On the way out, she passed the place where the receptionist used to sit. This was their den mother back before voice or e-mail. Mabel remembered confessing to her that she had a crush on Don. The day was right there, it was April, the first new hyacinths out, he had definitely smiled at her in the elevator for no reason, and Mabel had floated into the Room in a buttercup of a dress, drifting to the receptionist’s counter for telephone messages, and Treena had looked over the tops of her tortoiseshell glasses and guessed—somebody’s in love. Mabel had gushed awful, stupid longing to her until the next message retriever appeared—Don. Of course—he was right with her on the elevator. But someone had stopped him to talk. Now here he was. Mabel saw his hand reach into her line of vision to pull out his stack of messages. How long had he been standing there? Had he heard? Mabel could still feel how he had touched her elbow. He guided her, his palm on the small of her back, away from Treena, into the Room. Thinking about it, she remembered. There was such a thing as a princess.

Dozer Garcia the flight surgeon walked along the wall through a hallway at Andrews Air Force Base. It was a few days since Mary’s discharge from Walter Reed. She stopped Dozer when he saw her. She wanted to pump him about her crash.

“Your psych evaluation was always wooly,” he announced before she had a chance to say anything. “Now you’re a sleepwalker with a statistically impossible mishap on your record.”

Dozer was case manager on the Aircraft Mishap Board investigation into her crash. He was grumpy and had a curl on his forehead. He looked like a butcher. Dozer was hard to budge. Character consistency—the sunny team quipping that went well everywhere—made him sullen. He liked to sit in his car at lunch and eat chocolate frosting out of a can.

“How’s that fleabag?” Dozer was the only one who knew about Mary’s father. So he was the only one who asked.

“Locked up.”

“Parole not given,” Dozer said. “No chance at mercy.”

He was twenty years into a life sentence for first-degree murder. After school, Mary, age twelve and an only child, had found her mother facedown in the tub, floating in blood and bathwater. Her father, an F-4 Phantom pilot, was gone. The hunting knife he’d used was in the sink. Mary remembered it. She’d watched him skin game with it. The grip was indented, he’d often told her, so it wasn’t slippery when wet.

“They sent him back to Graterford,” Mary told Dozer. It was Pennsylvania’s largest maximum-security facility.

Dozer looked as if he’d been socked in the mouth. “Good,” he said, his lips messed. “Good,” he said again. He was looking down too, embarrassed, as if it were his father.