With her high heels sinking slightly in the soft grass, Ashley walked up behind the shed, where Barky was hanging threadbare sheets on his handmade clothesline. She pulled off her jacket and hung it by one finger over her shoulder. She should have changed, she thought. Her businesslike, urban clothes just seemed to emphasize the differences between them, Barky the farmer, Ashley the...the what? Executive, jet setter, city girl, philanthropist? Sometimes she didn’t know.

“Hi, Barky.”

He shook out a sheet. She could remember hanging that very same sheet back when she was a teenager. She didn’t know why it hadn’t fallen apart by now, given her uncle’s penchant for hanging wash in any manner of weather. He didn’t believe in clothes dryers.

Ashley herself owned Porthault linens and replaced them nearly every year. Barky had refused her discards, or even to let her buy him new ones. The old ones, he insisted, still had plenty of wear in them.

“Yaa, hello,” he said in his distinctive accent. He had been born in Poland, son of a Polish woman, and emigrated to his father’s native England before World War II, and then, after the war, to the United States. His accent reflected the different places he’d lived.

He snapped two clothespins onto the sheet and smoothed it out as it hung limp in the hot, still air. He didn’t seem surprised to see his niece on a Tuesday afternoon—didn’t, in fact, seem surprised to see her at all. She could come and go as she pleased, and that was fine with him. Tumultuous as her life might be, fraught with questions and complexities, the world of Bartholomew Wakefield never changed. He tended his gardens, his animals, his wood stoves, and life went on. He was a stump of a man, with a fringe of golden brown hair and warm golden brown eyes and weather-beaten skin. He had a long prominent nose that might have been ugly on anyone else, but on him was a source of strength and character in his face. As always, he wore baggy denim work pants, a dark-colored BVD T-shirt—today’s was navy blue—and sneakers. He had on a Red Sox cap.

“Is David around?” Ashley asked. “I need to talk to you guys.”

“He’s making iced tea.”

“Where’s his Rover?”

Barky nodded toward the back of the barn, where the fifteen-year-old Land Rover was parked with its hood up. Although he was nearly as rich as his twin sister and also owned a black Ferrari, David Wakefield was still partial to, and identified by, the Land Rover he’d bought to commute to the University of Massachusetts as a forestry student.

Ashley helped Barky with the last of the sheets and pillowcases, and they walked down to the house together. The kitchen was big and airy, its floor worn linoleum, its shelves open and simple, its appliances outdated but functional. Everything was spotless. There was a glass of black-eyed Susans on the middle of the big pine table, across from the cold wood cook stove.