Perhaps she did, or perhaps her combined exhaustion and exhilaration was what made her so nervously talkative, so confiding. Daphne, expecting no more than a routine answer—surely Caroline had been asked this a hundred times?—asked what she most wanted to know, which was how Caroline had started flying. The long, peculiarly intimate story that emerged, carrying the two women back across the field, into Daphne’s runabout, to the picnic table at the ice cream store, where they ate peach ice cream and brushed away the thickening mosquitoes, vibrated with the pain of a fox crying for a lost pup. Or of Henrietta unspooling her dreams and disappointments during their first passionate conversations, when they were capturing horseshoe crabs on an island in Buzzards Bay.

Although Daphne tried to remember every phrase as Caroline had conveyed it, it’s possible that her own feelings and her understanding of her friend’s family amplified some elements, intensified some emotions. Maybe she smoothed out Caroline’s syntax or altered her vocabulary. Still, she believed that Caroline said this—

I DON’T KNOW what went on in town those first few days. I didn’t see the reporters chasing the story or the neighbors my parents turned away. I was seventeen; I had a snail named Samuel who lived in a jar with a bit of dirt from the forest; I wore hand-me-downs and had odd habits and not many friends. Until that summer, my family had kept me busy, in both good ways and bad. For the week after the accident, almost all I did was sleep.

In my dreams, I was running up the path at the side of the Glen, picking grapes on Bully Hill, driving a buggy, swimming under the dock. I was at school, under Aunt Henrietta’s watchful eye; I was dressing one of the twins; I was flipping pancakes or lifting grapes from crates and repacking them into baskets. I was dancing. I was skating near the hotel where the parties were held; I was ducking one little sister into the water or walking the shore with another. But when I woke, I was always in bed, both legs and one arm stiffly casted, my head bandaged, the left side of my mouth and face sliced past the cheekbone to the place where a chunk of my scalp was gone.