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He studied her profile. “Everyone loves a good family story, assuming that’s what you mean.”

“Sure, dear. A family story.” Virgie thought of the article she’d been working on. It was like a Fireside Chat for young women. It was her whisper, her battle cry. “I’ll tell a very good family story.”

After midnight, after the girls were asleep, Charlie came into bed, sliding his arm around her. She turned over to face him, her eyes rising to meet his in the moonlight. His voice, an apology. “Please come back to me, Virgie. We can disagree, but it doesn’t mean you ever need to leave for good.”

The buoy bell rocked with the waves. Virgie loped her arms around his neck. Sometimes she wondered what it would be like to be married to someone who had a mother to call, a brother to play golf with, a sister to anchor you to something more than your wife.

Her frustration from earlier remained fresh, and still, her heart grew tender. He was right; they could disagree and remain close. She kissed him, feeling the neediness in how he kissed her back. After a few moments, she pulled away, whispering: “I’m right here.”

The following afternoon, Charlie gathered their daughters on the patio after he returned from a round of golf with a friend.

His ferry left that evening after dinner, and she wondered if they would ever discuss the elephant in the room, how she wasn’t returning to Washington with him.

They’d gone about the rest of their day in the passive-aggressive manner of a happy couple subtly avoiding serious topics, talking casually about things like the striped bass derby, a shared craving for chowder at Nancy’s, an island clam bar.

On the patio, he stood in his bathing trunks and flip-flops, the girls sitting on the grass beside him, their knees pulled into their chests.

Virgie was too curious not to wander over and sit in a nearby Adirondack chair, close enough that she could hear what he was saying, but not so close that she couldn’t pretend to read her book.

Charlie had the muscular legs of a soccer player, even if he hadn’t played since his coed days.

He pushed his wide hands into his shorts’ pockets.

“You see that buoy out there?” he said. A half mile, maybe less, out in the harbor was a red chiming one; the sound of it was the soundtrack to their island life.

“You’ve seen me swim back and forth from that buoy many times.

Well, your mother thinks I don’t take you seriously because you are girls.

So we’ll prove her wrong. If I had boys, I would demand that they swim with me, so now I’m demanding the same thing of you. ”

Louisa glared at her mother, which made Virgie snap-shut the novel she’d been rereading, The Awakening by Kate Chopin; she planned to make each of her girls read this feminist classic.

“Don’t blame me for your father’s cockamamie plans,” Virgie said.

She knew what Charlie was doing in suggesting the endurance swim.

This was his apology; he wouldn’t say sorry, he’d show it, by proving to Virgie that the girls could be free and strong and empowered without doing all the things he’d disavowed.

Well, two could play this game. “I’m in too,” she said, pulling off her sundress to reveal a conservative navy-blue one-piece. She’d swum to the same buoy more than a hundred times in her lifetime, at least a dozen times with Charlie, who would insist she time him so he could beat his score.

“Good.” Charlie’s smile turned up; his eyes shining. He’d mistaken her acceptance as submission.

She steeled her voice. “Let’s show him, girls, that we can be as hardheaded when it comes to getting what we want.

” No matter what he said, Virgie wouldn’t enforce Charlie’s paranoid rules about the children’s friends or insist on a formality for their lives in case a reporter glimpsed them having fun, wearing a bikini, or playing with a colored child.

It was a long way out there, and she imagined Betsy struggling halfway. “I think Betsy should drag a buoy behind her, just in case,” Virgie said.

Betsy stomped her bare foot on the grass. “It will slow me down. I can swim just as good as Louisa.”

The sea would chill them to their bones this time of year. “This isn’t about you and Louisa; this is about you being able to make it.”

Charlie agreed about the buoy, and Betsy huffed into diving position at the end of the dock, a Styrofoam bullet strapped to her back. “We’re not trying to get the best time,” Charlie said, even though they were. “What’s important, girls, is that you finish.”

“I do not want to do this.” Louisa had tucked her hair into a swimming cap.

Charlie smiled at her like she’d delivered a round of applause. “Oh, Louisa. You’re our leader. We’re all trying to keep up with you. Don’t let us down.”

“Besides, you’re finally getting Daddy’s attention.” Aggie held her hands over her head in diving stance. “Enjoy it. I’m going to cream her, Dad.”

Louisa turned her head away from them, but Virgie detected the slightest of smiles. Maybe things had finally thawed between her and Charlie; he had taken her to the soda fountain for a milkshake yesterday, even if Louisa’s patience still ran thin with her father.

