What grows in Louisiana grows with purpose. Eileen thinks of apologizing each time she types the words “nutrient-poor,” each time she calls these hillside bogs highly acidic, saturated. But there it is. One plant’s hostile conditions are another plant’s herbaceous haven, and four marked sites along the hidden slopes of Moss Bluff are heaven to the yellow trumpet, the subject of Eileen’s unwritten dissertation. 

Every other Saturday she makes the three-hour trip from Houston to southwest Louisiana to make observations in the field. The drive is long and without landmarks, the rivers shifting imperceptibly into bayous and the counties into parishes. She takes bridge after bridge from one bank of eroded land to the next until she finally crosses the I-10 bridge toward Lake Charles, refineries sparkling like geode clusters in the distance. It’s here that she veers north, away from the strip malls and shuttered casinos, into the thousand acres of forest and lagoon preserved inside a state park.

Today, Eileen stops at a familiar convenience store near the entrance to the park, and she buys a large Styrofoam cup of ice for her hiking pack. It startles her when the cashier recognizes her and takes a pack of Marlboro Golds down from the shelf without asking. But though she’s been swearing lately that she only smokes in groups and bars, Eileen pays for the cigarettes and pulls the wrapping off on her way out the door.

The air is thick as she smokes with the windows open, and she can feel the prickle of humidity curling the hair on the back of her neck. She’s only been away from home since breakfast, but she feels as she always does that she is distinctly someplace else, that the only thing warranting her attention here is her long and florescent pitcher plants, their round, open mouths, their pink veins and red-rimmed lips.

Eileen is twenty-nine, and fieldwork has been her way of life for the last two and a half years. After several semesters assigned to faculty projects, doing her own research feels glorious, if unglamorous. So she comes here. She puts on an unofficial but flashy reflective vest, to keep passers-by from wondering what she’s doing so far from the trail, and she books a night at the America’s Best on the Calcasieu River. She makes calls to her husband from the motel bathroom, wrapped in a towel brought from home as she paints her nails with a foot up on the toilet lid.

Until the confession, Eileen thought Alek was being so gracious. He was the only husband among her academic friends who understood that fieldwork calls, the only one who supported the travel unconditionally. He would change her oil before the drive and have dinner waiting when she pulled back into the garage. But he was seeing someone, he told her in bed one night, folding his glasses and placing them on the nightstand.  The way you’d say it to someone who dumped you six months ago, she thought. Not to someone who is currently, actively your wife, who had just been tickling your cold ass through a hole in your underwear. He only apologized for not telling her sooner. She thought of the way he’d started the AC in her car the morning of her last trip to Moss Bluff, how appreciative she’d been as she drove away. He’d taken her keys from the hook and started the engine, shaving seconds from the time it took her to leave.

Alek told her that he was terrified to lose her but that he’d discovered some things about himself that he hadn’t known when they married out of college. The woman, Elsa, was older than they were and had never been married. But it wasn’t about Elsa; he just didn’t know if he could be happy with one person for life. Not because of any lack in Eileen, but because he was “wired” that way. Maybe, he said, there were things about Eileen they hadn’t discovered, either.

After a week passed and there was nothing left to pretend to pack, Eileen sat down with him at the kitchen table. They wrote out a childish but thorough list of Boundaries and took the thumbtack out of the calendar to pin it to the wall. He gave her an introductory book to read from his therapist (even Bev knew before she did?) and she highlighted lines, mostly the doubtful subheadings like How will I explain this to my parents? and What if my friends don’t trust me around their partners anymore? Finally she agreed to try, and he watched her redownload dating apps on her phone as if this was the initiation, picking out the flattering photos and cropping her feet out, just in case. He showed her how to add “ENM” to her bio for “ethically non-monogamous.” His face was sheepish as he said it.

At the entrance to the park, Eileen shows her annual pass and turns down the offer of a printed trail map. She stops at the trailhead nearest her first observation sight and starts through the magnolia trees and longleaf pines, progressing from boardwalk to dirt path to the off-trail route she has trampled in the tall grass. 

