It pissed me off that my father gave me so little notice and clearly assumed I would drop everything to stroll along the beach with him. My husband, who was now a psychologist, encouraged me to see him. “He’s getting old, Eve,” he said. “You’ll regret it if this is your only chance.”

His email signature listed a website — The Mists of Avalon — and I clicked through on the link to prepare myself for our meeting. He’d started the site, no doubt with great excitement, but now it seemed rudimentary and out of date. There was a photo of him by a birch tree looking exactly as I remembered, with long blond hair and a tie-dye T-shirt with a black peace sign. And of course, his crow tattoo on his muscled arm. It was a photo from a long time ago, from when I was a young girl.

We met at Jericho Beach. I didn’t recognize him until I heard someone calling my name. My father was balding. It happens to lots of men so I should have expected it. Why I thought he was going to look like that old photo I’m not sure. I guess he’d remained the same in my mind and heart, where time moved at a different pace. My father was very thin. He wasn’t tall anymore. He stooped, in the way that happens to us all. His skin was blotchy and jaundiced but he still strode along with that little smile on his face, as though he knew something no one else did, as though he possessed an important piece of information, the secret, which would bring us all together, which would unite us with the natural world, with ourselves. He had swapped out his driftwood talisman for a piece of jade on a sterling-silver chain.

He gave me a big hug, as though we had been close all through these long years. I couldn’t help but stiffen. He didn’t seem to notice, or if he did, he didn’t let on. But I took a step back and he didn’t try to hug me again. We sat on a bench and he gave me space. He wanted to see pictures of his grandchildren. I dug through my purse. He smiled when I said he could keep the photographs.

I asked Ocean what he was up to these days. I didn’t mention The Mists. He was developing an algorithm, he said, a computer program, which would help him with currency trading, and he was going to make a fortune. Ocean wanted me to invest. He’d raised me right, he said. I was such a successful businesswoman.

“That sounds like a pyramid scheme, what you’re describing.”

He told me about the Rosicrucians, how they knew ancient secrets. Math was a language of the mystics.

We stood up and walked slowly along the beach. I asked if he knew how Wildflower was.

She was still at The Mists. She had her own house, another tall, slim house with four floors and a telescope on the top. She did the bookkeeping for The Mists and worked as an office manager in town as well. Sometimes men lived with her in the summer, but she mostly kept to herself. She had a child who was grown now, who came to visit. But she still believed in The Mists, the potential, the energy connected to its latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates. They had studied Al-Khwārizmī’s medieval Book of the Description of the Earth. Surely I understood all this, being an expert in this field?