He took the second one, too, and would have taken a third; he’d take as many as Charlie wrote. Edward will let me go, Chloe had said to him all those years ago, but only if I leave Lawrence. But in fact her bargain had been subtly, radically different. Last year, on the night after the amendment was ratified, they’d argued bitterly over whether they should bring Charlie into a business now on the verge of ruin. She destroyed a hatbox—a pretty one, too—crushing the cardboard bit by bit until nothing was left but a disk, and as the taupe stripes crumbled she let slip that Edward hadn’t demanded Lawrence, not at first; he’d resisted, refused to let her take Charlie with her, and given in only when she offered Lawrence. She’d offered her first son—So we could keep Charlie, she said. That’s how far I’d go for him—as a bribe. Since then he’d made some decisions without consulting her.

As he turned to say something to his boy, to offer him a taste from the special bottle, Charlie ran past him. Across the garden, over the snow, in his dress shoes and without his coat, he bounded toward Henrietta. She couldn’t help it, her heart leapt toward him. He ran right past her, toward the rocks. The fox was tiring, the dogs were panting.

“Olive!” he shouted. “Oscar!”

To Henrietta’s amazement, the dogs stopped and turned their hairy, intelligent faces his way. Her way. She had never had a dog.

“Come!” Charlie called. In that instant the fox found the ravine and sprinted up the shallow crease.

II

II

Natural History

Natural History

AND THERE SHE WAS, WHEN I OPENED THE DOOR: DEIRDRE, my old friend. She’d seen the cabin, which I’d bought back when visitors to Silver Lake would have been hard pressed to guess which of us would be better known. Some might have bet on me: Rose Marburg. I published my papers and won my prizes early. The wiser would have chosen Deirdre Banks.

On that August day in 2018, I opened the door after thirty years and she said, stepping over the threshold and bumping into the clumsy shelves, “I can’t believe it’s still the same.”

“Pretty much,” I said.

She eyed the old woodstove, the table and chairs, the slumping couch. “Not exactly, but—you added a porch?”

“A few years ago.”

She moved toward the screened-in space and sat where I’d hoped she would, in the chair facing the kingbirds’ nest. The male obligingly flicked down, scooped up a bee, and returned to his mate. I’d tacked the porch onto the back of the cabin, which otherwise was one high-peaked room centered around the chimney, with a sleeping loft over the front third, bathroom and cooking space tucked beneath that. Once I’d imagined Deirdre visiting every year.