"And all," Frederick agreed absently.

The day after Christmas, Crystal and Amber were to fly back East. Their Palm Springs home-sitting was over, the house on the golf course reclaimed.

"Like two Gypsies, you girls," Rosalyn said with envy. "Or two birds, migrating here and there. Always on the wing."

Annie entertained the unworthy thought of an albatross. Didn't they stay aloft for a year at a time? Among other things.

They were returning to an earlier home-sitting location: the house on Cape Cod. "We feel so at home there," Amber said. She glanced at Annie. "It's such a beautiful old house."

"A little too old if you ask me," Crystal added with a snigger.

"But no one did ask you, did they, Crystal?"

Nor me, Annie thought as she waved goodbye to the two young women. The yellow golf cart trolled off among the verdant golf hills, its fringe giving a jaunty shake in the desert breeze.

"My new home," Amber whispered to Crystal as they drove their rental car up the driveway. "Summer home, I should say. No way I'm living here all year around."

Felicity was the first to hear the car.

"Who's that, I wonder." She drew aside the curtain.

"Oh," Frederick said as nonchalantly as he could, "some friends. Coming to stay for a few days. The girls who sometimes house-sit for me."

"Your house sitters?" Evan said. "At Christmas?"

"When we're all here?" Gwen said.

"Well," said Frederick, "I wanted you to meet them."

Evan and Gwen looked at each other.

"Are you trying to fix me up or something, Dad?" Evan said. "Because, really, I can find my own girls, and I mean, your loser house sitters?"

"No, Evan, I am not trying to fix you up, believe me."

"It's so nice to meet you," Amber said when Frederick introduced the sisters to his children. "Freddie talks about you all the time."

"Freddie?" said Evan.

"She means your father," Crystal explained confidentially.

Frederick said, "Never mind, never mind. Here's my sister, Felicity. And this is her friend Joe."

"Freddie?" Evan was saying in astonishment to his sister.

The sisters moved into the attic bedroom and, they pointed out, would make themselves at home, no one needed to bother about them, since the house was practically their home; after all, they had spent so much time home-sitting in it.

Amber knew she had a high hill to climb, and she knew, too, that the going would be tough. She squared her pretty shoulders. Might as well get started at once. She had exaggerated only slightly to Annie: there had definitely been talk of marriage, or at least living together. But it was clear to her that she would have to neutralize Gwen and Evan first.

"What a great home," she said to Gwen. "So much history. I found a picture of it from, like, over a hundred years ago. On the Internet. It took me weeks, but... Here."

She had actually called the town museum and talked to an archivist who e-mailed it to her a few days before. She handed Gwen the copy she had printed out on thick matte photographic paper.

Gwen looked pleased in spite of herself. "Thanks." She examined the photo. "I've never seen this one. It looks so bare, doesn't it?"

"Your family obviously did a lot with the grounds."

Gwen nodded. "The rosebushes."

"Heirlooms." Then feeling a little more comfortable, Amber said, "Speaking of heirlooms, did your dad ever get that bathtub drain fixed? I reminded him about it a thousand times. That dad of yours, head in the clouds, right? Artists, right?"

Gwen looked at her blankly.

Amber, sensing she had gone too far too fast, tried to shift into reverse. "Such a beautiful old tub. With those claws? I brought some new bath salts. Perfect for that luxurious antique tub. I got them on a professional massage-therapy website. They're organic. They even have hemp in them." She bent down and unzipped her bag, pulling out a jar. "Would you like to try them?"

"No," Gwen said, her voice cold again. "I have no interest in hemp, thank you very much."

"I do," Evan said. "Just not in my bath."

"Oh yeah?" Crystal said. "Well, I have some really good weed..."

And so it was Crystal, not Amber, who chiseled the first real social chink in the Barrow family wall. Amber felt the victory had practically been handed to Crystal on a silver platter, and that it wasn't such a very big victory anyway, and she watched with a mixture of pique and gratification as Crystal and Evan retired to the back porch.

