By the time the evening wound to its end, I’d lost track of all the names, all the faces. They passed in a blur while the duchess guided me around the garden, under the lanterns, introducing me like a prize filly, and I pranced and pawed and whinnied on cue, made almost dizzy by this extraordinary ascent of fortune. In the months to come, I didn’t remember the exact moment in which I first met Mrs. Gudewill and her daughters, or Fred Sigrist, or the other men and women who were to figure so prominently in this Bahamian chapter of my life. I didn’t remember the precise drip of information that fed its way through my ears and into my brain, to be picked through and examined later. I do remember that I stood once more in the duke’s study, speaking to Axel Wenner-Gren—yes, him, the Swedish industrialist, owner of Hog Island, the sort of fellow attracted to tax havens like the Bahamas like ants to picnics—when Thorpe reappeared. By now, most of the guests had left, and only a few of us remained to drink bourbon whiskey from the Windsor cabinet and listen to the duke’s collection of popular American songs on the phonograph. Mr. Wenner-Gren wanted to know more about my husband.

“How long were you married?” he asked.

“Only a year.”

“Then you were newlyweds. What a terrible thing, this war.”

“What’s the war got to do with it?”

“Oh, I beg your pardon. I assumed he was killed in battle.”

I tried to speak and realized the muscles of my throat were paralyzed, that my pulse struck like a hammer in my neck. The familiar panic. You never knew when it might seize you, when it might sock your gut at any sudden noise, any bang of a window, any innocent question. When it struck, you had to remember to breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth, to disguise your terror as something else, like grief. When the panic receded, when the muscles softened enough to enable you to speak at all, you spoke haltingly, as if mastering your anguish, so that no one would suspect you were lying.

“No,” I said. “He was killed in an accident. A terrible accident.”