Carrying his suitcase upstairs, he caught sight of his son’s backpack as he passed the guest room and wondered if Clay was here alone. Three years out of college and still a nomad, Clay would bring home every now and then a girlfriend of the kind that delivers polio vaccines in India. She would touch him as if, on some level, she knew he was untenable—in but not of this life. Raj understood only too well how little all the suffering in the world can come to mean when you love someone you cannot have.

After dropping the suitcase at his closet, he opened the window. A jostling ocean breeze flung his hair across his face and flooded the room with the smell of the eucalyptus tree just outside as he watched a massive container ship ease toward the bay. He felt as if he had been away for much longer than a month, lecturing and chairing debates on alternative energies at Imperial College in London. At least he had managed to spend some time with Cici. When she had put on her barrister’s wig, he had looked for his father in her face. Cici had long suspected, after finding a hastily scrawled postcard among her mother’s effects, that Gerard, not Haig, was her father too. Was Gerard still alive? Might he even turn up one day to lay claim to this house, built on the land he had tried to get hold of that night after Annie’s wedding? It seemed right to Raj that this was how his father had come to exist: in the vague fear of a knock at the door.

He went to his office to check his mail and saw the FedEx immediately. After all those last-minute hiccups, Ruth’s farm had finally sold. He sat at his desk, surprised by his own rush of feeling. Dumb. Nothing in Pisgah now but a few graves. How lucky he was that Ruth had chosen to live out the end of her life here in San Francisco, grandmothering Lulu and Gayle, and was buried just a few miles away.

Absently, Raj toyed with his stapler. Well, there it was, he thought, no reason ever to go back. It had always been strange anyway to return, finding himself feeling so little in a place where he had once felt so much, a place inaugurated by the dirty bare foot of a girl in a yellow housedress. And another girl, emerging from the worming shadows beneath the catalpas to become a boy in the sun.

“Shit!” He dropped the stapler and, with a grimace, plucked the staple from his thumb and sucked the little bead of blood. Idiot.