THE DOOR OPENED, opened again, and Didier’s mother, after depositing the glittering bowl with Didier, greeted a friend who after the Armistice had stayed on in France and attended a school organized to keep American soldiers occupied while they waited to be shipped back home. His had been a farm school; he had learned about French crops and soils and methods. Not as much as Didier had learned during his stay there, which they’d always presented to outsiders as a carefully designed apprenticeship with the French wing of the family.

He was walking, now, her complicated oldest son, from the back of the dining room toward the front door, his hand held out to greet a group of men from the packing room, his face as cheerful and welcoming as it had always been and would be into old age unless some other crack appeared in his wife’s polished performance. Perhaps it would happen tonight. After the last of the trifle had been scraped into bowls, after the older men had finished their final brandies, he would ease them out to the porch and help organize the cleaning up. Then the bedrooms would fill, one by one, and the doors would close.

Didier and Chloe would be the last awake and Didier would finally close their door too and lie down next to Chloe, his thick, strong body so obviously still her great delight. His hands would reach for her. Afterwards, she might confess—what was it she’d done, or said? At night Opal had lain in bed down the hall, trying to imagine Chloe in Doylestown and the moment when she moved on Didier. And then she’d buried the vision: her family depended on accepting the mother of her only grandchild. Jasper had failed them; to Chloe, who although she couldn’t produce another child had at least given them Charlie, they owed everything.

What bad luck, then, that Henrietta Atkins had encouraged Charlie’s interest in fossils! At first the little brachiopods and gastropods he brought home from the Glen had seemed harmless; all Henrietta’s students went on those field trips, and both Didier and Jasper remembered handling the mysterious shapes with pleasure. But then Henrietta had gotten Charlie interested in the fossil mammals collected by Leidy and Cope, and after that in dinosaurs. The way Henrietta pushed this material back into their lives felt almost malicious, as if she knew Didier’s secrets. As if she’d read the first letters he’d sent home from the tile works, describing the fairy-tale house and his employer’s son’s passion for dinosaur bones. Because of her, they all spun their wineglasses at dinner while Charlie talked about dinosaurs, fossil formation in wet and dry climates, his friend Bernard’s experiments with casts and imprints. It was hard not to imagine, during those painful moments, what Charlie’s life would have been like if Chloe had stayed where she belonged.