Understanding Asta, over time: Polly’s first version was a soft-featured girl on Jane’s bedside table, a dead girl who was darker and older than Evie in the paired portraits of Polly’s childhood. Both were laughing, both were dead in accidents, both still made people cry decades later. The second version of Asta, after they left New York for Michigan: understanding that Jane never knew her mother, couldn’t remember her, and felt that Dee, who’d raised her, was her real mother. The third, as a teenager on a trip to Livingston: understanding that Asta died when her car went off the road and into the river when Jane was not quite two. And as a teenager, the fourth and central question: Who was Jane’s father? An openly out-of-wedlock baby in 1939 was no average thing. Polly asked for years and was dismissed.

The fifth, this last week: that Asta hadn’t been alone, and the sixth, that she’d drowned. The seventh, yesterday: The man was drunk, survived, and left Asta to die.

The eighth was Polly understanding that she might already know the end of the story.

Ned was on the phone, pacing in the garden. Polly knew he was talking to Drake, and she guessed it was about Graham. She was offended that he kept the conversation private, that everyone kept secrets from her. She got the kids to bed and tried to order her thoughts by sorting Drake’s backlog of manuscripts, listening for Harry’s car and the return of Maude. She missed hearing it, somehow, and it was almost nine before she smelled tobacco and looked outside to see Maude and Harry smoking surreptitious cigarettes in the garden, while Helen was back to her golem game in the corner. Ned and Sam were reading on the front porch, a stealth location to avoid a Maude inquisition.

“Don’t tell Josie,” said Harry, handing Maude the ashtray.

“Will you tell me the truth, Maude?” asked Polly.

Maude looked at the moon, looked at Harry, asked for a titch of sherry, asked for another cigarette, and spoke.