They didn’t say anything further for a time, wrapped in their separate thoughts amid the jumbled noise of traffic and people’s voices. This is going to be hard, Nest thought. He was not going to want to hear what she had to say. Maybe he would simply refuse to listen. Maybe he would just walk away. She could see him doing that. He had walked away already from the most important part of his life.

“Do you still live on the park?” he asked finally. “Yes.” She glanced at him “But Grandpa died last May, so I live there alone.”

She could see the pain reflect in his face. He was remembering the time he had spent in their house, pretending to be someone he was not. He was remembering how he had left things with her grandfather. “I’m sorry he’s gone,” he said finally. “I liked him very much.”

Nest nodded. “Everybody did. Pick is still there, looking after the park. He wants me to come back and help him like I used to.”

“That would be very hard for you now, I expect,” he said.

“It is,” she agreed.

“Things change. Life changes. Nothing stays the same.”

She wasn’t sure she agreed with this, but she nodded anyway, not wanting to get into a debate about it.

A few moments later, the trolley arrived and they boarded. Ross gave the conductor two tokens, and they took a seat near the front. They rode the trolley down a hill between rows of buildings, under a two-tiered viaduct that supported an expressway, over some railroad tracks, and then turned right on Alaskan Way to follow the waterfront north. It was too noisy inside the open-air trolley for conversation, so they rode in silence.

At the Madison Street stop, they got off and walked across Alaskan Way to the piers. Orange cranes stretched steel limbs skyward at the edges of the loading docks along Elliott Bay, dominating the skyline. Huge container ships piled with freight sat at rest beneath their cabled lifts, some being unloaded of the shipments they had brought from abroad and others loaded with whatever was being exported. Trawlers were tied up at the ends of several piers, winches cinched, nets drawn up and folded. To their immediate left, a terminal buttressed by huge clumps of wooden pilings provided docking slips for the ferries that serviced the islands and the Olympic Peninsula. Tour boats filled with passengers nosed their way along the waterfront, poking into the channels that ran back to the ends of the docking slips of Harbor Island and into the Duwamish River. Small sailboats with brightly colored, wind-filled spinnakers rode the crest of the silver-tipped blue waves, and tiny fishing boats dotted the bay, straddling the shipping lanes on the open water.

The piers closest to where they departed the trolley were dominated by long, wooden buildings housing shops and restaurants. The one to which John Ross took Nest was painted yellow with red letters that identified it as Pier 56. They navigated the noonday crowd strolling the walkways out front and pushed through the doors of a glassed-in entryway beneath a sign that announced they were guests of Elliott’s Oyster House. The entryway was stuffy and hot. A hostess greeted them and led them to a booth near the back of the dining area, further out on the pier toward the water. Nest seated herself across from Ross and looked out at the view. The sun shone brightly through scattered clouds, and the sky was azure and depthless. In the distance, beyond the bay and the sound, the peaks of the Olympics gleamed whitely against the horizon.