“There—I’ve been counting the seals, and now they’re all done. Aren’t they beautiful? I always love this part, the jars like jewels on the counter. We’ll be so happy to have these when the snow is six feet high.”

“They look good right now,” Yoshi said, slipping off his shoes at the door.

“Sorry we’re so late. The road service took a while.”

I crossed the room and took a strawberry from a bowl, biting through the red to its soft white heart, and offered one to Yoshi. We’d gone out early in the morning so many times when I was little, picking strawberries from their low bushes, or cherries from the trees, Blake and I eating as many as we picked. We’d come home with a car full of fruit, the kitchen growing warm and full of sweetness as the day unfolded and the jars of plump gold or red spheres or the pale sliced moons of pears lined up in rows, filling all the counters.

“Have a taste,” Andy said. He wiped his hands on a towel and offered us a bowl of dark red jam, swirled with foam. “We got some of that fresh bread of Avery’s, and some of her organic butter, too, and let me tell you, it’s out of this world.”

Yoshi and I sat down at the table, suddenly ravenous, and ate, telling the story of our day in Elmira: the beautiful drive, Yoshi’s conversations in Japanese, Julie’s familiar gift with the combination safe, and Iris’s amazing story. My mother looked up from her work, her hands resting on the berry-stained counter, when I started describing Iris, how temperamental she’d been, how deeply it had affected her to learn the truth.

“It was very moving and very sad,” I finished. “That’s what I’ve been thinking about all the way home. Ninety-five years old, and she still felt abandoned. I hope it helps her to know what really happened.”

“I hope so, too,” my mother said. “I have to tell you, I’m relieved it went well. I mean, she could have been crazy, or mean, or dishonest, couldn’t she? Or just someone you’d rather not know.”

“It’s true. You can’t choose your relatives, can you? Your mother’s been kind of worried all day,” Andy said. He stepped past her, carrying a bowl of smashed berries to the pot, and kissed her cheek as he passed. My mother glanced up at him and smiled.

“Everything was fine,” I said. “We were fine.”

While my mother and Andy finished preparing the berries, Yoshi and I made a salad and rice. We grilled salmon on the patio. It was late when we all sat down to dinner, the sky darkening to pale blue, then indigo, as we passed the food and poured wine. Distantly, boats hummed on the lake. Yoshi rested his hand on my thigh as we finished, and it seemed to contain all the heat of the field where we’d waited for the road service to arrive, the sunshine and the buzz of insects, and the scent of earth and sweat. We carried the plates back inside, admired once more the gleaming ruby jars. Then my mother and Andy left for a late movie. We watched their headlights recede, Yoshi standing behind me, pushing my hair aside, kissing my neck. He took my hand when I turned, as if we were dancing, and when we climbed up to the cupola it was like walking underwater, slow and graceful, full of forceful currents.

When I woke up hours later, I’d been dreaming. From the floor of the cupola the night sky was visible in all directions, struck with stars, as if the sky were a dark canvas flecked with holes, beyond which shone some clear white light. It was easy to understand how ancient people had imagined another world beyond, the myths of trees that would somehow grow past the limits of the sky and take them there. Easy to understand why they had not wished to name such power, too. I thought of the Wisdom window, all the people growing from the earth, being filled with breath and life, and of the Iroquois creation story Keegan had told me, how a woman, pregnant with the breath of a god, fell through a hole at the root of a great tree into the night, fell far to the sea below, where a turtle rose to catch her and the animals dived to the depths to bring back bits of mud and to make the world. You live here, the stories all said, but you are filled with the breath of the Divine, and the world in your care is full of amazements.

Yoshi slept. I turned to look at him. His mouth was slightly open and his breath faintly stale, his chest rising and falling in such a steady, gentle rhythm. I ran my hand along his arm and he twitched, then turned in his sleep and reached for me, his arm slipping around my waist. I curved against him, and we lay there at the top of the house, floating together in the night.

