“No,” she says. “I like my life.”

The next few prints are from the same event. I hand her several and study others.

“Are we looking for something special?” she asks.

“Mom and Elizabeth together,” I offer, though there’s so much else here to potentially see. “Mom and Dad together. Dad and Elizabeth together.”

“Here you go,” she says into the sound of the rain on the roof. “Mom and Elizabeth talking with Paul Schuster. Paul Schuster,” she repeats softly, clearly remembering the man. “Nice guy.”

I’m about to tell her that I talked with him, when she holds out another photo. “What does this one say?”

We’re at the firepit on our own beach. Mom and Elizabeth are scraping sticks down to the green with pocketknives, which I so remember doing myself. But they’re on opposite sides, not connected at all. “That they don’t like each other?”

“That they’re deliberately avoiding each other?”

“That we’re making s’mores? I don’t know, Margo. Does this get us anywhere else?” I look closer. “So sad. Jack’s Dad is alone over there by the water.”

“Richard.”

“Did he and Dad ever talk?” I ask.

“What could they talk about? They had nothing in common. He isn’t still around, is he?”

“No. He teaches at Berkeley. He doesn’t look happy here.” Lonely, is what he looks. Forlorn. Abandoned, like Jack. Had he been a different sort of man, the two of them might have been close to make up for Elizabeth’s distance. But Richard just … couldn’t and, in his super academic eyes, Jack felt stupid. Rather than try to compete, he went the other way. From what I could see, he turned his life around only after his father left. Sad.

“Richard never smiled,” Margo remarks. “What did he get out of that marriage?”

“Jack,” I say pointedly, thinking of all the man squandered.

Margo’s eyes touch mine before her finger taps on the tall figure with long hair and a defiant expression. “And how is our boy?”

Our boy. I smile at that. It’s a little jab that goes nowhere. Margo knows she and Jack would have bombed. “He’s fine,” I tell her and, in that instant, wonder if Jack is better off now that his parents are gone. Both of them were emotionally dysfunctional. His childhood rebellion may have saved him from that. He is levelheaded, at least, where animals are concerned. I’m familiar with TNR programs. They rely on the volunteers. Jack Sabathian volunteering? “Interesting, actually,” I say. “He’s still here, but he’s different.”

“Aren’t we all,” Margo murmurs and, that quickly dismissing Jack, reaches into the carton for her own handful of photos.