That was the start of their lives together. It went on for years. A mistake, to go to the house. Linda wasn’t a hermit; hers was the sort of shyness that dissolved in a crowd. What she hated was to be seen in her own habitat, among her own things, the nest she’d built around her. Soon after that meeting she finally sold the house in Swampscott and rented a room from a colleague at the high school. Then she moved to Nahant. Then, once retired, to an apartment in Melrose, and finally to a studio in a converted elementary school in Waltham. Jack was invited to none of these places. Perhaps she was trying to throw him off her trail. He couldn’t even remember whose idea it had been, that disastrous first visit. Had he said, Why don’t you bring me home to meet your mother? Had Sadie said, Sure, no big deal, we’ll just go to the house, we’ll go to the place where my father died, and you’ll meet my mother, and we’ll all be happy?

Ever after, Jack worked on winning Linda over. Mostly he succeeded. He needed a role for those times. He was not her child: What was more grotesque than that American trampling of boundaries, calling your in-laws Mom and Dad, I haven’t lost a daughter, I’ve gained a son, that whiff of incest and separation at birth? Nor was he a replacement husband, a tinkerer, an offered elbow at the opera, Aren’t I lucky to have two such beautiful dates: that was just as disgusting. He wasn’t a friend, though he grew to love Linda Brody decorously—a business relationship, a fond one, a banker or butler. A trusted member of staff.

Of the three of them, only Sadie worked year-round, as an editor for a numismatic magazine (her father had been a coin collector, a biographical detail that had landed her the job). After grad school Jack had lucked into a visiting position at Boston University, then a permanent one. Summers he accompanied Linda to games at Fenway—for her sake, he’d affected an interest in baseball, which eventually became genuine, he would have thought lifelong but then the Red Sox broke his heart by becoming successful, not once but over and over. He learned the secret of Linda, perhaps of all in-laws, which was to fold his own personality in half, and quarters, and eighths, then tuck it into his pocket. He allowed himself to be lectured; he offered himself up as the brunt of jokes. The widow Brody. Baseball, museums, movies, but Sadie was what they had in common, though they did not speak of her. They both respected her privacy.