The next afternoon, when she had to leave early for a catering, she left a note for Jimmy: Give Barry a slice of focaccia.

“You mean Berry, as in Berrigan?” said Jimmy. “His real name’s Ned.”

He didn’t notice when she started calling him Ned. Maybe she’d never called him anything out loud before, but the next night at the bar she asked questions. Why cheese? Why not farming? Pork, bees, apples. Why not law? (She had at some point sussed out the fact that Ned had gone to law school.)

He made a face and laughed. Jimmy had brought in a bowl of tiny wild strawberries and she popped one in Ned’s mouth. He smiled while he ate it, and she leaned over and kissed him, and he kissed her back and then pulled away.

His face was flushed, and now Polly flushed, too. She should have waited; she should not have assumed he felt that way. She filled their wineglasses and went back to scribbling down a list of recipes. Why not fishing? she asked, floundering back to the conversation, trying to pretend the kiss hadn’t happened.

Ned shook his head. He stabbed away at the food—a potpie like no other, a spinach salad with pistachios. “What was the world like, when you were looking for your dead people?” he asked. “What did you see? The daily things.”

At three, riding on Merle’s young brown back while he swam, looking up at the tops of her grandfather’s tomatoes, the whirring sound of Evie shuffling cards. Or at eight, the green parrot from below, flapping away from the hissing cat, the dogwood tree dropping petals, the map.

“A map,” she finished.

“I have always loved maps,” he said, wiping up crumbs with her bar cloth. He had graceful, smooth-muscled arms, with a line of moles above one wrist.

“What do you remember, from that age?” asked Polly.

“Everything,” he said. “But let’s start with a girl. I had a friend, a good friend.”

Something was happening, and she took in the whorl in his hair, the shape of his mouth, her mind slowing down. “You grew up in Ireland?”

“Not until I was eight. My father died in the war, and my mother was insane.”

He emptied his wine and fiddled with his napkin. When he looked up Polly’s ears were roaring. She thought of Dee’s hands in Edmund’s hair, Edmund drawing on a sidewalk with the same arm, Edmund ripping at her as she climbed a tree, Edmund under the porch while they listened to Jane’s sad voice, watching each other’s eyes and maybe knowing in that moment that everything might go away.

“But you knew that,” said Ned. “Polly, I should have told you sooner.”