Kris Ann stood beneath the green canvas awning in the way she had, straight like a dancer from her hips through the small of her back. She whirled at the sound of footsteps, black hair flying out and away. Then she came to me. I felt her breathing and the wetness of her face.

“Your father …” I began.

Our eyes met and held. As she leaned back I grasped her hand. We went upstairs in a kind of torpor. Undressing, no one spoke. We made love with silent intensity, each without looking at the other. Stiff desperate fingers raked my back, she cried out, and was still.

Afterward she wept, her face turned from me. I held her until it was done.

“Krissy …”

She turned to me suddenly. Her eyes were deep and black and brilliant, and seven years had touched only their corners. But in the puffiness beneath them, the slackness of shock still in her face, was the first shadow of age to come. Softly, she said, “What had he done to her?”

“Does it matter?”

“It matters to any woman. But to Lydia …”

Her eyes shut. I could almost see her imaginings: Lydia Cantwell, strangled as close from sex as she was now. Afternoon sun through the leafy tangle outside our window glinted in her hair, thick and soft as I touched it. She shook it free. “It’s like I can feel it.” Her voice turned low and angry. “Where was Jason?”

“I don’t know.”

I felt the line of her body stiffen. “He could do this.” She slid away from me, rolling on her stomach and pulling the bedsheet over her shoulders.

I bent to kiss her, then stopped. “Maybe a drink—”

She shook her head. “You can. But not me. Not now.”

For a moment I watched her. Then I put on a robe and went downstairs.

It was the maid’s day off. In the dining room one of Kris Ann’s silk blouses lay on the cabinet which held her mother’s gold-dipped silver and a lopsided clay ashtray with “I love you” scratched on it by a small retarded girl to whom she taught art. Next to that was the liquor. I poured some Bushmills, neat, and took that and the blouse upstairs.

The bed was empty. Kris Ann stood in front of her makeup mirror, brushing her hair in a dispirited ritual of something to do. Her skin was tawny and her back straight and slim, with smooth hollows beneath her shoulder blades. My father’s wolf-face appeared behind her in the mirror. She leaned back. “When I was little, Adam—after Mother died—Henry and Lydia would take me to the symphony or the ballet, like The Nutcracker at Christmas. I’d sit between them and she’d explain the stories. And Henry—”

“I know.”

She stopped brushing, her reflection grave as she watched mine. “Adam,” she said quietly. “Daddy’s been a lawyer for a long time.”