It’s the hottest day of the summer so far. It’s so hot that the surface of the pool is turning warm, the first few inches as tepid as bathwater. She doesn’t have the energy to get up and dive into the cool depths of the deep end, but instead stretches out on a chair, her entire body limp from the heat. She can almost feel the sunburn prickling across her skin. Later that night, she’ll step into the outdoor shower and gasp when the water hits her back, as sharp as needles against the angry pink flush of her shoulders where she was too lazy to reapply sunscreen more than twice.

On their fourth date, he tells her about his ex-girlfriend, a woman named Marisa Donicio who now runs a winery in Sonoma. This doesn’t bother her as much as she thought it would, and she finds herself happy to listen as he describes the way Marisa used to floss her teeth in the middle of a movie, a sign he describes as a red flag so flagrant that it appears crimson in hindsight.

The television is on with the volume muted in the waiting room. She tries to avoid looking at it, concentrating instead on the magazine in her lap — a back issue of the New Yorker open to an article on tracking musk oxen in the Alaskan wilderness — but the persistent neon flashing proves impossible to ignore.

She sighs, and sets the magazine aside, folding one leg up underneath the other and adjusting her weight in the overstuffed chair. The news anchor’s million-watt smile fills the screen, just above the ticker tape of breaking updates scrolling slowly at the bottom of the frame. All anyone is talking about is the storm: up to 19 inches predicted for Pembroke, 24 for downtown Boston, and Sharon forecast to be inundated with almost 30.