My dream, the one that had woken me, gradually surfaced again—not frightening, but intense, full of seeking and a sadness that lingered. I’d been fishing with my father, floating in the hour before dawn. It was still dark and he was hardly visible next to me. We cast our lines and floated, cast again. We needed better lures, he said, and I pulled the tackle box from beneath the seat and opened it. Gray-green metal, it caught the faint moonlight. Opened, it revealed rows of lures, each in their own compartment. Iridescent, made of greens and blues and deep oranges that seemed to have been drawn from the depth of a prism, richly hued, yet also somehow luminous. They were like gemstones, smooth and spherical and trailing feathers, streamers, bits of lace. Some were tiny perfect images of the earth, blue-green and wondrous, each turning slowly in a mist of white. I wanted so much to hold them, yet when I touched them they broke into pieces, and the dream energy turned urgent and frustrating as I struggled to hold the broken halves and fragments together, to wrap the beautiful lures in twine or thread them on tiny metal dowels. Something was wrong, terribly wrong, and then my father showed me another box with lures that were whole, smooth and gleaming, and I despaired at those in my hands, so make-shift, seamed, and broken, held desperately together by thread and metal rods and wishing.

I stared up at the stars, concentrated on my breath and Yoshi’s in the little room. Surely this dream was connected with the windows full of women and with finding Iris, the piece of the family story that had been broken away a century ago, broken away and obscured. Yet it was connected also to the dreams I’d been having since the night I arrived, dreams that seemed to go deeper than the ripples on the surface of life, deeper even than memory. Dreams born out of the restless searching I’d been doing since I left this place so many years ago. I thought about those dreams, all the seeking of round things, hidden in leaves, spilling like mercury, and now here, spheres falling into pieces, caught in a metal box. Yoshi’s hand brushed my thigh, and I thought of how we’d sat at the edge of the sunny field while we waited for the road service, the pulse of his thigh beneath my cheek. I wanted to be there again, in the sunny field with Yoshi, the deep blue lake set like a bowl into the green fields of the earth, wanted that moment of peace before we heard the truck arrive, the door slam, and we sat up.

We had walked through the grass to meet the man in the white cap. The trunk of the Impala was still open and he pulled out a bag full of tools, an empty red plastic gas can, a folded blanket, and my father’s tackle box, placing them carefully on the gravel shoulder, looking in vain for a spare. “They don’t make trunks this big anymore,” he’d said. Yoshi stood close to me, his hand warm on the small of my back. We watched him work. The lake in the distance was blue, silvery, and the fields were alive with dragonflies. He put my father’s things back inside the trunk and closed it.

I sat up, the bright, broken lures of my dream spilling their pieces everywhere. The air was cool and still, and the stars hadn’t moved. After my father drowned, the searchers had gone out, diving for hours, bringing back a lake-filled boot, his sodden hat, his fishing pole.

His tackle box, however, they’d never found.

His tackle box, hidden all this time in the trunk of his car.

I knew as surely as I knew my name or the rush of breath in my lungs that my father hadn’t been going out to fish the night he died. He’d gone out onto the lake to think, to float on the water in the darkness and grapple with whatever had woken him or kept him from sleep, whatever had weighed so heavily on his mind.

I slipped from beneath the sheet, careful not to wake Yoshi, and pulled my shorts and T-shirt from the tangle of clothes on the floor. We’d carried the heat of that field with us all day, brushing against each other like sun against grass, like stems pushing through the soil, and the clothes we’d discarded so quickly as we’d kissed at the top of the cupola stairs still held something of that warmth and sunshine. I went down the stairs gingerly, trying to stay at the edges so the steps wouldn’t creak, and stopped in the kitchen to collect the car keys from inside the cupboard door. Then I went out through the porch and across the lawn and driveway to the barn.