She finds the first site without trouble—the trumpets there are some of the biggest in the park, and their curious heads peek out bright from the tall grass. She takes her journal out of her hiking pack, leaving the bag beside her as she works. 

Alek has teased her about the leather-bound field book she carries, given that all of the data she takes down end up in lifeless Excel sheets, that the sketches are made redundant by the pictures she takes on her phone and uploads to a Google folder with numbered labels. Still she opens to the ragged burgundy ribbon marking her page and writes,

Site 1. Date 4/17, Time 2:03

Weather: Sunny, 79F

Moist soil

6 trumpets, 20-26 inches in length. Strong musty fragrance after recent rain. Not yet in bloom but signif. growth since 4/3. Dead insects (gnats) in 4/6 traps. Trumpet 1=2 insects, 2=3, 3=0, 4=0, 5=1, 6=4. Insects in 1 + 2 partially dissolved. Visible dew on all lips.

When she’s done recording, she crouches there a moment longer, admiring the long flutes. A couple comes down the path and starts to turn away, probably thinking she’s relieving herself. Eileen waves, still holding her journal in her hand.

She does the same at the other sites, though it takes some time to find the smaller plants at site 3. She’s unsurprised to find that none of the plants are in bloom, but the wait still makes her nervous. Biweekly visits, as she argues in her methodology, should be frequent enough to ensure an observation during peak bloom, but if the Gulf Coast has taught her anything, it’s never to take the climate for granted. As she takes the last photos of the just-developing pitchers at site 4, her phone makes a bright sound it hasn’t made in years. Someone likes you, a Tinder notification teases. Play it cool by checking it out immediately.

She thinks of the tattooed bartenders who serve foamy cocktails at Anvil, the few classmates from college who still live in Houston and might recognize her. It doesn’t occur to her that she might have been liked by someone from Moss Bluff until she sees the first name, Landry, and the distance between them, four and a half miles. Landry is 34, holding the camera at an awkward distance, wearing a sweatshirt from some kind of fundraiser. He has sharp blue eyes that look out of place with his full cheeks and happy expression. When they match, his photo aligns with hers and the wide smile seems to lift at the corners.

*

They meet at a bar called the Icehouse, a daquiri shack lately rebranding as a “casual atmosphere with live music and small bites.” Nervous conversation distracts them so long that they have to ask twice for more time to decide, so when the bartender comes their way a third time Eileen flips her menu over and asks for two draft Budweisers and a basket of fried cheese curds.

Landry wears a tasteful cologne and is so freshly shaven it’s like he did it on the drive over. He wears a royal blue sweater under an open navy-blue jacket, and Eileen’s attention keeps moving to the colors, to the fact that he hasn’t removed the jacket. Worse, though, are the fasteners that dangle from the jacket—actual wooden toggles, like a child’s, like Paddington Bear.

“I’ll be honest,” he says. “I’ve never been on a date with a married woman before.”

“It’s okay,” she says. “I’ve never been on a date as a married woman before.”

“Do you mind if I ask…what should be different? Aside from the obvious, I mean. The exclusivity and all.”

Their drinks come to the table, and Eileen thinks. Everything on the Boundaries list revolves around Houston; it forbids mutual friends, sexiling each other from the house, taking dates to their special occasion bars. In Moss Bluff, it’s hard to think of anything she can’t do. “I’m not sure anything should be, at least one hundred percent,” she finally answers. “I think let’s keep communication open and make our judgment calls from there. But aren’t you getting ahead of yourself?”

She means to tease him, but he returns a quiet, pained smile.

“Have you ever been married?” she asks.

He shakes his head. “Engaged, once. She disappeared and popped up months later on a playbill for Hairspray in Long Beach.”

Both of them are silent for a moment, and then they laugh, and the cheese curds arrive with a thick stack of napkins, and the awkwardness is broken.

They talk about the Astros, about casino regulations and the couple at the other end of the bar sharing a jumbo daiquiri with two straws like they’re at a soda fountain. Eileen tells Landry about her PhD, and Landry tells her about his job with the energy company, Entergy, and how it isn’t as bad as it seems, how he’s actually in environmental research, so the two of them have at least something in common.

