Fate, or a colossal waste of time. But it was the riverbed or a cold, empty king-size bed at the hotel, so I took a few steps forward, closer to the waterline, and knelt down again, waving away a swarm of gnats that hovered at my feet. I scanned my eyes slowly over the pebbles and caught a glimmer of something shiny and reflective. I gasped, ready to call Bachelor Alf over to inspect my find. But as I stepped closer to pull the thin, shiny object toward me, I realized I’d merely grasped the pearlescent, rotting tail of a dead fish.

“Ugh,” I groaned. “Gross.”

Suddenly, there came an excited shriek behind me. I turned to see one of the others—a middle-aged woman bent down low, the tips of her hair almost touching a sandy puddle beneath her—holding up a whitish, sharp-edged rock. She scrubbed furiously at the front of it with her gloved hand and then held it up proudly.

“Ah, a bit of delftware!” Bachelor Alf exclaimed. “Be-auti-ful, too, I might add. Can’t find a blue like that anymore. Cerulean, discovered late eighteenth century. Nowadays, it’s a cheap dye. See there—” He pointed, tracing the pattern for the excited woman. “It appears to be the edge of a canoe, perhaps a dragon boat.”

The woman happily dropped the fragment into a bag and everyone resumed their search.

“Listen here, folks,” Bachelor Alf explained. “The hint is to let your subconscious find the anomaly. Our brains are meant to identify breaks in a pattern. We evolved that way, many millions of years ago. You are not searching for a thing so much as you are searching for an inconsistency of things, or an absence.”

Well, there were a number of things absent for me at the moment, not the least of which was any security or surety about what the rest of my life might entail. Following James’s news, after I’d locked myself in the bathroom, he’d tried to break his way inside where I lay curled up on the bath mat. I begged him to leave me alone; each time I asked, he responded with some plea, a variation of Let me make this up to you or I will spend my life fixing this. All I’d wanted was for him to go away.

I’d called Rose, too, and shared the entire, miserable thing with her. Aghast and with a crying infant in the background, she’d patiently listened as I told her I couldn’t imagine going to London with him the next day to celebrate our anniversary.