Her eyes hold mine. They’re the same dark green as Joy’s when she’s scared. “What’s the first?”

I consider. How to prioritize? “Seeing Dad, I guess.” So how did that work for ya? a voice inside me asks, and I wince. “He didn’t look pleased.”

“He was unsettled, is all. He didn’t expect you to come. If I’d known ahead of time, I could have prepared him.”

“How bad is he?”

She wrinkles her nose. “Not bad at all. You’ll see. He eats, he sleeps, he walks, he talks. He does everything he normally did, except work.”

“And remember who Joy is.”

“But he does,” she enthuses with a new light in her eyes. “He kept looking back at her in the car and saying, ‘Mallory’s daughter, Mallory’s daughter,’ like he didn’t believe she was here—and he said it in a really excited way. He loves that you brought her.”

I hoped that. The alternative was that his repetition of who she is was an attempt to drum it in so that he didn’t forget again.

“His memory isn’t what it used to be,” Anne goes on. “He wants to see the three of us here, and Joy looks like Margo. It was wishful thinking, is all.”

He isn’t the only one suffering from that. I cross to the window. The beauty of being on the bluff is that every window has a striking view. This one is part ocean, part land. I want to focus on the ocean half, which is more open, certainly more soothing to me, but that’s the coward’s way. Land is where the people are. Sure, open ocean can be lethal, but so can people. Is my father a murderer, or is he not? The answer isn’t out there in the deep blue. It’s here on land.

Returning, I sit on the bench at the foot of the bed and pat the spot beside me, like I would do at home with Joy. Seeming grateful for the invitation, Anne comes right over and sits close enough beside me that our arms touch. And there’s a memory here, too.

For an instant, we’re conspirators again. I whisper, “Remember ganging up on Margo?”

She whispers back, “Oh yeah.” We’re both eyeing the closed hatch. “She’d be up there ordering us around, and we’d sit here so quiet, so quiet that she’d finally come to the door and look down and see us and hit the roof that we hadn’t already come back with her peanut butter Triscuits.”

“We’d just stare up at her.”

“It took two of us to defy her.”

“She wasn’t always bad.”

“She was imperious.”

“And where did she get that?” I ask, the words slipping out before I can think better of it.