She’d requested right away to go to the nearest place to the crash. The Red Cross people had made arrangements; other family members were going to Trachis too. But it took another full day before she was finally driven out of Halifax. The limousine driver kept the little window open between them—just in case. Outside, the world slipped by without sound: green hills, white gas stations. Rain on the blacktop. She woke to sunlight through tinted glass. Liquor bottles, strapped in place with belts. On the ferry, she staggered up to the deck and set her face to the wind. It was afternoon by then. She stood in the back of the boat beside the rail and wept, while Arctic Terns forked overhead and a large woman with a cane appeared out of nowhere, placed a hand on her elbow, and embraced her. When the Trachis Light swung into view—silent, minatory, the faro’s lamp rounding in the tenebrous afternoon—she wondered, was this what Russell last saw? A beacon, a green flame, a candle. Was this his Last Known Position?

On Trachis, all the houses had colored ribbons tied to the trees and hand-painted signs—drawn by children, it seemed—of broken hearts with supportive sentiments (she refused to read them after the first five). In the dimming light, they passed marshes, spruce forests, iron red mudflats, and then they arrived at the high-peaked inn on a bluff: yellow-painted, Gothic, with graveled lanes leading to cottages half hidden in the wood.

For days Ana Gathreaux had been surrounded by others, and all she’d wanted was to be alone, closer to Russell, by the water’s edge, to have a moment of stillness near him. But now, sitting on the bed in the darkened cottage, with the door closed and the innkeeper gone, she felt utterly—acutely—alone. The day was ending outside, the ocean folding in on itself. Like her life, she thought, like linen, folded up and packed away. It was exactly one hundred and twenty hours now since the crash (she’d been keeping track). This is why she came here, she reflected. To see the ocean, the wreckage; to see, more pointedly, what wasn’t visible. Tomorrow, they’d go to the tip of the island nearest the place where the plane went down.