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Lake was less than a hundred miles from Deena’s condo in Edgewater, but it felt more like a thousand. She could hardly believe her eyes. Where did all these tree-covered mountains come from? She had lived in New Jersey all her life but she had never seen anything quite like this.
    Deena pulled her Volvo into the clearing in front of the little cabin. When she hopped out she took the deepest breath she had taken in years. Instantly, she felt more alive. There was something in the air here.
    She looked at the cabin. It was perched on a rise that sloped gently down to the water. Deena marveled that the cabin was made of real logs – logs that had once been trees, trees that had probably once stood in the very same clearing where she was standing now.
    This was a far cry from the vinyl siding she had known all her life.

    *

    In the week that followed, Deena settled into a new routine. She rose with the sun and was at the little wooden table by the window, writing, by 6:30. Except to get up for a cup of coffee or to go to the bathroom, she worked straight through until one o’clock.
    But it almost seemed wrong to call to it “work.” Sitting at the little wooden table with a pen in her hand, Deena would look up and gaze out the window. The strange white rock out in the middle of the lake mesmerized her. She’d stare at it and fall into a kind of trance. Then, breaking free of its hold, she’d start to write – and write and write. Never before had thoughts and ideas organized themselves so clearly in her mind. Never before had sentences poured so freely from her pen.
    Deena laid her right hand on the stack of papers that were rising at the corner of her desk. Then she looked back out at the bleached white rock in the middle of the lake.
    “Ah, my silent muse,” she murmured. “Thank you.”
    Then, at one o’clock, with the sun high in the sky, Deena stopped. Her mind was best in the morning. And by one she was hungry.
    As she made herself lunch, Deena thought how strange it was having no one to talk to. She had always been a talker, a gabber. Now she was thinking that maybe she had talked too much. Everything she had ever said in conversation, no matter how clever or insightful, just went poof. Words were uttered and then they were gone. And to whom had she been talking? Men. Men, who all turned out to be interested in one thing. And it wasn’t the brilliance of her conversation.
    But none of that mattered now. Deena had turned a corner and she wasn’t going to turn back. She had set her sights on a goal: two little letters in front of her name. A capital D , and a small r , period. She knew plenty of women who actively pursued doctors. She, on the other hand, was going to become one. Dr. Goode. Dr. Deena Goode. It had a nice ring to it.
    And all she had to do was finish her dissertation. And every day she was getting closer.
    Deena took her lunch over to the window. Each day it was the same: an open-faced liverwurst and onion sandwich and a bottle of Carlsburg beer. It was a man’s lunch – no different from what her grandfather had eaten back in the old country – but Deena liked it. When she was finished, she stripped naked and changed into a sleek, black, one-piece bathing suit. She walked barefoot down to the lake, took a few steps in from shore, then plunged in headfirst. She was a strong swimmer and the forty or fifty yards to the floating dock was nothing to her.
    When she reached the dock, she pulled herself up onto its sun-warmed surface. Over the years, people had carved their initials into the weathered wood. BL. OH. IA. Who were these people and when had they been here? Then Deena let her fingers slip into the deep grooves that formed the initials AA . The man she was renting her cabin from was named August Andersen. AA . Remembering his voice on the phone, Deena rolled over onto her back and started to daydream. Steam rose from her body as the sun dried her suit.
    Soon, the sun and the lapping water