RITA FAEZ . GEÔRGIA

Volume 194 comes down to a knot and the hand that undoes it. In a Laguna Beach cove at high noon, with a sea stack for a chaperone and the sandstone wall throwing back every degree of the day, Jessee B follows Geôrgia from a lilac string top dangling off two fingers to nothing but a white towel and the sand clinging to her, Unfiltered and serenely indifferent to the houses on the bluff.

Rita Faez is the counterweight. She spends her story in a whitewashed courtyard house of arches, carved plaster screens, and floor length linen, a silhouette through the curtain in one frame and poolside in trailing crochet ties the next.

The coast hides nothing and the courtyard hides almost everything, right up until it doesn't. Over a hundred pages, and every string gets pulled.