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The swallows skipped like flat stones across the surface of the infinity pool, their wings spread, and a lone woman in a gauzy beach coverup—what she might have called a kaftan if that word didn’t sound so matronly—watched them. The tunic didn’t merely protect her pale skin from the sun, which already was sinking into the trees to the west, it hid from the world the scars on her thighs at the edge of her bathing suit. The birds, their feathers a deeper blue and a more pristine white than their cousins in North America, looked playful and frivolous, and she was beginning to resent their happiness because her disquiet was morphing moment by moment into dread. She lowered her sunglasses to gaze beyond the pool, down the long, flat stretch of driveway she could see from here, and the lines of statuesque dipterocarp trees that bordered the pavement like sentinels and were at least seventy or eighty years old. They’d been planted by some French overlord and they’d survived the wars. She was hoping to see him on his bike, hurtling through the open wrought-iron gates, past the guardhouse (manned this afternoon by a sweet and slight teenage boy in a uniform that looked like it belonged on a bellman from a grande dame hotel from a distant era) and down the straight stretch of asphalt, but she saw nothing. No bicyclist. No cars. No delivery trucks. The idea crossed her mind that he had stopped at one of the massive beach hotels to dive into the ocean on his way back; he’d expressed his disappointment that the bike tour hadn’t booked them at a property on the water, the way they had the last time he was here. No one would presume that a tall American wasn’t a guest if he raced in, leaned his bike against a palm tree, and cooled off in his bike shorts in the waves.

Still, she tried to will him to appear, she tried to fashion an image of his black-and-red bike helmet from the heat that hovered, even this late in the day, like mist atop hot, fresh pavement.

She swatted a mosquito on her knee and sat up on the chaise, her bare feet on the bluestone tile, and dropped her magazine. Her hands were moist with sweat and sunblock, and she wiped them on her coverup. An animal, a tiny rodent of some sort, skittered beneath the chaise and into the nearby brush. A salamander froze. She reached for her phone and sent him yet another text asking him if he was okay. She’d sent him five now, each one a little more urgent and anxious than the one that had preceded it. He was an hour and a half late. If he’d had a flat tire, he would have texted. The sag wag—their slang for the support wagon, a van technically—would have left to rescue him. There was pretty good cell coverage in this corner of Vietnam, though apparently it was spotty in some of the inland stretches and up over the pass that would comprise a part of his ride. If he’d stopped for a cup of iced coffee—or even hot coffee; he was obsessed with the way the waitstaff at so many places here would bring a French press to the table—he would have let her know. If he were lost, he would have sent her what she imagined would have been a comical Mayday. She’d heard nothing from him since they’d parted midmorning.

The sun wouldn’t set for a few hours, but it troubled her that his bike didn’t have a light.

For an hour now, her thoughts had grown steadily darker, a step-by-step ascent into the thin air of trepidation: He’d been hit by a car that had left him hurt by the side of the road. He’d been hit by a truck that had sent him careening over a...