Sylvia hesitated. Ted had turned immediately around and run after Rose toward the cottage. Frieda was methodically gathering and eating the bits of cheese and raisins Sylvia had scattered over a plate to distract her. Nicky was still asleep. She had a sudden vision of Percy in his windbreaker at the foot of the Roman mound as she’d seen him a few days before, coughing thickly into his handkerchief, the elm crusty-barked and stiff next to him, drooping its clusters of callow chartreuse leaves, blood-spotted at their centers, rustling like sistrums. There was a battalion of several thousand slender, green-stalked narcissi at Percy’s feet, their white heads pinging and bouncing in the fine sea-spray drizzle. She imagined him abruptly as an angel, ascending to the churning heavens from the mound, his feet and face and jacket blue, the starry narcissi bowing and waving good-bye, blinking their tiny gold eyes.

But it wasn’t going to be like that, and Sylvia knew it. The pull was irresistible. She ran coatless out the door, banging through the back gate. Ted was already on the phone to the doctor in the dim cottage. Sylvia stood behind Rose at the doorway and gaped. Percy was jittering in front of his television as if electrocuted. It was terrifying, priceless material: it was like observing her first electric shock therapy from a casual distance. Had the point been to shake her back into life? That’s not what it had felt like. It felt like an execution. As she watched, Percy had already begun his retreat. He had become an awaited death, diminished, not a person. The trail had forked.

Last night she still stood listening at her back door, wiping out pans and eavesdropping on the unseeable comings and goings at the Keyses. The somber, purposeful knocking, the click of the doorjamb, whispers, footsteps slow and even down the lane. The rector? The doctor? Looming over her the moon, a day from full, was snagged in the elm despite the wind’s effort to blow it free. Sylvia stood in its glare and watched it hang, tugging at the branches.