That night I didn’t go to the dance; the next day we met at the baseball game but I was too uneasy with my glimpse of her and Jasper. A few days later I skipped school as she asked and felt like nothing had changed between us. And then she was gone. She was gone, I was in bed, and Jasper was walking around the dining room on his two good legs, the blue book I longed to read useless in his hands. Someone came up the steps; one of my sisters, I thought, until the knock. Jasper opened the door to a little boy, who stepped in when I nodded.

“Charlie,” Jasper said. “What in the world?”

“Nana sent me,” the boy—Jasper’s nephew—said importantly. His lovely face, wide at the cheekbones, narrow at the chin, with a perfectly shaped mouth and soft gray eyes, was much like his mother’s. “She said you’re to come home right away, they’re holding dinner.”

His eyes were fixed on my casts. “I’m Caroline,” I offered. “You go to school with my little sisters, I think.”

“Alice,” he said, his face lighting up. “And Agnes, and Elaine.” He inched closer. “Does it hurt? I heard the aeroplane hit you.”

“An accident,” I said, even as Jasper told Charlie not to pry.

THE NEXT TIME Jasper visited, I confessed to eavesdropping on him and Raney at the gazebo. Instead of being angry, he dropped the book (he was still pretending he came to read to me) and made a short, sharp noise resembling laughter. Hak, hak.

“I should have told you right away,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“I might as well have kissed her on my front porch,” he said.

“I’m the only one who saw.”

“I wish,” he said. “But my grandmother was out there, getting some air.”

“How did I miss her?”

Jasper shrugged. “She tore me apart when I came back in. Couldn’t I see that Raney was just toying with me, and why would I risk our family . . .”

“She thought of Raney as a risk?”

“Of course.” He pinched the tip of his long nose between two fingers. “Too young for me, too flighty, no roots here in the village, bad enough for my reputation that she might damage my chances with someone from a family like mine.”

Perhaps she’d spotted me lurking on the path. “I didn’t even know you and Raney were seeing each other, until that night.”

He traced a knot in the wooden floor with one foot and said, “She had a flair for keeping secrets. I thought she’d told you about us, though.”

I shook my head. If I’d let myself understand, earlier, how much she’d hidden from me, I might not have seen her at all the weekend she met Jasper in the gazebo.