She smiled. Serenely. Indicating her plain robes, she said, “Suffering ends when craving ends,” like this was a message of incredible profundity instead of something her guru had probably cribbed from a Starbucks cup. “I was lost to myself in New York. Now I’ve come home. So what about you, Bettina? What is it you crave? How can you find your way home?”

“I’ve got a ticket on the five-thirty flight to LaGuardia,” I said. It wasn’t like I could tell her that home was forever lost to me, because home was the five of us, together, the way we used to be. Nor did I mention that, hoping against hope, I’d bought a ticket for her, too.

She rose easily to her feet and walked me to another fountain, this one outdoors, a verdigris-green bowl into which water trickled from a sculpted flower. We sat there in silence, smelling sage and some flowers I didn’t recognize. “Be well,” she said. I knew it was a dismissal. She kissed my cheek and glided off to her chores.

It wasn’t until I’d dropped off the rental car and was flying back to New York that I figured out what else I wanted: my father’s safety, his happiness, an assurance that he would not get his heart broken again. These were perfectly reasonable things to desire. Trey was too wrapped up in Violet’s new teeth and soiled diapers to care; Tommy was too busy chasing women who thought it was witty when a man sang a heavy-metal cover of “Sunny Came Home”; my mother had renounced the world entirely; which meant that I would have to keep my father safe. If I did that, maybe I could keep India’s bony, grasping hands off our money… and maybe I could have a chance at the thing I most missed and most wanted: my family back.

The Monday after my trip to New Mexico, I was down in the Crypt, wearing white cotton gloves, working with a Tensor lamp and a magnifying glass and tweezers to determine the value of an antique silver locket that was part of a new lot of jewelry. “These things are precious to me,” the woman who’d brought them in had said. “They were my mother’s.” I’d dug out a reference book, trying to determine the age of the locket and whether the chain was original to the piece, when Darren Zucker called.

“Just checking in,” he said. “How was your trip?”

“Fine,” I said automatically.

“I was wondering what you decided to do.” His voice was high, a little nasal, the voice of a Woody Allen wannabe for whom the whole world was a joke.

“Are you billing me for this?” I asked.

“You have a suspicious and untrusting nature. But I respect that. And no, this isn’t business. I was just curious. It’s how I wound up in this line of work — being curious. And I was thinking you might want someone to talk to. You know, do the Franklin list.”

“Pardon?”

“Ben Franklin. Draw a line down the middle of a piece of paper. List the pros and cons. We could have lunch.”

I closed my book and gently replaced the necklace in its box. Darren Zucker was not my ideal confidant, but he’d been a good sport about our trip to Hoboken, and besides, I did need to eat. There were no windows in the Crypt, but when I’d arrived that morning the weather had been a beautiful day, the sky deep blue, a light breeze stirring the treetops. September in New York City always felt, to me, like the year’s true beginning. It made me think of the last days of summer, loading up the station wagon in Bridgehampton for the ride back to the city. We’d stay in the Hamptons as long as we could, wringing every last minute out of August. My parents would throw a barbecue on Labor Day, inviting anyone who was left: the neighbors, our staff, their kids, the lifeguards who’d watched us swimming all summer long. We’d eat chicken and ribs, potato chips and thick slices of watermelon on paper plates. Games of tag and Marco Polo and hide and seek would form, break up, and re-form, and, as it got late, children would fall asleep all over the house, in beds, on couches, in nests of blankets and pillows on the floor.

As the night went on, the grown-ups would gather on the porch and the lawn, drinking vodka tonics or beers. On that night, instead of their usual jeans and chino shorts and tennis skirts, they’d get dressed up, the men in button-down shirts and jackets, and the women in Lilly Pulitzer skirts or sundresses that left their tanned arms and shoulders bare. Some of them still smoked back then, and I remembered looking at the lit cigarettes bobbing and darting like fireflies, music coming from a CD player plugged in on the porch, the sound of their laughter, and how I would think, This is how I want it to be when I grow up.

Darren and I met at the Shake Shack in Madison Square Park. Where else, I thought wearily, would a committed hipster take a girl for lunch? He’d already staked out a bench when I arrived and was waving at me, wearing his glasses, khakis, and a short-sleeved button-down shirt, checked blue-and-white, which looked like it had been swiped from some homeless man’s closet. I was in my usual office wear, an A-line black cotton skirt, a plum-colored boatneck sweater with three pearl buttons at each sleeve, low-heeled shoes, and a gold necklace. “Chocolate? Vanilla?” Darren asked, holding out two cups. “The line gets crazy, so I bought one of each.” He’d also gotten two cheeseburgers with everything and an order of fries.

