“Sorry, Mother. Something came up.”

“Is that all you can say? Then please … explain why you weren’t there to say good-bye to the guests.”

“Sit down, Mother.”

“I don’t want to sit down. I’ve been sitting down since ten waiting for you to come home. I sent Pierce to find you. I thought … I thought—”

Rowan interrupted her sharply. “Stop.” He held out his hands toward her. “Please. There’s something I need to tell you.” Rowan sat and took the glass in his hand. “I think I’m going to need your help.”

It was the thing she was most hoping to hear. She sat down beside him and took hold of his hands. “There’s a meeting every other night in the community center.”

“No.”

“Rowan, dear, come on. It’s the only way. One day at a time.”

He paused. “It’s not what you think.” He withdrew his hands.

“Don’t be dismissive. That’s the thing I hated most about your father!”

Rowan looked at her. That hurt. He rocked his head side to side in sadness. His eyes watered, and he gulped to stop himself from crying. It seemed they sat a long time, neither of them speaking, Louise opening and closing her mouth forming words she didn’t speak. Louise got up from the table and walked to the sink. To the refrigerator. Back to the table and sat. Rowan didn’t see Pierce, but he’d heard the screen door open and knew his brother stood in the hallway, waiting.

Finally Louise said, “Tell me! What’s happened?”

The look on Rowan’s face startled her. “Oh God,” she said. “What have you done?”

“Mother—”

“Tell me!”

“Calm down, please.”

Pierce came up behind Rowan and put a hand on his shoulder and shook him gently. “Hey, buddy. It’s going to be all right.” He left his hand there and, after waiting a few moments, in case Rowan would explain to their mother, Pierce turned to Louise. “You might be a grandmother after all.”

Louise’s eyes quivered. Stunned, mouth fully agape, she looked first to Pierce, then to Rowan. Fluorescent light showed the full weariness of her face. “I don’t understand.”

“It’s late. It’s been a full-on day,” said Pierce.

“Hilary?” she said softly, her voice waning like light rain falling.

Pierce went to his mother and bent to kiss the side of her face, which was turned to Rowan with tears in her eyes. “And enough’s been said for the time being, I think. Rowan will tell us all about it in the morning.” Pierce’s commanding voice quieted them and in a way gave them permission to be silent. No more talking was necessary, his look told his mother. “You need to sleep. And so does Rowan. Nothing can be achieved tonight.”

It was as if all at once in the silence of the bright kitchen all three received, individually, a kind of blessing from Burdy. The urn with his ashes, bathed in a kind of blue aura, seemed to radiate. It was like a key turning the plot of a life, Rowan thought. He went to his mother then to assist her to stand. Despite the occasion and the enormity of the disclosure, Rowan somehow now managed a smile, albeit weak. His wasn’t a tortured face any longer, just drained and tired. With his help Louise stood and she took hold of him, and for the first time in a long time Rowan let himself be held.

*   *   *

In the morning Louise went out early and came back with a box of pastries, and over coffee in the kitchen her sons puzzled together the scant information they had. “If Hilary really had a child,” she said, “her parents would know.”

“Maybe. Maybe not,” Pierce said.

“But if they knew, why wouldn’t they have told me?” Rowan fidgeted with his coffee spoon.

Pierce said he remembered attending her funeral. “What? Twenty years ago?”

“Seventeen. She died on February 15, 1992.”

It had been a cold February day when a snowstorm threatened to disable the service. Louise remembered Hilary’s grief-stricken father, Jack, and the seething anger that was clearly directed at her son. Rowan had been forced to consider that Mr. Barrett’s anger was in some way justified. He’d broken the engagement rather unchivalrously. He’d been too young. They’d both been too young. In the years since there had been no further contact, but every February 15, in that place inside him where he had left his love for her and where once the world had been full of the possibility of marriage and children and happy ever after, Rowan thought of her. And as the years went on, he knew he had made a mistake.

He’d met Hilary at a house party of a mutual friend, Scott, somewhere off Harvard Square. Scott played electric guitar and Rowan played tenor sax in a jazz ensemble. Scott and Hilary were in their senior year at college in Boston and Rowan was completing his MLA nearby in Cambridge.

She was tall with shoulder-length brown hair. She wore a sheepskin jacket that cold night, and a blue-jean skirt with frayed edges she’d fashioned herself, and lace-up boots with black tights. She’d come to the party on her own because Scott told her there was this guy he really wanted her to meet. She moved on the edge of the party with a kind of confidence that showed she was comfortable in herself, and even proud, and she spoke with Scott without needing to look around the room for the person he’d proposed for her to meet. When Scott finally brought them together he’d said, “You two have a destiny. I can feel it.”

Rowan had found out much about Hilary that first night. She came from the same part of New York State. It was this that got them talking so easily. They talked about places they visited in Westchester and found they had a mutual partiality for the old Bedford Village Playhouse and an Italian restaurant called Nino’s. They agreed right then and there that the next time they were both “home” they’d catch a film and dinner. Maybe Scott was right. Maybe they had a destiny.

Hilary lived in Brighton in a studio apartment. She cycled everywhere, she’d said. And she loved Bonnie Raitt and Bruce Springsteen and an Irish singer called Elvis Costello. Half a dozen silver bracelets on her arm made a kind of music, like cymbals proclaiming the arrival of royalty, Rowan had mused, every time she moved. He liked that she wore mismatched earrings, and liked the color green, and Irish poetry, and that she hoped to do a master’s degree in Ireland at Trinity College in September. Rowan told her about Burdy and his own Irish connection.

He remembered that in the dark, crowded room of the kitchen when someone had dimmed the lights he’d kissed her suddenly and said he wanted to take her back to his place. If Rowan closed his eyes, even now, there she was, waving good-bye to him as she went down into the station at Harvard Square to catch the T back to Brighton. She hadn’t accepted his invitation to spend that first night together.

*   *   *

Now, twenty years later, midmorning, Rowan was driving down the Saw Mill River Parkway. Louise had checked the phonebook—the Barretts still lived at 57 Cedar Lane—twenty minutes away. Mother and brother had wanted to go with him.

“Moral support, brother?”

“Pierce, thanks,” said Rowan. “I need to do this on my own, though.”

A heat wave was folding in over the whole of the northeastern coast, from the Jersey Shore to Boston, but Rowan turned off the air-conditioning and drove with the windows down. He needed a bit of reality. It was Sunday morning and traffic was light. He’d spent many hours up and down this highway traveling by car from the city to visit Burdy and his mother. Or he’d take the train that snaked along the river, a tributary of the Hudson that Burdy had once told him was known by the Native Americans as Nepperhan, meaning “rapid little stream.” He sometimes felt he belonged more to the landscape than to anything, to the richness of its place names and its flora and fauna.

Hilary had felt the same, and during one of their times together they’d taken a drive on the Taconic State Parkway up through the Hudson Valley to Chatham to spend the night in a country inn. He remembered telling her that the Taconic was as perfect an example of what was meant by a parkway as you could hope to find. A magnificent blend of highway engineering and landscape architecture. She’d let him ramble on about the designer, whom Rowan had studied at Harvard. “That’s the guy that designed the Unisphere,” he’d said. “You know the thing … the giant globe? You pass it on the way into Queens if you’re going to Long Island?”