Ned was still hiding on the front porch with a book, a halo of bugs surrounding the wall light. Polly floated around, making a list, cleaning up stray bits, and waved peacefully when he headed upstairs.

Polly of the blinking mind. The man at the party, the man on the beach—she’d never forgotten him, but she’d been blind to the context, never even talking with Ned about it. Until now, the cause and effect, the why of the bad man—the two bad men—getting into the boat, was what Jane as a student called an onion story, an artichoke story. It confused, and Polly shied away. Now she needed confirmation, but the blinking thought felt red, not green—there was a point to Jane’s willful ignorance. Polly shouldn’t think any memory was true, ever, especially after wine, especially when she was tired. Ivor was one of those turn-of-the-century names that might seem like a one-off, but nothing in the world ever really was, and why would her memory be right about the last name? Maybe it had been Dewar, Dworkin. She’d been eight.

Still, she saw Papa’s grim face, white against the green hedges of that old estate, water dripping off his clothes. She went down to the dining room table for the photo she’d pulled off the board earlier, an old man rinsing himself with a hose after a swim, grinning at laughing children, the children they’d been. He was so old but so strong, the long muscles on his arms withered but still defined, every motion still sure and coordinated. Had he felt relief when he let the boat go and swam back to shore?

Upstairs, in bed, Ned looked up from a cookbook. In times like these he stuck with nonfiction. “Are you coming soon?”

“I won’t be long,” said Polly. “I’ll be quiet.”

“Are you all right?”

Everyone was asking that; her pride in a poker face was dented. “I’m fine,” said Polly. “I’ll explain later. I promise.”

Before her accident he might have been impatient. At the computer, tucked on the cramped landing to make way for Maude, Polly wasted time reading about another Ivor—Novello—before she finally searched the New York Times for an obituary. If the Dewitts were that sort of family, that sort of paper might show a trace. Polly watched her shitty dusty curtains blow in the first cool nighttime gust to breach the heat of the landing, the dial-up connection laboring along.

The screen snapped into focus: Ivor Madison Dewitt, gallery owner and ex-pat, who’d spent his postwar years (after serving in noncombat positions, as the Times somewhat bitchily pointed out) in Paris. Married three times, no children, born 1917, dead August 30, 1968, of drowning, near Stony Brook. No photo, but Polly could see his face, the sand in his open eye.