Myles told her to come on up after lunch. She left her house in Chestnut Hill at one, and was in Gloucester an hour and a half later. It was a dull November afternoon, a stagnant overcast veiling the sky and a flawed breeze blowing fitfully up the harbor, its surface ruffled in places, and in other places as slick as an oyster bar exposed at low tide. Main Street was sparsely trafficked, now that tourist season was over, and the wharves were crowded with idle draggers, raised outriggers resembling construction cranes, with long-liners and whale-watching boats tied up for the winter, humpbacks and fins having departed Stellwagen Bank weeks ago to breed in warmer seas. From Main, Sybil turned onto the road to Eastern Point, passing turreted mansions, and then saw Myles’s house, more modest than its neighbors but still substantial, its peeling window frames white against the weathered shingles’ brown, its dark green front door peeling also, and the brass knocker in the shape of an anchor, with the name BRAITHWAITE etched almost invisibly on the shank, tarnished to the color of old mustard.

Corinne answered—Corinne, more massive than ever, smiling as she always did, with her lips only. She raised her flour-dusted hands and arms as explanation and apology for not embracing Sybil, said, “The liberry,” and then returned to the kitchen, her ponderous hips switching under polyester pants stretched to their limit. Sybil hung her coat on the clothes tree in the entry hall and crossed the living room toward Myles’s study, almost tiptoeing so as not to disturb the dead stale immutable quiet of that house. If it hadn’t been for the grandfather clock, ticking in the hall, she would have thought that time itself had been suspended within those walls. The scent she remembered from her girlhood—of roses a day or two past their prime—still permeated the rooms; the same four-masted schooner stood becalmed on the mantelpiece, in air so static that the dust motes glimmering in the dim window light appeared frozen in space, like atoms at absolute zero, and the maroon Persian carpets she had walked on as a child lay under overstuffed chairs and heavy walnut tables occupying the very places they had thirty years ago, the impressions their round, clawed, or square feet had made in the fabric now worn almost through to the oak floors. To Sybil’s mind, the whole place, right down to the kitchen in which Corinne was baking, amid an antiquarium of obsolete appliances, possessed the haunted inertness of a period stage set left with every prop in place long after the play was over.