“Major said your grandmother has Beatrice’s gold fish?”

“Yes, but it’s silver,” Kennet said. “Marianne asked the deWrenne jewelers to make it so. She said silver was for a girl.”

“Do you agree?”

He ran a forearm along his sweaty brow. “I wouldn’t call it a universal law, but I was the kind of kid who loved to sort and label and classify things. Maybe to a fault.”

“But it’s such an endearing fault.”

“All my life, I’ve thought of the most important women as silver, and the most important men as gold. For a while, I even believed my father was made of gold.”

From hip to knee, Emil Fiskare’s left leg was a constellation of shrapnel scars, bits of metal blown there in the Somme Offensive. As a child, Kennet was particularly fascinated with the divot in his father’s thigh where, if you pressed, you could feel something under the skin. Something hard and tantalizing and unobtainable.

“That’s a Hun’s gold tooth,” Emil said, straight-faced and earnest. “He blew himself up trying to blow me up. His head exploded in a hundred pieces, and his gold tooth went into my leg. So deep, the doctors couldn’t get it out. Now it’s mine. Finders keepers, right?”

Kennet took such a tale at face value when he was five. Later he’d cast his doubts on the story’s veracity. The lump was probably another piece of metal. Still, he liked the idea that his father had a bit of gold inside. It gave bravado to his limp and lent an air of romance to his short stature, thinning hair and quiet, almost abstracted demeanor. Until Kennet could believe the gold tooth was slowly dissolving, sending its noble atoms and particles through Emil’s veins.

“Which means, possibly, that I have a little gold in my veins,” Kennet said. He laughed at his sneakers. “I’ve never told that to anyone.”

Astrid sat on the grass, stretching out her legs and leaning back on her hands. “Tell me something else.”

“After Beatrice died,” Kennet said, “my grandmother wore the silver fish pinned inside her blouse. It made a lump over her heart and it would dig into my cheek when I hugged her.”

“Like a piece of shrapnel she carried on the outside,” Astrid said.

“Yes,” Kennet said. “Exactly. So I decided war hurts men on the inside, and it hurts women on the outside.”

“What a thoughtful little boy you were.”