Double Eagle III was in the lead, though not by much. She was being challenged by another yawl, only a half-boat length behind, as the two vessels bore off on the downwind leg. Wade knew he would seal the victory if he could keep his opponent outside him at the downwind mark, then hook around it in the nautical equivalent of a hairpin turn. He fell off ever so cautiously to a dead run, his navigator warning him that the wind was fluky and that he was running the risk of an accidental jibe. “I know that!” Wade snapped, and the man kept quiet, for Wade was not only his skipper but his employer. Double Eagle III cracked toward the buoy, her green and white spinnaker ballooned out in front, Wade, alert for any shift in the wind, warning Jason to stand by the sheets and Hilary to be ready to douse the spinnaker. “Prepare to jibe!” he said, and as Hilary rose and scampered forward, the wind veered suddenly, with more force than Wade, or anyone, could have expected. The boat jibed a split second early, the heavy boom slammed over, struck Hilary in the back of the head with the power of a bat swung by a cleanup hitter, and knocked her overboard. She floated facedown in her life jacket, until Wade and his crew, acting with a competence and calm everyone later agreed was remarkable, doused the spinnaker, brought Double Eagle III around, and pulled Hilary out of the water. All attempts at resuscitation failed. The autopsy determined that the blow to her head had killed her almost instantly.

“I could be speaking about that,” Myles had replied. “It’s merely another way of urging Christian forgiveness.”

“I’ve tried to, but it’s hard. It’s hard even now, with him gone two years. And what’s just as hard to forgive is the way everyone just automatically covered it up and pretended he had nothing to do with it. But he did. It was his pride that killed her, as much as that freaky gust of wind.”

“Yes. Yes,” Myles had mumbled, and then, in the stentorian voice of homily and scripture: “There is nothing more corrupting of a family’s integrity than keeping secrets. And I don’t mean integrity in the sense of reputation. The family that conceals certain truths about itself, or denies those truths, or in some other way falsifies its history, is going to suffer consequences, but those won’t necessarily fall on the creators and bearers of the falsehoods, nor even on those who belong to the same generation as the creators, the bearers. They could just as easily fall on a future generation, at some unforeseen, unexpected hour, without making any fine distinctions.…”

“I’m not following. Do you mean that Hilary, what happened to her, that it was because of something someone did a long time ago?” Sybil had asked.