I didn’t know what to think about this insight. It was beyond me why he felt he had the right to offer up any sort of criticism about my personality, at that moment or any other. I wanted to say something about how I’d started out the summer by not eating for two weeks, but it was an exaggeration.

“Do you photograph Lonnie?” I said instead, suddenly.

“No,” he said. “Lonnie won’t let me.”

The statement made a painful lump develop in my stomach. I guessed that meant I shouldn’t have either.

We were approaching the back of the house; I could see the ghostly lights of the pool in the yard. “Did you call us when we were upstate?” I said.

“No,” he said.

“Really? You didn’t call the cabin? In the middle of the night?”

“No,” he said again. It bothered me; I knew he was lying. It also bothered me that he didn’t say “Thank you” when we parted.

29

THE NEXT MORNING A WOMAN I’D NEVER SEEN BEFORE APPROACHED me before breakfast. “You are Elle?” she said. “Mr. Thomas would like to see you.”

I was giving William his bottle. “I will take the baby,” she said. “Only for a moment. He’s in the far wing.” She pointed down the hall.

I assumed she was a cleaning woman—she was dressed casually, in white orthopedic tennis shoes. I followed her to a door at the end of a long hallway I’d never been down before and handed William over with some trepidation.

Everything smelled like eucalyptus—vaguely medicinal. The door opened to reveal a bathroom, where Robert was sitting on the lip of the tub in a navy robe, his skinny legs crossed. It was hard to see with all the steam and it was cloyingly hot.

“A touch of a cold,” he said, gesturing around the room. “Forgive me.” His voice was hoarse, his throat filled with the clogged sound of phlegm.

“It’s okay,” I said, though I couldn’t have been more uncomfortable with the intimacy of the location.

He coughed for a long time, as if for emphasis. “I’m supposed to sit in the steam. Horribly boring. Hard to even see the pages of a book.”

“I can imagine,” I said, though in summer, any kind of sickness felt far off, hard to remember. He looked pretty awful in his robe; they can put it off, but the rich are not completely immune to aging. He was trying to sit up very straight but having some trouble perched like that, his skinny wrinkled neck sticking out at an angle, his jagged collarbone emerging above a few sad tufts of gray hair and brown age spots. “As I have no intention of wasting your time, I’ll get straight to the point. I don’t think you’re the best fit for this family.”