Desmond was crunching the sour ball between his teeth, leafing through his notes. It would have been equally annoying but not nearly as humiliating if Jane hadn’t been here to listen to all these contradictions. He found the page he was looking for and scanned it quickly. “You told me,” he said, “that you were here when she died, that you went to the burial. ‘We had a good long cry at the grave site.’ That’s a direct quote.”

“Well sure, we went to the grave site. We went that summer. I can’t guarantee about the tears.”

“I definitely cried,” Mrs. Walsh said. “I cry about everything. Are you sure you don’t want a little drink to wash down that candy, Davie?”

“Now that you mention it, a drink might be nice. Jane?”

“I could use a splash of something.”

3.

When Chloe complained that the sun had started to shine into the lens of the video camera and that they’d have to rearrange the lights, Jane and Desmond went out to the backyard to get some air. It felt more humid than it had earlier in the day, as if yet another spell of summer weather was blowing in, even though it was the third week in October. Jane hated it. There were about seven days in the year when the temperature was tolerable now. There had been at least four weather disasters described as “the storm of the century” in the past six months alone. Jane took a pack of cigarettes out of the pocket of her skirt.

“I didn’t know you smoke,” Desmond said.

“No, neither did I. Anyway, I don’t. Not really. I hate the smell of cigarettes and the taste of them and what they do to you, but I love the matches.” It was true. She pulled out a small, green box of Rosebud wooden matches, slid it open and struck one. She loved the bright flare of light and heat. She shook out the match and put its ashy remains back in the box. She’d sneaked a cigarette from Caroline’s pack in New Hampshire, smoked it outside in the cool night air, and now she was up to three or four a day. Just what she deserved, punishment for her bad behavior, although a complicated kind of punishment, since she enjoyed the compact drama of lighting up and inhaling until the little cylinder of tobacco was used up and gone.