“While she was digging up samples, Ms. McKinnon came on part of a skeleton of a baby, probably born around the same time as Cady. She sent that to Dr. Roque along with the soil. I wondered if Cady had a twin who died or if Sonia’s emotional problems might have been triggered by a pregnancy. She was fourteen that summer. I got DNA samples from both women. Neither is related to the dead baby, but the two are sisters.”

“How did you trick Cady into giving you a sample?”

“I asked her for it.”

“No,” she said again, but it was a whisper. An instant later she started to cry, terrible jagged sobs that shook her whole body.

She would not welcome comfort from me. I went into the house and found the kitchen, found glassware, found water in the refrigerator. I filled two glasses and brought them with a box of tissues to the porch.

Perec took a glass from me. She gestured at a small round table. I moved it next to her chair and sat back down. Her sobs had already diminished; she sipped at her water and dabbed her face with a tissue, leaving muddy streaks across her cheeks.

I drank my own water: my throat was dry and raw from the stress. Or from incipient pneumonia. I surreptitiously felt my lymph glands.

“I wondered if you might be Cady’s mother,” I ventured.

“What?” The suggestion outraged her enough to bring some strength back to her voice. “My husband died when Jenny was a toddler. I thought you knew that—you know so much, busybody that you are.”

I felt a perverse relief in her insulting me again—it meant she was recovering. “Sonia and Cady had a parent in common, perhaps two. I don’t suppose the Kiels had a baby that you adopted.”

She looked fierce, briefly, and then her face crumpled. She didn’t start to cry again, but she collapsed back in her chair.

“I love Cady as my own,” she whispered. “I do, I truly do, but—”

I waited, sitting still, making myself part of the porch furniture.

“I was so angry when Jenny got pregnant, and with Dr. Kiel’s least promising student to boot. She was bright, outgoing, people followed her lead: she could have done anything with her life.

“Science—she was gifted, even Nathan—Dr. Kiel—who judges everyone harshly, saw how gifted she was. He got the university to offer her a full scholarship, and she started, in physics and international politics, and then she got sucked into the anti-nuke movement. Of course she met Matt Chastain through me—through my working for Dr. Kiel, I mean—and what she saw in him I’ll never know!”