I was barefoot, the grass wet and the gravel harsh against the soles of my feet. The barn doors swung open quietly. The Impala was a shadow in the dim light. After my eyes adjusted, I groped my way to my father’s workshop, stumbling against the lawn mower and knocking over a rake with a clatter. The flashlight hanging on the wall didn’t work, the batteries long dead, but the old lantern still had an inch of kerosene at the bottom, and the matches were where they had always been, to the right of the jars of nails, above the shelf of planes. I lit the wick, and the glass globe filled up with light, casting objects back into their shapes, their shadows.

The car trunk opened easily, swinging upward. I moved the lantern forward, light flickering into the darkened spaces. The tackle box, dull green, was pushed far back in the corner, and I had to put the lamp down before I could lift it out all the way. It was locked. I found a wire on the workbench and then I sat down right on the floor, the concrete cold and gritty against my legs. The wire was thin and warm in my hand. The night fell softly around my shoulders and I still felt halfway in a dream, as if my father were present, watching me slip the wire into the keyhole and press my ear against the box, listening, listening, with an ear that knew how to hear.

Silence, and then the subtle rush of metal on metal. The click, soft, almost imperceptible, when one of the pins fell into place. One, and then another, and then the final sound in the sequence, one, two, and then three. I sat up. The lid was ajar, and I opened it.

The lures were as they always had been, dull, feathered with wire, plastic worms, each one different than all the others, none of them luminous, none of them a sphere. No little moons and planets, floating in their own misty atmospheres, filled the compartments. I’d seen these lures hundreds of times as a child, had helped my father make them, spreading the wires and bits of plastic or shining metal on his workbench, coaxing them into shapes we imagined fish might dream of, and strike. I was filled with nostalgia, remembering the sharp, final sound of scissors on metal, the hiss of wire, the laughter of my father as he held the lure up, bright or dull, spinning or trailing, so we could admire our imaginations, our handiwork, the artifacts of pleasure.

I lifted out the insert with its bounty of lures. Everything was so ordinary, so much as it had always been, that I half expected to see the space below filled with rolls of wire and twine, small pliers, extra fishing line. Maybe my father had simply forgotten the tackle box, left it in the car after a trip to another lake, and found himself out that night on the still, dark waters with his pole and no lures. It was possible. However, when I saw the bottom, I knew my intuition had been right. The space, usually orderly but cluttered with equipment, was empty except for a bundle of papers, several sheets together, folded in thirds, bound with a dark red rubber band that disintegrated when I tried to slip it off.

The page on top was unlined, with a single sentence in my father’s handwriting: Found in kitchen, west wall.

I closed my eyes and focused on my breathing, in and out, a pulse like the sea, waiting until I calmed down. Remembering the night I’d come in from the gorge, rushed with wind and guilt and anger, to find my father standing in the garden, smoking and thinking. Remembering that last spring, the kitchen torn apart for several weeks, walls stripped down to their studs, the air tasting of dust and metal, the new appliances sitting in their boxes on the porch, my father in his work clothes, pulling a bandana from his pocket to wipe the gritty sweat from his forehead and glancing through the broken plaster and dust to find these pages. I opened them, as he must have done, slowly, because I both wanted to know and did not want to know, and my hands trembled as I moved the cover page to the back and started reading.

It was a formal document, the last will and testament of my great-grandfather, Joseph Arthur Jarrett. The boy with his comet dreams had grown into a man who built a lock factory and restored this house, and who wrote, at the end of his life, in a firm, slanted script not so different from his sister’s. I moved closer to the quivering golden light of the lantern, its faint hiss, the scent of kerosene, everything falling away into shadows except this paper, these words. There was a tribute to Cora, and a memorial bequest to the flower guild she had enjoyed. There were several other small bequests, to the library, to the church, to the hardware association. The bulk of his estate, however, was to be divided between his son, Joseph Arthur Jarrett Jr., and his niece, Iris Jarrett Wyndham Stone, who had last resided in Elmira.

