When the service ended, I suggested to Mrs. Gudewill that we put together a few books and treats—a Red Cross parcel, if you will—and deliver them to the hospital. I thought it wouldn’t be so singular if I went with a friend. By the time we reached the hospital with our basket it was past teatime, and the nurse on duty told us that Mr. Thorpe had regained consciousness a little past noon and was out of immediate danger. But we were too late to deliver him any comfort baskets. At that very moment, he was on a boat bound for Miami and the hospital there: a voyage chartered for him by the Duchess of Windsor herself.

All of which, you might think, was wonderfully good news: the kind of news that ought to make a girl feel better on the spot. Indeed it did. For that first hour or two, I felt as if I’d been loosened from a vise, from one of those devices of medieval torture that turn each limb and organ on its own separate screw, and come to understand at last the true meaning of the word relief. I parted ways with Mrs. Gudewill and made my way to my bungalow to pour myself a festive gin and tonic. But as I sipped at the drink, I discovered that my relief had dissolved into something else. Into emptiness, into a loss of mass, an absence of atoms and molecules I had not known I possessed. There had been something, and now there was nothing. Gone.

On a boat for Miami: the Gemini, the Windsors’ private yacht.

The first of June dawned hazy and hot, promising trouble. I woke in a jolt, in the middle of some dream, seized by the conviction that someone was pounding on my front door. But as I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling, the milky air of sunrise, no noise disturbed the stillness except the palaver of birds outside the window.

There was no point in returning to sleep. I crawled from bed and crept down the hall to the parlor, where the radio rested on the sideboard, tuned to the single Nassau station. I switched it on. A plume of baroque music swept into the room, crackling with static, Bach or something. But no news. I checked the lock on the front door and went back down the hall to run a bath.

An hour later, Veryl had not yet arrived. I boiled an egg, toasted bread, started the coffee in the electric percolator. The radio now thrummed with piano. Still no news. I ate breakfast in the kitchen, standing up, because there was no room for a table. I washed and dried the dishes, poured another cup of coffee, and betook myself to my work, such as it was.