His wife glared at him and tucked the paper pyramid into her purse. “It isn't stealing, Albert. It's a souvenir. Besides, lunch was expensive.”

“It's stealing,” said the husband, as if he might summon New York's Finest, arrest his wife, and be done with it.

The boy was laughing. “That's the thing about marriage,” he whispered to Annie. “The decades pile up and so do tempers.”

“Tell me about it,” said Annie. “But sometimes they rescue themselves. My parents left today on their second honeymoon.”

“Really? How nice. Did they get married again and everything?”

Annie nodded. “My mother went on a killer diet so she could fit into her wedding gown again, and Dad into his same tux. My brother was best man and I was maid of honor. We even had the same guests. It was fun in an embarrassing kind of way.” She skipped the part about the affair her father had promised to abandon. Who knew whether to believe him? But Mom believed, and it was her marriage.

She said, “I remember that Hiram Stratton, Sr., made a fortune in railroads. I never knew he was a philanthropist.” If I could touch your hair, she thought, I would know whether you are my Strat.

But they were sitting opposite each other in a public place and he thought they were strangers. “The family legend is that Hiram Stratton, Sr., disowned Hiram Stratton, Jr., because Junior went insane. Junior took up gentle Victorian activities like watercolors and eventually went to Egypt for a rest cure. He took a few photographs for the Lightner dig and then—who knows?”

They called him Strat, not Junior, thought Annie. And he wasn't insane. He loved me. Of course, my brother, Tod, would call that insane. “So you're Devonny's great-grandchild,” she said instead.

“You make it sound as if you and Grandmother Devonny met,” he said, laughing.

We did, thought Annie. She sent me on a mission, to save Strat from the asylum. But it went wrong in the end, and we had to part.

“Devonny Stratton married an Englishman,” he explained. “They had two children. The older son became an earl or something, but the younger son came back to America and called himself Lockwood Stratton. His son, my father, was plain old Bill Stratton, and now I'm Lockwood Stratton again. Ridiculous British-type name, huh?”

No. Lockwood was not a ridiculous British-type name.

It was a ridiculous American-type name. Annie's. Annie folded and unfolded the paper pyramid to distract herself. She swallowed her latte. She loved the puffy creaminess and the soft sugar at the bottom. “I'm a Lockwood myself. My name is Annie Lockwood. It would be,” she said carefully, “somebody in my family that Devonny got the name from.” Because I tried to save Strat, she thought. And maybe I did. I've never really known.

“That is so terrific! Then we're related, in a nonrelated kind of way.”