The conversation is entertaining and comfortable, but Eileen knows they can only talk so long. She likes Landry, but she isn’t sure she wants to have sex with him—besides, she’s just eaten a basket of cheese curds and bloated herself with beer. Is it prudish not to, if she’s already married? Landry pays the check for both of them, and before she can make an excuse, he says, “If you’re not too tired, there’s something else we could do.”

He brings her to his truck in the parking lot and reaches for something in the glove compartment. It’s a folded piece of paper with creases and bent corners, and when he opens it she sees a map of the lake, a small X in the southwest corner. The image is faint, as though a printer ran out of ink halfway through and its creator finished it in pencil.

“Is this…a treasure map?” she asks.

“It’s from my uncle’s storage unit. He died of pneumonia and I helped my parents clear it out. I don’t know if it’s anything worth hunting for, but it’s an excuse to keep talking with you.”

She glances back at her car, off-center in its parking spot. The cigarettes are waiting there in the center console, a reward she brought herself for trying. 

“You can say no,” Landry says. “I won’t be offended.”

“No,” Eileen says. “As in yes. I’m coming.”

Apple Maps takes a lot of the work out of her navigational duties, but she sits with the treasure map folded open in her lap, trying to make out its shapes in the light from the moon and from passing cars.

They pull into a small gravel lot, park between a utility van and a rusted-out Cadillac. Across from the lot is a long community dock, stretching out into the quiet lake. For a moment, Eileen wonders if there’s any dead uncle to begin with, if this was just a complicated ploy to get her alone. She wonders what’s worse, pulling out a treasure map in earnest or as a ruse. Then he asks if she can reach the heavy-duty flashlight underneath the passenger seat, and she recommits to the adventure.

By the scale of the map, the treasure could be anywhere, so they split up, Eileen starting from the car, Landry starting from the water. She holds her breath at first, imagining explaining to some cop why she’s peering in the windows of a defunct shrimp truck. But minutes pass and the only sounds she hears are Landry’s footsteps and her own, growing gradually nearer. Finally Landry calls out to her, and she finds him crouched by a hydrangea bush, pointing his light at something underneath it. It’s a six-can cooler that once bore the Pabst Blue Ribbon logo but is now faded to white, everything but the ribbon tails sun-bleached beyond recognition. A long piece of masking tape below the logo is Sharpied with the name Thibodeaux. A moldy but not altogether repulsive smell is released with Landry cracks open the lid, a scent that reminds Eileen of the last day of summer camp, dead ants in old ice-water, warm soda poured syrupy out of forgotten cups.

Inside, a large Ziplock bag is stuffed with what looks like pieces of rubble. Landry tugs the bag open, inspects its contents, and holds something out to Eileen, presses it into her palm. She holds her hand out to the light and sees a jagged rock at its center, dark grey on top and reddish underneath. It’s a piece of rough agate, she realizes.

“What do you think?” he says.

“Agate,” she says, unsure if the question is what the treasure is, or whether she likes it.

“Have you ever been hunting?”

“You mean for agate?”

“Yes.”

“No.” She shakes her head slowly, worried he’ll take her to some cave next, pass her a headlamp in the middle of the night. Instead he shifts forward, and, an ancient instinct returning, she leans into his kiss. His lips are soft, but he holds her in a way that stops her breath. It’s not sexy, exactly. It feels more like a relief, like giving in to sleep with the lights on. She closes her hand around the gemstone, presses until she can feel her pulse in it, can feel it through her whole body.

*

A time-lapse video makes it look easy. A fly settles without thinking twice. A single twitch as it moves to take off again and finds itself dew-heavy, gravity-bound. It slips and drops over the ledge, floats, for a time, then sinks.

Eileen’s ecology class sits scattered across an oversized lecture hall, their feet propped up on empty chairs, their wire-framed glasses reflecting the blue light from the video.