It was dated May 1972, about six months before he died.

There were bats in the barn; one swooped low as I sat back, the papers in my hand, trying to assimilate all the dates, all that these pages meant and implied. In 1972 Rose had been dead for thirty years and Cora for more than a decade, so when my great-grandfather died there had been no one left alive in the family who remembered Rose directly or knew her story, no one to testify to the envelopes that had arrived every month in the early years, money that was spent on Iris, yes, for the new dresses and shoes or the books and tea sets, but that may have gone for other purposes as well—to help pay the expenses on the new business, to buy the grand falling-apart house on the lake and ensure its restoration. It was impossible, from this distance in time, or maybe ever, to separate good intentions and mistakes from calculated moves, impossible to know exactly what had transpired all those years ago, but it was vividly clear from this will that he’d carried regret with him always. At the end of his life, he had wanted to make amends, and it seemed he died believing he had done so.

Another bat swooped low and floated back into the rafters. The concrete was cold, but still I sat for a long time with the will in my hands, watching the pattern of flickering light and shadows on the ceiling and the wall, thinking of Rose, whom I had never known but had nonetheless come to love. Finally I stood up, brushing dust and grit from the backs of my legs. I put the tackle box back in the trunk and closed it, extinguished the flame on the lantern and returned it to the workbench. Then I went outside and stood in the driveway, looking at the house, its eaves and porches, the cupola where Yoshi slept, the peeling paint, the unkempt garden, overgrown and heavy with wild roses. We’d grown up here, Blake and I, running across the lawn, diving off the dock into the lake, believing that the world had a certain order, an inevitable pattern, as fixed as constellations in the sky. And all the time these papers saying otherwise had been sealed up in the kitchen wall.

The air smelled of roses, and waves shushed against the invisible shore. I tried to imagine my father’s thoughts on that last night, as he smoked one cigarette, then two, then walked across the lawn and took the boat out, grabbing his pole but not his tackle box. Had he even known who Iris was? Had he been trying to find the story of her life in those weeks before he died? And who had sealed these papers away in the kitchen wall all those decades ago? Sealed them but not burned them, hidden them where they might never be found, or would surface only after so much time had passed that any memories of Rose and Iris would have faded into dust. It might have been Joseph Arthur Jarrett himself, having changed his mind. Or it might have been my grandfather, who must have felt blistered with the anger radiating from these pages if he’d read them.

On the patio, the iron chairs were cold and damp with night condensation. I sat down, so agitated I wasn’t thinking clearly, and pressed Blake’s number on my speed dial. It rang ten times, twelve, fifteen, but finally he picked up, his voice gravelly with sleep.

“What is it?” he wanted to know.

“You were asleep. I’m sorry. Is Avery there?”

“Yeah, trying to sleep. Look, Lucy, what the heck’s going on? What difference does it make if Avery’s here?”

I stood up and walked to the edge of the patio, looking out across the lawn to the lake, the soft shuffling of shale beneath its waves against the beach.

“It’s about Rose. I didn’t want to wake you both.”

“Well, thanks for that.” I heard his footsteps, and then a space opened up around his voice as he stepped out on the deck.

“Lucy, this is all ancient history, okay? Whoever this Rose person was, whatever sort of scandal she caused a hundred years ago, it just doesn’t matter anymore. Can’t you let it go? Get some sleep, and let me get some, too.”

“Look, that’s just it, I found her daughter,” I said. “I found Rose’s daughter, Iris. Yoshi and I met her today. She’s ninety-five, and she lives in Elmira. We met her family, too.”

There was a silence, a rustling, and I imagined Blake sitting down on one of the deck chairs, looking up at the very same sky.

“Okay,” he said, finally. “Tell me why it’s so important. Why you’re calling now, at one o’clock in the morning. You didn’t just get back?”

