On the hillsides, forsythia flamed and the wind ran brilliant over darkened fields. The garden lay in ruins. Could Kevin possibly plant anew? Start another garden? It all seemed a dream, the last seven months. The plane, the guests. The Bulgarian. Diana Olmstead, the Dutch girl.

Go! he’d shouted and was surprised afterward by his reserve of passion, the trembling in his voice, but also: that Douglas actually went. Kevin never expected that.

One night late in April, Kevin picked up the phone. He’d been sleeping in front of the fire when it rang, his copy of Heraclitus’s Fragments opened on the coffee table, an empty glass of scotch. There was static on the line. He couldn’t quite hear the voice but knew: It was Douglas. He was calling from a pay phone in a bar in Halifax.

It’s me, Douglas said uncertainly, and Kevin said he knew. And after a pause that seemed to last forever, Douglas finally asked: What went wrong? Why didn’t we ever talk?

Kevin had no answer. He was barely awake. He could hear the sound of video games in the background. Finally he said: I don’t know, Doug. I don’t know why we never did.

Let’s, Douglas offered.

He sounded like he’d been drinking, but Kevin didn’t care.

Okay, he said cautiously.

And so they agreed that night on the phone. Douglas would drive down the next morning. He’d catch the noon or the one o’clock ferry. They’d sit in the kitchen or outside on the stone terrace and finally, after all this time, they would talk.

Twenty

The last Friday in May that spring, Laura Fallon and her two daughters caught the early ferry to Trachis Island. The morning was brisk. Coral clouds hovered overhead. The ocean breathed ice, but the sun was warm on the boat.

The girls—Isabel and Olivia—raced along the upper deck, past red-and-white painted rowboats. Excited, sprinting, the sea wind in their hair, they’d been stuck in the city all spring and winter. For eight months they’d begged to go out to the island; they’d pleaded and whined, but their father wouldn’t allow them. It wasn’t a good time to visit Trachis, he said. Not with the recovery ships offshore and the island overrun with rescue teams and searchers, and with what the girls were likely to see by their beach house: bits of plane carted onshore. Men scouring the strand. God knows what drifting in on the tide. If they saw any of that, they’d never step foot again on a plane—let alone in the ocean. It was best to wait until the island sorted itself out. They’d have to stay in their town house in Montreal until then.