One evening, a flock of wild turkeys came out of the scrub in the meadow, crossing the lawn below us as we ate dinner. There were four or five adults, with a dozen-odd lighter-colored poults stepping cautiously in single file behind them like novices behind a group of black-shawled nuns. Caitlin gripped my hand as they passed, watching with the rapt look these visitations from the animal kingdom always produced. I remembered the smashed eggs we’d seen that spring, and my own role in that calamity. The hen must have had another brood, or perhaps these were the offspring of a different bird. Skirting the feeders without investigating the pools of spilled grain, they entered the colonnade of white birches at the edge of the meadow and disappeared into the forest beyond. They were of a size, already, to be safe from all but the larger, rarer predators that still prowled around in these woods: coyotes, the odd solitary bobcat. “We should catch one for Thanksgiving,” I said—an old joke that always made the kids squeal when they were little. Caitlin gave a tolerant smile, squeezing my hand.

We talked about my meeting with Julia. Some faint but persistent qualm had been nagging at me—a sense of having missed or glossed over something. I trusted Caitlin’s reactions more than my own. Her instincts, unlike mine, had an intact purity about them. The life she’d made for herself since we moved to the country and had children had left her comparatively unmaddened by the toxins that seemed to have saturated public discourse on every subject these days. Crucially, she’d been preoccupied with other things during the years when our friends took en masse to social media, and she’d never acquired a taste for that neurotic activity. Also, though she was thoroughly American (Minnesota farmers on one side, Chicago professionals on the other), she was free of that paradoxical and—to my mind—quintessentially ­American combination: the love of scolding and the hatred of being scolded. If anything, she had it the other way around: she rarely set herself up in judgment of anyone, but she actively sought out people’s criticisms of herself, and listened to them avidly. I knew that whatever she might have to say about Marco and Julia would spring from a clean source.