Their parents, she whispered conspiratorially, then shook her head and stared off at the girl; Kevin did too. She was kicking a clay shuffleboard disk with her boot. Kevin volunteered to take them to their room. Mrs. McIntyre said she’d better do it herself. They were Dutch; they’d flown in just the day before from Amsterdam.

Two minutes later, a town car pulled into the drive, and an Italian couple climbed out. Then another limousine followed with an elderly Chinese man and woman, and a thin translator in a double-breasted suit. The Chinese woman wore a white dress. Her husband held a small tote umbrella over her head. They walked to the edge of the lawn while Mrs. McIntyre oversaw the others.

Kevin watched them all climb into the drizzle, each with the same disoriented expression, with hair that hadn’t been combed, clothes that looked unchanged in days, jackets that were crumpled and unironed. All looked slightly bewildered, as if they’d lost their wallets or keys and kept checking pockets, patting shirts. They walked to the edge of the driveway and lifted faces to the sea and sniffed the salt air, as if, at any moment, on the ground or in the grass or out in the fog, they might find what was missing. And watching them in the rain, alone or in pairs, Kevin felt a pang of such sadness that he couldn’t control himself; for until that point, the crash had seemed strangely remote, something that had happened only to him that night alone in the garden; and since then, as he skulked around the kitchen and avoided the island itself, it had all grown rather abstract. But now, watching each new family member emerge from the back of a limousine, solemn and haunted, he remembered that night again, the windows lit up in the fuselage, the awful crunching explosion, and he hurried back into the house, to the hallway, where he hid momentarily beside the antique phone booth beneath the stairs, collecting his emotions. He blew his nose into a handkerchief. He smoothed his hair. Then he screwed up the courage to go outside again and greet his guests.

For the rest of the afternoon, more people arrived. With each hourly ferry, two or three cars pulled up to the inn. Mrs. McIntyre supervised. She carried a clipboard with names and nationalities and contact numbers. A few other counselors—“care partners” they called themselves—arrived, as well as a priest and a rabbi, and each of them hovered around the house, inside the inn, or on the driveway, hands in pockets or behind backs, while the lights of limousines burned in the rain.