A pitfall trap, she explains, must include a lure, a slippery peristome, and a killing liquid. Eileen’s carnivore of choice, the yellow trumpet, uses nectar as a lure, its bright color as bait. Its pitcher lip becomes wet with dew and its prey drops directly into digestive juices, decomposing slowly into fuel for the next catch. But that’s sarracenia flava, she explains. There’s also sarracenia purpurea, sarracenia alata.

The assigned project for the biodiversity unit is a taxonomy of a genus of their choosing, complete with trait descriptions and basic sketches, and each student’s project must be unique. On the Google spreadsheet Eileen set up, the quickest students chose “toothed cetaceans” and “macaques,” while those who signed up at the deadline filled in things like “omnivorous centipedes” and “cultivated garlic.”

Eileen ends class ten minutes early to make it to Anvil before happy hour ends. She meets a friend, Cara, from the department, and they drape blazers over the backs of their chairs and order two drinks each at 5:53. Eileen drinks G&Ts while Cara drinks double bourbons, so four bourbons total, her highball glasses sharing a single damp coaster.

“So he took you out on the town in Lake Charles,” Cara says, picking up their text conversation from two days ago as though they’ve only paused to sip their drinks. “Say more, was he a gentleman? Did he take his camo hat off inside the restaurant?”

Eileen laughs. “I don’t know what else to say, it was nice. I was glad I went.”

“So you’ll see him next time you go?”

“I think so. He seemed to have a lot of ideas.”

“Sexually?”

“No. I mean, maybe. We didn’t get there that night.”

“You just ate cheese curds and went home?”

Eileen stirs her drink, drowns the sprig of rosemary with her straw. “We went on a small…treasure hunt.”

“Please tell me that’s a euphemism.”

Eileen shakes her head. 

“Oh, wow,” Cara says.

“What?”

“Nothing. I just wonder if it’s appropriate.”

“I don’t know. Alek and I made a pretty comprehensive list of Boundaries together. Nothing came up about my research trips, or about romance.”

“So it was romantic?” Cara asks.

“I guess so. Isn’t that what you mean by ‘inappropriate’?”

Cara shrugs. “If Alek trusts you, I trust you. Just don’t let it get too far too fast, is all I’m saying.”

*

The Fontenots live in a rancher down a long, straight drive, so near the regional airport that it could almost be mistaken for a runway. As Landry takes Eileen’s coat and hangs it on an over-full rack in the mudroom, a landing plane draws a shadow over the house, rumbling inside Eileen’s boots.

There are two gray cats named Doucet and Dusty, and the house smells like garlic butter and animal. Eileen grips the paper-bagged wine she’s brought, uncertain, as a conversation finishes between Landry’s parents, that they’ve realized she’s there.

“I’m just saying,” Landry’s mother repeats, “I know you left a message, but you’ve got to catch him when he’s home, he’s an old man. How are you, Landry? How are you, sweetheart, it’s nice to meet you.”

She kisses Landry and Eileen each on one cheek, and grabbing a potholder, she returns to the etouffee without breaking the flow of introduction. Landry helps her move the steaming dish to a trivet on the table, and Eileen helps by unbagging the wine, asking Landry for a corkscrew, and uncorking it. When they’re all seated, Eileen gets a good look at Landry’s mother. She has the same nose he does, the same default expression, which is a happy one. Her face is red from cooking, and whisps of hair are escaping her claw clip, but she looks, like Landry does, young for her age, as though gravity has gone easy on her.

“Landry tells us you’re nearly a doctor,” she says, scooping rice from the pot.

“Nearly might be generous,” Eileen says.

“And what is it you’re studying?”

“My dissertation is on the yellow trumpet. But in general I’m interested in carnivorous plants.”

“So you’re a fan of, eh, the Venus Flytrap,” Landry’s father puts in.

“Completely,” Eileen says. She hates the look of gratitude Landry gives her, like he expected her to scoff.

“That’s very impressive,” his mother says. “Now I wonder how he got a date with you.”

