Elfriede can’t move. The girls scream happily, the gulls call overhead. Gertrud pulls at her dress, wanting milk that isn’t there. As she stands, immobile, the undertow buries her feet deeper into the sand. To pull herself free will require greater and greater strength, strength she doesn’t have when she can scarcely hold herself upright, when she is hard put just to hold Gertrud safe against her side. A wet hand grabs hers. “Mama, what’s the matter?” says Johann. “Who’s that man?”

The girls, oblivious, run straight past. The man takes off his hat, a plain straw boater, and the horizon catches flame.

“His name is Mr. Thorpe,” she says. “He’s an Englishman.”

When she and Charlotte and the children left for Florida six months ago, Elfriede didn’t pack much. For one thing, she had few clothes suitable for the tropics. A couple of summer dresses, a hat, her underthings, her nightdresses. Her English books, to practice the language. Of sentimental objects, she packed even fewer. The Cloth of Tears—she has a superstition—and a small stack of letters from deep inside her bureau. Not many. By some unspoken agreement, they always waited months to reply to each other. When they did, the letters were not long. Maybe a page or two. They contained not the usual newsiness of letters, not even dates, not even names, not even their own. They were like poems dropped from the sky. She couldn’t be sure how Wilfred perceived her missives, but to Elfriede, Wilfred’s letters were strange and passionate and wonderful. Just last night, Elfriede was trying to remember the exact wording of a certain passage that she had received in the spring of 1902, so she pulled the letter from the bundle and read it through: