She turns her head to me. “Well? What do you think?”

“I hope you’re not expecting me to surf, that’s all.”

“Of course not. Only a daredevil would surf this wave. Give me a hand, will you?”

I help her spread the blanket and unpack the sandwiches and the bottles of lemonade and the orangey-pink fruit she calls papaya. She removes her hat and eats in silence, legs tucked up against her chest, watching the waves form offshore. The sun is hot, but there’s enough breeze to keep us comfortable. When we’ve finished the sandwiches and the fruit, Lindquist tells me there’s a cake inside the basket, and could I fetch it out and slice it up with the knife. I do as she asks. As I sink the blade through layers of frosting and sponge, I feel as if she’s watching every movement, every tiny gesture, like this is a test of some kind. I hand her a slice. We eat. I say this would be a grand time for a cigarette.

“I’d rather you didn’t,” she says.

“Well, I’ve thrown up all the Scotch, so I’d say you owe me a cigarette.”

She opens her mouth and stops herself.

“What?” I say.

“Nothing.” She stands up and holds out her hand. I allow her to draw me up. The ocean stretches out before us, all the way to the Orient. The wind tumbles my hair. Lindquist speaks so softly, I have to strain to hear her, and yet I have the feeling that this is why I’m here, this is why she brought me here, the flight, the Scotch, the island, the picnic, this particular stretch of ocean before us: all of it in preparation for this moment, some grand speech.

“Samuel Mallory had his faults,” she says. “We all do, I guess. But he was an honorable man. He was a good man. He always wanted to do the right thing, even when he fell short. He loved me. He loved his daughter. Everything else came second. He would have died for us both. If you’re going to write this book of yours, you have to make that clear, because unless you understand that, you can’t understand Sam at all.”

“What about his wife? Didn’t he love his wife?”

This brings her up short. She studies the question for some time. So long, in fact, that I start to wonder whether she means to answer me at all, whether we will ever get to the heart of the matter.

I continue. “Men, you know. They talk all the time about love and fidelity, but in the end they just follow their own inclinations to populate the earth, and who suffers? The wives and the children they leave behind. And that’s something I take personally, because the same thing happened to me. My father left my mother for another woman, and I wound up getting myself in the kind of trouble that a girl often gets into when she loses a father, the kind of trouble she never recovers from, the kind of trouble that haunts her all her life.”