Everyone contributes a polite amount of laughter as the basket of rolls makes its way around the table. When no one else speaks, Mrs. Fontenot adds, “Of course, we’re very proud of Landry.”

“Was Landry an only child?” Eileen asks. She realizes as the question slips out that she’s speaking the unspoken thing—that she’s seeing Landry for only the second time, that she hardly knows him at all—but if Mrs. Fontenot is concerned by her lack of background information, she doesn’t show it.

“Yes, he was,” she says. “He was born just over four pounds, spent his first three weeks in the NICU.”

Eileen looks at him, trying to imagine his features on the red face of a premature baby, gummy closed eyes, a squashed nose. “You’ve come a long way,” she says, and it comes out a bit more sincerely than she meant it.

“Then there was the scoliosis,” Mrs. Fontenot says.

“Mama,” Landry pleads.

“Scoliosis?” Eileen prompts.

“Wore a brace from third grade to seventh. A twenty-eight-degree curvature, the pediatrician’s office still has his before and after x-rays on the wall.”

“Mama, that office isn’t even there anymore.”

“Do you have any pictures?”

“The scans I think we lost in the basement flood—that was Rita. But almost every picture in the blue book—” She leaves her silverware across her plate and ambles into the living room, and Landry tops off a wine glass that was nowhere close to empty.

Eileen imagines that sometime later she’ll trace the shape of his spine with her fingers, that she’ll say Twenty-eight degrees, huh? You could never tell. She imagines he’ll ask why she was so curious, imagines she’ll say, There’s a lot I want to know about you.

The boy in the blue photo album is pale and skinny, with hair lighter than Landry’s and highwater jeans. In one picture he rides in a hay wagon with a group of boys his age, sitting up straight in his brace with a yellow pumpkin in his hands. In another, his father holds him up to the rim of a backyard basketball hoop, and his feet dangle in the air as he sinks his first dunk. Eileen keeps turning the pages, trying to make sense of the feeling that she could devote a whole life to saving this person, to understanding him, to keeping him warm.

*

Eileen brings home a bag of sphagnum moss from the garden center. Alek had texted while she was on campus to let her know a pair of spoon-leaf sundews had appeared on the doorstep in a white box marked “THIS SIDE UP – HANDLE WITH LOVE.” She had ordered them in the uncertain days after Alek’s confession, needing a distraction from the tension in the quiet apartment. It unsettles her how much has changed since then, in the time it took to ship a pair of tropical plants. 

When she gets inside, Alek has unboxed the plants just like she asked, set them on the windowsill behind the sink with their damp-paper-towel-wrapped roots hanging over the ledge. They look dry, more of a sickly yellow than a fluorescent green, but Eileen knows they’ll perk up within days, when they recover their dew and reacclimate to the humidity.

She brings the plants and the moss into the office and pulls a bag of soil out of what Alek calls “the printer closet.” She finds two small terra cotta pots easily—nested in a desk drawer—and she works beside the desktop, poking the roots into the soil, piling the moss around the sundew’s base. Each plant is a rosette of green leaves with sticky red hairs, waiting for the stray fruit fly.

Eileen replaces the soil bag and gathers up the paper towels, and she sees something else lying limp on the corner of her keyboard, wonders if it fell out of the packaging. When she picks it up, it’s two flat flower-shapes, light pink and translucent. A trademark of the shipping company? When she sees the two shapes flat on her palm, she realizes what they are—nipple pasties. Alek’s been fucking someone in her home office, and she owns nipple pasties. Eileen’s never taped her nipples in her life.

She goes into the kitchen and stuffs the plant delivery box into the recycling, which is already full, of course, of Alek’s seltzer cans. She shoves the box down with the heel of her hand, and then she steps one leg inside the can and stomps on it. Her face flushed, she grabs her phone from the counter, and she sees two texts from Landry. How’s your day been? he says. It’s dreary and gray here. Must be because you’re not around.