He opened the paper sack, and we spread our lunch on our laps. Darren took a big bite of cheeseburger and sighed happily, the way a man with his mouth full of meat will, as I removed the lettuce and tomato from my own burger with my fingertips and set them aside before carefully peeling away the cheese.

“Oh, come on,” he said as I took a small bite. “Don’t tell me you’re one of those rabbit-food girls.”

I didn’t bother to respond. For years, I’d read those “Make the Most of Your Figure!” articles, the ones that told you how to dress if you were a pear or an hourglass or an inverted triangle, and I’d used all the tips they’d recommend to try to balance my narrow shoulders and flat chest with my wide hips and heavy thighs, but I wasn’t sure whether any of it did much good. Nor did dieting help. I’d done the rounds with that in high school, two weeks of grapefruit and hard-boiled eggs, a stint on Weight Watchers sophomore year and another on Jenny Craig when I was a junior. When I started college I’d tried a few of my roommate Vanessa’s diet pills, but all they did was give me a permanent headache and make my mouth feel like it was crammed full of cotton. Each time I’d lose ten or fifteen pounds, but it never changed my essential imbalance, the way that my body looked like one woman’s torso grafted onto another woman’s bottom.

“I think you look fine,” said Darren, eyeing me slowly, up and down. His ridiculous glasses bobbled on his cheeks as he raised his eyebrows. “Nice gams.”

I yanked at my skirt. “Nice gams? What are you, Raymond Chandler?”

“I am a detective,” he said, and poked a straw through the top of a waxed-paper cup, sucking down his chocolate shake with a noise that sounded like a clogged toilet finally managing a flush.

“I just like to eat things one at a time,” I explained.

He looked at my lap, where I’d arrayed the burger, the bun, the cheese, the lettuce, and the tomato, each in its own place on the white waxed paper. “Is that, like, a condition?”

“Habit.” I took another bite of the burger, holding it carefully with the pads of my fingertips.

He wolfed down his own lunch in half a dozen jaw-distending bites while I looked him over. He was a rangy guy with broad shoulders and thick legs, full lips and a cleft chin and a surprisingly dainty nose. Thick eyebrows, light eyes, pale skin, and an unlined brow that made him look boyish, like he didn’t have a care in the world as he reached into a battered canvas satchel at his feet and pulled out a legal pad and a pen. “Okay,” he said, writing PROS and CONS and dividing them with a line slashed down the center of the page. “I’ve got half an hour, but I bet we can solve this by then. Pro?”

“My father is living a lie,” I began. “His wife isn’t what she says she is, and he deserves to know that.”

“And you’re sure he doesn’t know?”

I nodded, because I was positive that if my father had any idea who India really was, he would never have married her. Almost positive. If he had some kind of ridiculous knight-on-a-white-horse fantasy. . but then I dismissed it. There was no way my father could have known what I knew about India and married her anyhow, let alone agreed to have a child with her.

“More pros?” he asked.

“Maybe if he knew the truth, they’d get divorced. Or the marriage would be annulled,” I said, thinking out loud. “Maybe my mother would come to her senses.” I said it—putting it out there, as Vanessa, who was a big fan of putting things out there, used to say — even though I knew it was unlikely.

“Is your mom still in the city?” Darren asked.

I shook my head. “She’s. .” This was painful to admit, but Darren was basically a stranger, a stranger who’d been on my payroll, which meant that he was obligated to keep my secrets. Besides, it wasn’t as if we had friends in common. There was no one he could gossip to who’d be interested. “She’s in New Mexico. In an ashram.”

“An ashram?” he repeated. “Whoa. Did she read Eat, Pray, Love?”

“She said she wanted to live authentically.” The last word came out more scornfully than I’d intended. I looked around to see who might have heard, but the other people in the park seemed focused on their food, or on one another.

Darren raised his eyebrows. “You don’t approve?”

I shrugged, feeling foolish, nibbling at a lettuce leaf to buy time. “She sends me pictures of herself in the sweat lodge.”