I thought of the trip home through the blooming fields, daylilies running through the ditches like fire, the fields alive with butterflies and insects, the lakes vivid blue as we drove on the ridges between them, how after that meeting I’d seen the world the way you do when you’ve been a long time under water, everything luminous and vibrant, strange and new, charged with life. I couldn’t tell Blake about any of this, or about the dream of lures that had woken me, brought me to the barn and the tackle box and finally to this moment. And suddenly, remembering the rolls of drafting paper at Dream Master, their penciled plans—secret plans, unshared—I hesitated to tell Blake about the will.

“I know it’s late. I’m sorry, I couldn’t sleep. But doesn’t it seem astonishing to you that there’s this whole branch of the family we’ve never known existed?”

“It does.” He sighed. “Of course it does, it’s interesting. But honestly—it’s not life-or-death interesting. It’s not wake-me-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night interesting. Lucy, don’t you think maybe you’re dwelling on this a little too much? Why not just relax and enjoy showing Yoshi around. Maybe if you weren’t between jobs and here on vacation, this might not seem quite as important as it does right now.”

Despite what I’d told Yoshi earlier, Blake’s comment touched a nerve. Maybe this was one of the reasons I’d never let myself be between jobs before, had never paused, going from scholarship to scholarship, good jobs to better ones, so I could always come back and run into Art or Joey or even Zoe and think to myself: So there.

“What do you mean? It changes everything.”

“They’re, like, third cousins once removed. It doesn’t change anything at all.”

“Blake, the story changes everything.”

He laughed, exasperated. “Okay, okay. I’m not going to argue with you at one o’clock in the morning, Lucy. I’ll see you tomorrow at the party. Meanwhile, good night, okay?”

Then the phone went dead.

I sat on the patio for a few minutes longer. There were bats here, too. Winged shadows, I had always liked them, their small intelligent eyes, their fondness for insects and the night. There were caves on the depot land and perhaps the bats lived there, clustered silently along the walls, aware of the voice of the land, the susurrations of the water and the swift growing of the plants, listening to the strange new sounds of metal against rock as the bulldozers scraped away the earth.

If my grandfather had found this will, had he looked for Rose and Iris and never found them? It was possible. I’d had a hard time tracking Iris down, even with the letters from Rose and a great deal of luck. Or perhaps he’d never looked for her—that was possible, too. I tried to imagine how it must have felt for my grandfather to read that will—if indeed he had seen it—his father’s words, so harsh, like blows: To amend for the things I denied her. To remind my son that the world does not owe him a living by any reckoning. Bitter words, and perhaps the writing of them had been enough; perhaps my great-grandfather had put this will into the wall so no one would ever see it, the flashing anger of a moment.

Or, if my grandfather had read this will in the silence of the house after Joseph Arthur Jarrett died, he might have shoved the papers in the wall and smoothed the plaster over with even strokes, as if to erase those words, though his father’s disappointment was already engraved forever on his heart.

I thought of my father and Art, growing up in this house, those words buried in the wall, all that bitterness sealed away but present, shaping everything that followed, like water shaping rock. Like it or not, it had shaped me, too.

Lights flashed across the lawn and over the surface of the lake, then went off abruptly; gravel crunched in the driveway, and my mother’s laughter carried through the night, and voices, softer, floated through the darkness. Then silence, the thud of the car door falling shut and more laughter, and the flash of lights again as the car backed out. My mother came in through the porch. I called out hello.

“Lucy?” she asked, coming to the screen door, then pushing it open and stepping out onto the patio. She was dressed in white and silver, like one of the flowers in her discarded night garden, her perfume drifting through the air. “What are you doing up? Where’s Yoshi?”

“Oh, he’s sleeping. I couldn’t. How was the movie?”

She smiled, but it was a private smile, and despite the jam-filled jars and Andy’s kindness and my own best intentions, I felt a surge of anger at everything she was leaving so willingly behind. So easily, too, it seemed from outside, though I knew that wasn’t fair. Maybe it was because I had been thinking so much about my father, about his last restless days. Or maybe it was the scent of strawberries still lingering in the house. “It was terrible, actually, but we had fun. You know, it’s been years since I laughed so much with anyone. We stopped at his place for pie when it was over.”

