“I smelled cigarettes when I came in the house. I assume he was here unless you’re smoking again.”

She shut the refrigerator door and came over to the table.

“I’m not smoking again, and Marino was here briefly.”

“What did he want?”

“He wanted to ask me a lot of questions,” I said.

“About what?”

“Why do you need to know the details?”

Her eyes moved from my face to the stack of financial files to the legal pad filled with my indecipherable penmanship. “It doesn’t matter why since you obviously don’t want to tell me.”

“It’s complicated, Lucy.”

“You always say something’s complicated when you want to shut me out,” she said as she turned and walked away.

I felt as if my world were falling apart, the people in it scattering like dry seeds in the wind. When I watched parents with their children, I marveled over the gracefulness of their interactions and secretly feared I lacked an instinct that couldn’t be learned: I found my niece in my study sitting before the computer. Columns of numbers combined with letters of the alphabet were on the screen, and embedded here and there were fragments of what I assumed were data. She was making computations with a pencil on graph paper, and did not look up as I moved next to her.

“Lucy, your mother has had many men in and out of your house; and I am well aware of how that has made you feel. But this is not your house and I am not your mother. It is not necessary for you to feel threatened by my male colleagues and friends. It is not necessary for you to constantly be looking for evidence that some man was here, and it is unfounded for you to be suspicious of my relationship with Marino or Wesley or anyone else.”

She did not respond.

I placed my hand on her shoulder. “I may not be the constant presence in your life that I wish I could be, but you are very important to me.”

Erasing a number and brushing rubber particles off the paper, she said, “Are you going to get charged with a crime?”

“Of course not. I haven’t committed any crimes.”

I leaned closer to the monitor.

“What you’re looking at is a hex dump,” she said.

“You were right. It’s hieroglyphics.”