She looks at the list of Boundaries on the wall, the list that hasn’t stopped her from feeling jealous or hurt, that hasn’t stopped Alek from debasing her desk chair. It hasn’t stopped her, either, from drifting away, retreating into her head like her students do when she talks about energy flow through ecosystems. She feels like ripping it down, calling his therapist and reading it to her, demanding, This is who you call the good guy? But instead she twists the thumbtack out of the wall, stabs it through both nipple flowers, back through the list, and into its place again.

*

When she leads Landry into her motel room for the first time, the air conditioner kicks on. It’s not the same room every week, but she knows the layout well enough to pull him to bed without the lights on, staggering blindly backward. He follows until he falls onto the swirled comforter beside her, and she pulls his coat off with both hands, so impatient his arms bend backwards. She kicks off her tights and the cold air raises goosebumps on her open thighs. 

It’s the first time she’s had anyone but Alek in over a decade, and every sensation is multiplied tenfold. Even where he misses the mark or fumbles the rhythm, he wakes up a part of her she had forgotten was sleeping. Still, even in the middle of it, she wonders—how could Alek do this and come back home like nothing had changed?

They hold each other a long time in the dark, and then Landry says, “I’ll be back.” He kisses her temple and rises from the bed, and she watches his reflection in the sliding closet door until he disappears into the bathroom.

She stretches out from under the covers to take her glasses from the bedside table. It’s 12:15, which means the unit project is past due. She checks her inbox for last-minute extension requests and panicked formatting questions, but all she finds is two dozen emails with two dozen attached files. A Taxonomy of Cereal Grasses. A Taxonomy of Jumping Rodents.

When Landry returns from the bathroom, he’s wearing a plaid pair of pajama pants and a black t-shirt with a breast pocket. He takes his laptop bag, which she had not noticed was packed like a weekender, and sets it on top of the dresser.

“You brought pajamas?” she asks.

“I hope that’s okay.”

“Sure,” she says. “I mean, yeah, yes, pajamas.”

“Do you sleep in pajamas?”

“Yes, well—in that I change my clothes before bed. I was going to wear leggings and a big t-shirt. I didn’t really think I’d have company.”

“Is it all right?”

“Yes, it’s great, just—just let me brush my teeth, and I’ll be back.”

She takes her bag into the bathroom the way he did, self-conscious now to dress in front of him, although she’s starting naked. She puts on the leggings and the Relay for Life t-shirt. She washes her face with the motel soap, brushes her teeth to a two-minute timer. She puts on a lavender hand lotion and then rinses it off, worried he’ll think she put on perfume.

When she comes back to bed she finds him scrolling on his phone, and when she climbs under the covers he takes her glasses and sets them on the nightstand. She turns on her side, and soon she feels his arms wrap around her and pull her in. She can feel her heart hammering under his flat palm.

“Landry—” she says. She moves to sit up, and he turns the light on.

“What is it?” he asks.

“I just—do you think this is ‘appropriate’?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “You said there were no hard rules about anything.”

“I said we should use our best judgment.”

“Is your best judgment saying I should leave?”

She exhales, leaning back against the headboard. “Would you hate me?” she asks.

He shakes his head, smiling in the pained way he had the day they met. “Not possible,” he says. He gets up and packs his discarded clothes into his bag, and he turns his coat right-side-out again. He looks into the bathroom, considering changing again, but decides against it and puts on his boat shoes by the door. He nods, smiles again, but leaves without saying goodnight.

Alone, Eileen tries to compose a text explaining, or apologizing, some combination of the two. But soon she winds up in her inbox again, opening one file at a time in the neat stack of taxonomies. Clear order-levels, class, family, genus. Bold, straight lines connecting each species to its classifying groups, common names paired with scientific. Now there’s a map, she thinks, and the window unit kicks on again, drowning out the other noise.

*

Two nights after Alek’s confession, he didn’t come home. Eileen graded exams on the couch, pretending not to notice as his home-for-dinner time passed, then his home-after-dinner time, then his home-after-drinks time. He was shameless, then, she thought, and there was no decision to make. But with her grades entered and a rotisserie chicken left demolished on the kitchen counter, there was nothing to do but wait, and watch the phone, and worry. She called at eleven and eleven-thirty, and when she picked up the phone to call after midnight, it started to ring.

