It was an innocuous manila, sealed only by two splayed metal fasteners that Cade’s secretary had put through the hole in its flap, then pressed down to each side. I pried the fasteners upright and opened the flap. Inside was a typed document of sixteen pages. I riffled it, then read again, this time carefully. When I had finished I checked for missing pages, found none, and reread the twelfth page, twice. Then I placed the papers back in the envelope and took it with me to the sitting room.

It was sparsely decorated, mainly from the past. On polished end tables were porcelain figurines—a sparrow, Marie Antoinette—that Lydia had collected. From above the fireplace stared an oil of her father, framed by candelabra and looking vaguely distressed, as if he smelled smoke. The built-in shelf next to that held portraits of more dead ancestors and a larger one of Henry Cantwell, gray hair neatly parted. The papers in the envelope reminded me that Jason’s picture had been removed. Then I noticed that Lydia’s was gone.

I called out.

No one answered. I walked past the fireplace through the open door to Henry’s library, filled with books: Lancelot by Walker Percy, some Aeschylus, much Faulkner and Camus, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and leaning next to that with a bookmark sticking from it, Crime and Punishment. Often I would find Henry in a cardigan sweater, amidst his volumes: the most reliable friends, he’d once remarked, full of consolation. But his half-glasses were on the shelf and his chair was empty. I returned to the sitting room, stopped, and listened.

I didn’t like finding the house unlocked, or its silence. Though in the seven years since, I’d been to the Cantwell’s perhaps a hundred times, I could still hear the sounds of our engagement party, when the house had been filled with people and laughter and the clink of a barman dropping ice in crystal. I’d begun awkwardly, conscious of Cade and worried that if I moved too quickly I’d slop champagne on the Oriental rugs. I had never met the Cantwells and, while Henry and Lydia were gracious, Jason watched me from one corner with a peculiar bright intensity, never coming forward. The chances of meeting a second northerner were nil and everyone else seemed to have money to burn, even Kris Ann’s florid uncle who had backed me to the fireplace denouncing the Berrigan brothers. Then Kris Ann appeared behind him in the crush. For an instant her look seemed probing and uncertain and then, knowing I saw her, she flashed me the dazzling, flirty, self-mocking smile that was an in-joke between us—her southern-girl smile, she called it—until it warmed the darkness of her eyes. I’d felt myself relax, and after that I remembered the moment precisely: her smile, the room, and the sounds of the party—so that now it seemed too quiet.