“That’s the spirit,” Virgie said, a competitive ferocity taking hold of her as well. “Let’s pummel each other.”

Charlie angled his body in the direction of the lighthouse. “Ready, Whiting girls. GO!”

There was the sound of five bodies splashing into the cool water, followed by the pull of their arms and the suction of their collective breathing.

Virgie swam hard, stopping after a few minutes to check on Betsy, all her daughters hauling forward.

Halfway to the buoy, Betsy yelled for help, and Louisa swam right by her, ignoring her like she was in an Olympic race with Aggie and Charlie.

“Mommy, the life preserver, it’s heavy. Can I take it off?” Betsy treaded water, her lips blue and trembling.

Virgie treaded beside her; what was the point of competition if someone was going to get hurt? That was the part Charlie forgot sometimes. “I’ll take the life vest. We’ll swim together.”

She and Betsy swam in sync, Virgie slowing her stride; it wasn’t worth trying to win against Charlie now.

Her youngest had more stamina than she would have thought, and still, minutes from the buoy, the other three shot past them on their way back.

On an inhale, Louisa glimpsed Aggie ahead, and she kicked her feet with a vengeance.

Betsy panted, steadying her hand against the bottom of the buoy to rest. “Do you think Louisa could have swum this when she was ten?”

Virgie wiped the water off her face, wishing that Betsy would stop comparing herself to her older sisters. Virgie hoped she didn’t spend a lifetime figuring out she was her own person. “Louisa can barely catch a ball with the boys in gym.”

Betsy laughed, water specks like crystals on her eyelashes. Her chest was heaving. “I prefer to play with boys. Is that because I’m more athletic?”

“Maybe,” Virgie found herself saying, although Betsy had taken four years of tennis and still couldn’t serve properly.

“Someday when you get older, you’re going to see that playing with boys helped you navigate relationships with men.

You will learn how to make things seem like their idea, even if it is entirely your own. ”

“So I’ll be a good wife?”

“You’ll be a good human.” A fish nipped at Virgie’s foot, an unsettling feeling that made Virgie want to get swimming again. “I know that you and James are good friends, but there’s so much more to life than falling in love.”

“I’m not in love with James!”

“Of course you’re not, but it’s okay if you secretly are. It’s how Daddy and I had started out—close friends who fell in love.”

Once again, mother and daughter swam in sync, slow and steady. As Virgie watched her daughter push through her fatigue, determined to finish, she was filled with so much hope for Betsy’s future. She was pushing through the current, through the cold, through the discomfort.

Before Charlie left that evening, they ate dinner as a family, the water lapping a deep, vibrant blue. Hamburgers and corn on the cob. Crisp chardonnay.

Freshly showered, her husband came downstairs smelling of aftershave, his dark hair pushed back from his golden tan.

“What are you girls going to do this week?” he said, after asking Virgie where she got the corn; it was the sweetest they’d had yet this summer.

Virgie relaxed into her glass of wine, relieved that he’d made peace with her desire to remain on the island without him. Her mind glazed over with victory, and she lost track of the conversation, the girls piping in with upcoming plans of a lifeguarding demonstration and an art fair.

The citronella candle flickered, a stinging sweet smell puncturing the salt air.

Charlie leaned back in his chair, putting his hands behind his head. “It was so entertaining swimming with you girls today. You girls competed like Olympians.” Charlie’s smile was always so big and hearty, with the kind of shine that could feel like it was meant only for you.

They all giggled. Betsy ran inside and raced out with scissors, paper, and colored pencils, drawing gold and silver medals to cut out in an impromptu awards ceremony.

Charlie played along, handing them out while crossing his eyes and talking like a goofy television announcer, calling Louisa “dogged but most ready to get out of the water”; Aggie, “speedy and determined to make waves”; and Betsy, “small, mighty,” then he paused for dramatic impact like the comedian Bob Hope, “and diving into the case of why the race isn’t fair. It’s never fair.”

After a round of goofy applause, Betsy falling into her father, holding her tummy with laughter, the girls yelled over one another, playfully appealing their designations. The children moved over to the grass, Aggie and Betsy doing cartwheels while competing to come up with the best swimming pun.

Virgie sensed Charlie staring at her. “This was fun,” he said. “Way more fun than what I’ve been doing.”

They clinked wineglasses in what felt like a celebration of the perfect summer night. Virgie’s mind drifted to her article, the one she planned to ask Wiley to publish. How would her husband’s adoration shift once he saw her words printed in a big city newspaper?

How much would he let her push—how much would he try to pull her back?