“Where are you?” she answered.

“Come downstairs,” he said.

He was sitting by the community pool, upright in a lounge chair, as he had been all night. He was in his work shirt with his tie undone, and even in the dim light from the pool she could see that he was sunburned from the neck up, sweat-soaked under the arms. There were dark circles under his eyes and when he sat up to greet her, he was slow and stiff.

“What is this?” she asked. “You were here the whole time?”

“I came home at five but I couldn’t go up,” he said. “I couldn’t think of anywhere else.”

She sat beside him on the chair and listened as he talked her through the shades of guilt he’d been passing through, the feeling of crisis that followed him like an electric prod, keeping him from working or even thinking. “I do it because I’m broken,” he said. “But why am I broken?”

Eileen held him, breathing chlorine and sweat. In the days to come, when he outlined his plans for nonmonogamy like he was pitching a cereal commercial, she wouldn’t use this. She wouldn’t remind him of the way he cried against her shoulder, the way she brought him upstairs and spread aloe gel underneath his shirt collar. She would remind only herself, trying, in desperate moments, to conjure that rush of love, those moments she was capable of such real heartbreak.

*

The bar hosting Alek’s company party is bright inside, all greens and teals. An art deco chandelier hangs over the elliptical bar, and the white-clothed tables have been lined up along the walls to make room for the guests to mingle and table-hop, to graze from the table of hors d’oeuvres. Eileen wears a jumpsuit with a deep V-neck, attached to her bra with a hidden safety pin. As Alek leads her through the restaurant to the rooftop, she looks at all the breasts, looks for women who might have conspicuous enough nipples to warrant taping them down with flower stickers.

He introduces her to his team leader, Loren, whose breasts are smaller than Eileen’s, rounded like two teacups. Then a marketing rep, Jennifer, who easily has Ds but couldn’t be dressed more modestly, cloaked to the knees in a mock-neck dress. Loren and Jennifer are both kind, and as Alek promised, Eileen’s favorite work wives are there, gushing over her outfit and hair.

Eileen sips prosecco and stays close to Alek, always reaching a hand out as if to catch his fall. He works the room but never forgets her, and every time they leave one social cluster he gossips about them to her as they wander over to the next. When the party has mostly funneled into the restaurant, withdrawing from the cooling night, Alek puts an arm around Eileen and squeezes her shoulder.

“Thank you,” he says. “For everything. For being here.”

Eileen pats his hand. In the morning, she’ll make the drive again. Maybe she’ll play the radio. Maybe she’ll check into the Red Roof Inn for a change. Alek excuses himself to say goodbyes, and Eileen takes a last look at the city skyline. It’s a violet darkness, and its shadows move as black clouds pass over the moon, floating east toward Louisiana.

*

Eileen waits for Landry at the entrance to the park. Thursday’s storm has pulled the flyers from the bulletin board and soaked through the awning above the pay station. Downed branches clutter the parking lot, and litter gathers in sopping clumps by the lake. When she sees his truck roll in, she jumps up from the tailgate of her own car. Gratitude pours through her like water through a storm drain.

Landry parks and steps down from the truck with his flashlight and a set of hedge shears. She runs to him and thanks him and hugs him awkwardly around the side, and then she runs to the pay station to cover his day fee. Friday afternoon, she had checked her observation sites and found all but one of them hidden by fallen brush, possibly crushed under tree limbs or the weight of water. The only site she could still find was in full bloom, and her observation notes flowed in a frenzy down the page.

She shows him how she goes and where her footpath used to be, where to cut branches back and where to shine the light. Each time they uncover a site, he waits patiently as she measures, as she sketches and photographs and scrawls into the corners of every journal page. She tries to hold back her smile, not wanting to seem happy with herself after their last meeting, after she couldn’t apologize and gave up trying. As she leads him through the trees, each branch she pushes out of her path snaps right back into his, sometimes hitting him in the gut with a loud thwack. But she pushes on, glancing back over her shoulder, and for some reason, he keeps following after.