“I’m not worrying.” She rather liked this limbo. There was nothing she could do, nothing except talk, and she could talk out into the fog, knowing that Henry, concentrating on the car ahead, was only half listening. She felt lightheaded, almost as if she were a little drunk. She could say whatever came into her head, it would not matter. And she had woken up, not knowing where she was, thinking for a moment that she was in bed at home in Medfield.

“It’s so queer that you never saw that house,” she said.

“What house, honey?” he said, swerving out past a bus.

“The house in Iowa, of course. What I remember, funnily enough, is the way the stained-glass window on the stairs made a colored pattern on the floor, and then the velvet window seat, brown velvet. Everything in the house was golden oak or brown,” she went on dreamily.

“Gloomy?”

“Well, maybe.” She felt doubtful. No, it had not been gloomy exactly, sitting in the window seat looking through the diamond panes, waiting for Edward to come home from school, sewing a doll’s dress, those long winter afternoons which seemed timeless, wonderfully safe and timeless now. “It was one of those solid houses built about nineteen hundred, shingled, with turrets, and seemed awfully grand at the time. All the other houses were white frame with green shutters and lawns going right down to the sidewalk. We had a hedge.”

“You were big shots,” Henry smiled.

“I suppose so,” she said, but it had not really felt like that.

“Anyone who’s president of the bank in a town that size is a big shot. I can’t see Edward, though, in all that. What was he like?”

“A stranger,” she said, without thinking how peculiar it must sound. “From the time he was about nine or ten years old, he was always off somewhere, playing with the Donovan boys for instance, people my father spoke of as ‘Irish riffraff.’ He was always doing the opposite of what Father would like—on purpose, perhaps.”

“Like what?”