“He’s quite the cook.”

If she heard my tone, she ignored it. “Yes, he really is. The pie was incredible, deep-dish, with clotted cream. He says he finds it relaxing to cook.”

“Well, that’s lovely.”

“Lucy. Honey. Just be happy for me. For heaven’s sake, just be happy, period.”

“You know,” I said, not deciding to tell her, the words just coming out in a rush. “The night Dad died, I ran into him here, in your garden. In the middle of the night, before he went fishing. He asked me to go with him. And I said no.”

My mother seemed startled. “The night he drowned?” she asked slowly.

“Yes. That night. I mean, if I’d gone, everything would be different. He’d probably still be alive, and everything, everything, would be different.”

“Oh, honey,” she said. She came and put her arms around me. “Is that what you think? What you’ve thought all these years? Oh, honey, no. No. What happened to your father was not your fault, or anyone’s fault, and you can’t fix it.”

“If I’d gone fishing with him,” I insisted, “everything would be different now.”

“Yes, maybe. And if he hadn’t gone fishing at all everything would be different, too. If it had been raining, if and if and if. You can’t do this, Lucy. You just can’t. Believe me, I tortured myself for a long time, too. Your father had had something on his mind for days. After the accident—and at first I wasn’t even sure it was an accident—I couldn’t stop wondering: why hadn’t I pressed him harder to find out what was wrong? I woke up when he got out of bed that night. I caught his hand as he was leaving the room and asked him what was wrong and he said nothing. He kissed me, and he said not to worry. Those were his last words to me. I couldn’t sleep, though, so I went up to the cupola. I heard you come in, Lucy. I heard the motorcycle come and go, I heard you talking in the garden with your father. It was fine, everything you said. It was not your fault, what happened.”

I didn’t speak for a moment. Bats rushed above us, like leaves drifting, like scraps breaking free from the sky. The relief I felt at having told her was physical.

“I know that. It’s just—”

“Your father is gone, honey. He’s been gone a long time. He would want you to live your life.”

“I know. I know that. But Mom, you said he was preoccupied. Do you happen to know why? What was on his mind?”

She sat down, shaking her head. “Oh, Lucy, do we have to? I don’t want to talk about the past anymore. You’ve found Iris, right? So your quest is over. The past is the past, Lucy,” she added gently. “It doesn’t help you to dwell there. You miss too much of what’s going on right in front of you. Believe me, I speak from experience on this. Don’t get stuck.”

The will, those pages with their slanted handwriting, was burning in my hands. I imagined telling her about it, but as with Blake, something held me back. This will left half of everything to Iris, and all these decades later, I had found her. Would the will still be valid? Would Iris even care? Would my mother? I didn’t know, and that was just the trouble. I felt like I was walking on sand.

She looked at me—puzzled, irritated, concerned. I knew she wanted more than anything to walk away and go to bed, to drift into sleep, the scent of pine and strawberries permeating everything, the memory of Andy’s laugh, the touch of his large, capable hands, all of this easing her into pleasure, sleep, dreams. Still, after a moment she sighed and pulled her chair closer to the table. I thought of the morning we’d sat here looking at Rose Jarrett’s cryptic notes—just over two weeks ago, though it seemed a lifetime away. I turned the pages in my hands.

“I don’t know,” my mother said. “I don’t know the answer to your question. As I said, I thought about it night and day for months after your father died. Trying to understand what had happened. We weren’t old, you know—your father only forty-five that summer, and I was forty-three, and for a long time after, I’d wake up in the morning believing it hadn’t happened. I think that’s why I closed off the rooms. I wanted a wall between then and now, between what we’d dreamed for our lives and what had really happened.

