It’s been many years since Rosaline and Peter first rented a house on Cabot Lake, and Rosaline, swimming, lifted her head up from the water to see Eleu staring down at her from his dock. “You’re Dr. Engels’s wife,” he said.

She recognized Eleu immediately. He was Peter’s supervisor, the reason Peter had wanted to vacation on this lake. Or, really, the many neurosurgeons from Peter’s department who had their second homes here were the reason.

Rosaline sat with Eleu. He gave her a drink and then, when he saw her shivering, a towel. “How did you and Peter meet?” he asked her. He was now entirely bald, she noticed. His eyebrows were gray, almost invisible, his eyes pale blue. He wasn’t handsome. It was as if his face’s line of symmetry began, at his nose, to curve to the right.

“In college,” she said.

“And you swim?”

“Just for the exercise,” she said.

When she got up to leave, he said, “You seem like a very private person.”

She felt a certain thrill. He’d been noticing her. She was special to him, all her qualities seemed special. She was hidden, she was private, she was like one of those little Russian eggs, infinitely ornate inside. It was her egotism. He’d found it.

Eleu hadn’t, at that point, ever paid much attention to Peter. “I feel really crushed by him,” Peter would say, though he’d be smiling. “He sees something in me,” Peter said once. “Something bad, I think, I mean.”

Rosaline saw Eleu again that night at the Monckebergs’ dinner party. She and Peter were ushered through a crowd of women in the kitchen and out to the backyard, where the children of  Peter’s colleagues were stringing plastic flowers onto necklaces. Rosaline stood, watching, until Elena Monckeberg came and led her to the dinner table, seating Rosaline next to Theresa Baker. Somehow Rosaline managed to irritate both Elena and Theresa almost immediately, by describing herself as “just a social worker.”

“This is just not⁠—⁠you have to be confident. You have to be more confident. Social work is amazing,” Theresa said. But Theresa would never have been a social worker, Rosaline felt. Theresa had been a lawyer but now did some sort of charitable fundraising. Elena did interior design.

“Like, I just want to say, yes, my husband is the one who supports the family. But I do have a business. I was in New York magazine. You have to be confident about it,” Elena said.

Later, when they asked her where she’d studied social work, Rosaline for some reason said “Just NYU,” as if she’d intended to drive them crazy.

“Oh my God, I can hardly take it,” Theresa said.

“NYU is an amazing program,” Elena said.

And Rosaline, embarrassed, was relieved when Eleu asked Elena about the wallpaper. “It’s actually a friend of mine who does it,” Elena told him. Theresa began to speak with someone else. Rosaline was often careful with other people, avoiding anything contentious.

She looked over at Eleu just once afterward. It was to see if he needed anything of her⁠—⁠this was how she was at parties, always looking around, never entirely herself. It was only after she’d seen that he didn’t need her or anyone, deep in thought and distant as he was, that she allowed herself that as well, that she shrank into herself and was inert and emotionless until the end of the dinner.

She remained silent on the drive home. Peter rolled down the windows so that they could smell the lake. “What can I do when you don’t talk?” Peter said.

“You don’t have to do anything.”

“But it affects me. Everyone else will be talking around you.”

“There’s nothing you need to do,” she said.

She was quiet again. She thought of Theresa and Elena and how they’d assumed she suffered from a lack of self-esteem. But she didn’t, not really. She didn’t seem to need to insist on her own accomplishments or require the praise that might result. This was flattering to herself, and it was an exaggeration. But it felt to her that anything she might say about herself, or other people, was in part exaggeration, because it couldn’t always be true.