“I know what you mean. Days like this are always tough.”

She leaned back, letting her long brown tresses float out behind her. I did the same, thinking again how nice it would be to have a pool like this of my own.

“I just hope Marion doesn’t think us disrespectful for coming out here,” Sidra said softly. “But Carlos was going stir-crazy. I thought this would be a nice break for him.”

“Of course,” I said. “I’m sure Marion would understand.”

I, too, felt a little guilty for swimming on such a somber day. But my shoulders were stiff and my side was still throbbing from my fall this morning. I knew the warm water would be the perfect antidote to my pain.

As Carlos played energetically in the deep end, Sidra and I languished in the shallow, floating and softly chatting. This was really the first conversation she and I had had when she wasn’t hysterical or crying, and I found her to be a fascinating woman, very articulate. As we spoke, I asked about her life in Honduras, about what it had been like to move to the foreign culture of the United States.

“It’s one thing to learn English, which I did as a child,” she said, smiling. “Quite another to speak ‘American.’”

She told me a funny story about her early days here when she was told they used napkins to wipe their mouths at dinner.

“In my village, ‘napkin’ is the word for—how do you say it?—a diaper. I thought we were all expected to wipe our mouths with diapers!”

I laughed out loud, trying to imagine this girl and her dinnertime faux pas. She talked about how much Carlos liked it here, how many friends he had made, how he was excelling in school. I avoided any talk of the knife in the photo, and she didn’t ask. As for her disintegrating marriage, I had said what I had to say to Derek that morning; I could only hope that when everything came to light, he would be the one to take things from here. I thought it was his place to tell Sidra about Judith, not mine.

As Carlos perfected his back flip, our talk turned inevitably to Wendell Smythe and to the wonderful relationship he had shared with his grandson.

“Wendell would sit there,” she said, pointing to a wrought iron chair placed beside the pool at the deep end, “for hours on end, coaching Carlos with his dives. He never raised his voice, never lost his patience.”

“Did Wendell use the pool much himself?” I asked.

“Almost every day,” she said. “He liked to wade in up to his waist, then climb on his inner tube and float around.”

I smiled, trying to picture it.

“Of course, that was up until the last few weeks.”

“Too chilly for him?” I asked.

Sidra shook her head.