“Anyway, all I can tell you is that he had something on his mind. He was preoccupied. Not worried so much as distracted. It was like he was listening to music I couldn’t hear. Sometimes I’d have to ask him a question three or four times to get an answer. He was finishing the kitchen renovation, and he kept having problems with the subcontractors. I didn’t want to add to his stress. I figured he’d tell me eventually, once he’d had time to work it out, whatever it was.”

She stared at the table, then looked up and spoke again. Her eyes were dry, but her words were rough with emotion.

“Does it matter, Lucy? Because I think we’re still in different places with all this. In the beginning I kept searching for reasons, too. I tortured myself with the idea that I might have changed the outcome. If I’d only done this, or said that, a different set of events would have followed. Maybe so. But this is what happened, and nothing changes that. It was an accident, and over the years it’s become a comfort for me to think of it that way.”

We’d never spoken so directly of my father’s death before; we’d driven grief underground, like water pressed beneath shale, threatening to emerge without warning. I didn’t want to cause her any further pain, but I put the will, those angry pages, on the table. I explained what it was and how I’d found it. I told her what it said.

She sat back in the chair, then picked up the papers and shuffled through them, though it was too dark to see.

“Really? He left half of everything to Iris?”

“He did. If he meant for this will to be seen, that is. He might have put it in the wall himself. Changed his mind, sealed it away instead of burning it.”

She nodded slowly. “Either that, or someone else did. Your grandfather or grandmother. It’s hard for me to imagine it was your grandfather, though. Do you remember him at all?”

“Not really, no.”

“He was genial, he liked the good life and was happy to float along on what his father had accomplished. Art’s a lot like that, when you get down to it. He feels entitled to everything, somehow. He was the sort of person who went along to get along—though, who knows, he might have bottled up enough anger to do this. Your grandmother, though—especially after your grandfather had that stroke—was very protective of her boys, especially of Arthur. I can see her doing this. Of course, I never knew your great-grandfather, so I can’t really say what he might have done.”

“Well, someone didn’t want it to be found.”

“Yes.”

“That seems awfully mercenary, if it was all about the money.”

“It might have been money. Or it might have been anger or embarrassment. They were very proper, both of your grandparents. Very concerned with appearances, with the family name. It’s a small town, and word would have gotten around. It might have been a sense of shame as much as anything, if either one of them did this.

“That’s your father’s handwriting,” she said, picking up the first page and reading it again. Found in kitchen, west wall. “He must have come across it during the renovation that last spring.” She sighed. “He never mentioned it. He wouldn’t have, though. Still, I knew something was off.”

“So maybe this was what was on his mind.”

“Yes,” she said slowly. “I can see that. It might have been.”

“If it’s true, it could change everything.”

In the silence we listened to the soft voice of the lake, whispering and whispering to the stony shore where they had pulled my father from the water.

“Well, not everything,” she said.

She stood up and slid the papers back across the table. The radiant happiness that had surrounded her when she’d come in had disappeared.

“Let’s just think about this,” she said. “Let’s not mention it to anyone. We can talk to lawyers and so forth, but for the time being, I don’t see the need to discuss it with others.”

“It’s been such a strange day,” I said, because I didn’t want to consider too deeply why she might wish to keep this quiet.

My mother reached over and put her arm around my shoulders. She smelled unfamiliar, of strawberries and sweat.

“Go to bed, Lucy,” she said. “Get some sleep.”

I went upstairs, climbed into the room at the top of the house where Yoshi was sleeping in the middle of the futon. He moved away as I slipped in beside him. I lay there for a long time, the events of the day and discoveries of the night coming around and around, as if circling on a conveyor belt I could not switch off. I tried relaxation exercises and reciting lines of poetry and, remembering how I had felt in the chapel, for the first time in years I even tried self-consciously to pray, but the cupola was filling with the grainy gray light of sunrise before I finally slipped into a fitful, dreamless sleep.