“First time?”

You don’t have to, she told herself. You can just drive away. Get a cheeseburger. Go home.

She called Marcus from the car.

Elara sat for another ten minutes. She watched a teenager with acne on her back run into the waves without a backward glance. She watched a man with a colostomy bag play fetch with a dog, the bag swaying gently, no one staring. She watched a pregnant woman—hugely, gloriously pregnant—lie on her stomach in the sand, her belly pressing a perfect round mound into the towel beneath her.

Elara was forty-three the first time she stepped onto a beach without a single scrap of fabric between her skin and the wind. She didn’t plan it. She had driven two hours past the city, past the last coffee shop, past the last cell signal, because the GPS on her phone said “Vista Hermosa Naturist Resort” and she liked the name. Beautiful View. She had been chasing beautiful views for a year now, ever since the divorce.

Elara laughed despite herself. “Weather?”