“But was it with your mother or mine? He goes in and out, Jack—is lucid one minute and not the next. The upside of his being lucid is he’ll remember what happened on the boat. The downside is he’ll remember a pact and won’t talk. If he’s half-confused, he might.”

“How can you make him half-confused?” Jack asks with only the smallest quirk of his lips.

“By badgering him. When he gets flustered, he gets confused. I hate to do it.” I put my heart in my eyes. “He’s an old man, Jack. He knows what’s happening to him, and he isn’t happy.” When Jack opens his mouth, I say, “I know, I know. What he’s keeping secret is making everyone else un-happy. But it’s hard for me.”

“Could the police do it?” he asks, and while I hear compassion, the worst of memory drowns it out. It isn’t just the police. Where the police go, the media follow, and while there were no lies in what they printed, they were painful to read. Those pieces were speculative, asking questions we were asking ourselves. Unfortunately, what the media speculated about went public.

I don’t want that again.

Slipping my arm free, I turn and look around the room. The books help, with their colorful mix of hard and soft covers. Spines of the latter are cracked multiple times—and there’s another one in the shadow of the angular sofa arm, open and face down, an active one, for sure. Neither of Jack’s parents were readers, and I can’t imagine the wife doing this much reading in the short time she was here, which means the books are his, which is interesting. He never used to read. Teenage rebellion prohibited reading as an art form. If he does it now, I’m guessing loneliness drives him to it. Either that, or maturity, neither of which have to do with the décor here, I decide and refocus on that.

Even aside from the Dante Bowen original, I miss the way this house used to be—miss the big furniture, the colorful pillows, the sense of time and place and purpose. Sure, my condo in New York has the same modern feel as this. But that’s New York, where the chaos of life outside demands simplicity inside. Here on the bluff, it isn’t a matter of chaos and simplicity, but survival. The ocean is beyond our control. The counterpoint is softness, comfort, and warmth.

Feeling a chill, I wander into the hall. The dining room, straight ahead, is more of the cool modern that Jack’s wife apparently liked.

Coming up from behind, Jack is quiet. “She never understood this place. She wanted to make it into somewhere else.”

“Didn’t she know what she was marrying into?”

“She thought she could change it.”