By the end of November he was worn out. It was one thing to care for the families, quite another to host a parade of airplane officials, investigators, pathologists, those who’d come late to the table, whose connection with the crash seemed tenuous at best. They banged cell phones that didn’t work. They dragged blackboards into the drawing room, made charts of wiring and voltage buses, left napkins on the table inked with diagrams of the cockpit, then demanded, incredibly, that their pictures be taken beside the bluffs. There were the professional air disaster people who showed up too: journalists, lawyers, conspiracy theorists, those who blamed the Dutch airline—and by association the Dutch themselves. How could anyone blame the Dutch? Kevin wondered. For tulips? Hydroengineering? For Gouda and dikes?

He grew sick of it all. When would it end? When would they stop coming? When could he have his well-earned winter? For he loved the Trachis winters, when all the summer cottages were closed and the island tucked into itself, a closed shell, a clam: the snow squalls in the afternoons, fires in the hearth, and the short, pink twilights with the sun racing into the sea. In winter on Trachis the stars burned brighter than any other time of year. That winter Kevin had planned to purchase a telescope. He’d wanted one since they’d moved to the island, and he’d promised himself for his birthday this year, he’d buy one; Douglas promised too. He’d set it up in the bedroom with a Peterson guide and finally he’d learn the constellations: the Pleiades, Orion, Cygnus, the Bear; hadn’t he deserved it? He’d turned fifty-two earlier that summer. And each year seemed like a card in a deck—and this one was definitely the Joker. But was it too much to ask for a telescope? Was it too much, after fifty-two years on earth—fifty-two years he hadn’t thought he’d survive—to be able to look up at night and name another object besides the moon?

Not this year. Douglas had typically forgotten. And who could think of the stars or birthdays or anything else aside from the guests, with their speculations and theories, their book binders, and outside the constant drone of recovery ships still plying the waters off the coast.