16

The winter blew through Westport, hard and fast, as if it were a season in a hurry, ready to get the whole messy business over with and move on. There was just one big snowstorm, which dissolved in the bright yellow sun of the following morning, and one ice storm that brought with it a townwide loss of power as branches fell to the ground, hundreds of them, sheathed in frozen rain, heavy and ornate as French mirrors. Some gray skies hovered, some wind blew through, a fair amount of rain fell. And then, suddenly, in February, deep blue heavens and gentle breezes and mud.

When the Weissmanns returned from Palm Springs at the beginning of January, the snow had just come and gone and the ground was oozing. Betty decided to take up online poker in an attempt to supplement the family income. Annie and Miranda had forgiven if not forgotten what each had said to the other and were on precariously good terms, but Annie tried to spend as much time as possible at the library. Even there, however, she felt the need to escape. When she could no longer stand the part of her job that required her to speak to board members and ask bibliophilic rich people for money, she would retreat to the library's attic and putter. She told the staff she was looking for artifacts, and she did discover a discolored letter from George Washington in a frame with cracked glass, as well as the first volume of the two-volume first American edition of Sense and Sensibility. But the main reason she dug through piles of broken chairs and abandoned space heaters was to be alone. It had become an aching, physical need. The beach in Westport, where once she had felt so free, now seemed to her to be teeming with the presence of other human beings: they were behind her in their houses, they were across Long Island Sound in other houses, they were a mile away on I-95, whizzing past her in cars. They flew above her, back and forth, in planes in the sky. They were even buried beneath her, or close enough, deep and silent, in the earth. Wherever she went, they followed. They spoke to her on telephones and wrote to her on computers. They sang from radios and hailed cabs and demanded she hold the elevator. It was not their fault, of course, they were only doing what people were meant to do, yet she found herself despising them.

But in the attic, there were just the things people had discarded, not the people themselves. A bulky electric typewriter. A framed diploma from Barnard College for Mildred Peacock Winship, 1927. Engravings, photographs — it was like picking up seashells. She was alone, blissfully alone. Who was Mildred Peacock Winship? Perhaps she had been a devoted member of the library's staff, a middle-aged unmarried person who typed and filed, collected her meager paycheck, and went home to a big frame house in the Bronx to make supper for her aging parents. Perhaps she was a trustee who had bequeathed to the library thousands of dollars as well as her treasured editions of Emerson and Hawthorne. Annie thought vaguely that she should find out. At the same time, she blessed Mildred Peacock Winship, for, whoever she had been and whatever she had done, she was now, blissfully, absent.

The attic was safe. It was quiet and remote. Like me, Annie thought. She was walking to the subway after a particularly tiring board meeting.

"Aren't you just so bwack and bwown?" a woman cooed to a dog tied to a parking meter.

When Annie emerged in Grand Central, a homeless man holding a battered coffee cup said, "Hello there, beautiful lady," and she was wondering whether to smile politely without making eye contact or just hurry past, when she realized he was talking to the woman behind her. On the train, she walked through the first couple of cars looking for a seat facing forward. She spotted a likely prospect — the back of a single well-groomed female head sticking up from the three-person bench — but when she got up to the female head and was about to heave her bag onto the middle seat, she saw it was occupied by a small child.

There was an awkward moment when, even as she drew back her bag, determined to avoid what could only be a very loud and very dull young companion on an evening when she wanted peace and solitude, she caught the mother's eye and wondered if she had already somehow committed herself to join the duo and if it would now be insulting to this doubtless doting parent to continue on her way. But even as she quickly and decisively decided in favor of insult over boredom and annoyance, the child in question spoke.

"Annie!"

And she looked down at the boy, focused, and recognized Henry.

Annie put out her arms, and Henry jumped to his feet and, standing unsteadily on his seat, gave her a hug. She saw the mother's face over his head. Henry's mother. It was instantly and unquestionably apparent. Not just the full cheeks or the set of the eyes. But that look, that proprietary mother look. "Oh, you must be Henry's mother," Annie said quickly, holding a hand out. "I'm Annie Weissmann. A friend from Westport."