“There wasn’t any record of him,” she said. “All the graduate-student files were there, people who I knew had been students even before him, but not one word about Matt Chastain. Then I began to wonder if he’d ever even existed. Maybe Dr. Kiel made him up to cover for a mistake he’d made himself.”

I was as bewildered as Cady, but I shook my head. “Although Sonia could have imagined a lot of different things emotionally, she saw him with your mother. Whatever she imagined Chastain saying to your mom is a fantasy, but not his existence. Maybe he wasn’t a student, though, maybe a lab tech or something.”

“I don’t think so. There’d have been some file on him, whether he was staff or student.”

I couldn’t fit a narrative over it. Whatever Chastain had done had been so outrageous that he had to be put down the memory hole. And that had happened long before Emerald Ferring and August Veriden—and I—showed up and rattled everyone.

“Tell me more about your mother’s death,” I said.

“I can’t—I wasn’t there.”

“Tell me what you’ve been told about it.”

Kansas, August 1983

It’s always hot in Kansas in August, temperatures climbing to three digits, humidity high. The wheat harvest came in two months ago, but the corn was as high as an elephant’s eye, the tasseling silky cream, everything as it should be, more or less.

Doris was doing her third alfalfa mowing for the season. She took the tractor down to the southeast edge of her land, where the missile silo dug an ugly gouge in the field.

She hated weapons of every kind, nukes most of all. Her older brother had served with the Army of Occupation in Japan after the Second World War. He’d written about the cancers the children had, the deformities of babies born in the fallout regions around Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and then he’d died of leukemia himself. Of course she’d said yes when Jenny Perec and the others had come and asked if they could camp out next to the silo.

Jenny was pregnant. Lucinda Ferring noticed it right away, even though she wasn’t showing. “It’s in the face, Dorrie,” Lucinda had told her.

“Don’t tell my mom,” Jenny begged when Doris went to talk to her about it: she didn’t want Jenny going into labor out here in a tent, miles from any medical help. “She’s already having ten fits, me out here with the hippies.”

The baby came a little after the big July 4 protest. One of the protesters was a nurse-midwife; the delivery went uneventfully. “I’m naming her Cady for Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She’s going to grow up to be a strong woman, just look at her.”