“South Carolina,” Duran told her.

“Turn left.”

About forty-five minutes later, they drove through Denton, Delaware, detouring past the house that Adrienne said she and Nikki had lived in. It was a tidy brick rancher, with a vinyl carport, and a mailbox painted with morning glory vines. In the front yard were a pair of trees whose rounded crowns had been gutted to accommodate a power line.

Half an hour later, they were on the outskirts of Bethany Beach, the horizon pink with dawn. Duran could feel the excitement mounting within him. Once he saw the beach house—once he actually stood before it—the past would be his again. And undeniably so. He could show it to Adrienne—the white rocks and outdoor shower, the little garden. Even if the place had changed, it would still be the same. He was sure of it.

Soon, he was announcing their arrival. “Coming up—the Bethany Beach totem pole!” A minute later, they rounded a curve and there it was, the towering kitsch emblem that marked the intersection of Main St. and Highway 1-A. As they drove closer, he could make out the elongated face of the Indian carved into the wood. It was like seeing an old friend. He remembered, with sharp nostalgia, arriving at this intersection as a boy, how he and his father shared a ritual, filling the car with war whoops.

“When’s the last time you were here?” Adrienne asked.

He thought about this, but… “I don’t know. I was just a kid.”

When the street dead-ended at the steps to the boardwalk, he turned left onto a road that ran parallel to the beach.

“Were you thinking we could stay here?” Adrienne asked. “I mean, if you can’t remember the last time you went to the cottage, it’s not like it’s still in your family, is it?”

She was right, of course, but he didn’t know what to say—and that was strange, even to him. He’d never given a thought to the cottage. Was it still his? Was it ever his? It ought to be, but he couldn’t say for sure. The question had never come up. But now that he thought about it: no, he hadn’t been here since his parents died. His only memories of the place were childhood memories. Yahtzee and Boggle, Monopoly, and playing in the waves.

But all that would resolve itself, Duran thought, as soon as he saw the place.

Some of the houses they passed were modern and built on stilts to protect them from hurricanes. These tended to be much bigger than the old cottages, with elaborate multilevel decks. Fabric flags—lighthouses, crabs, sunflowers, ghosts—snapped in the breeze. The new houses were unfamiliar to him but everything else was just as he remembered it, right down to the realtors’ signs beside every other driveway. For Rent: Anna Liotta, Hickman Realtors. For Rent: Connor Realty Co. Same old firms. They would rent out the beach houses on a weekly basis all summer long—when the families who owned them were not in residence. He tried to remember if his own family had stayed at the beach all through the summer, but he couldn’t.

“Well?” Adrienne asked.

“What?”

“I asked you—”

“I don’t know,” he told her in a distracted voice. “I don’t know what happened to Beach Haven after my parents died.”

“But you should—”

“I just want to see it,” he insisted. “And anyway—it’s right around the corner.” Turning left onto Third Avenue, he recited the numbers: “One-thirteen. One-eleven. It’s the fifth house, on the left. Right… there.”

It was an old cottage, a little shabby. The sign that hung from the post beside the walkway trembled in the wind.

He stepped from the car, and stared. Adrienne got out, and came around to his side. The air was fresh with the smell of the sea, and they could hear the ocean’s susurrating boom, just a block away. “They changed the name,” Adrienne observed. “So that answers one question. Someone named Gill bought the place.”

Duran shook his head. “This isn’t it.”

“What?”

He put his hand on his forehead, and closed his eyes, recalling the things that just weren’t there: the wraparound porch and wide wooden steps to the front door, the dormered windows on the second floor. He tried to understand how the house in his head could have been changed—remodeled—to resemble the one in front of him: a narrow frame structure with two steps up to the door, no porch, no dormers. No hydrangeas, either, and no white rocks to hide a key.

“This isn’t it,” he repeated.

At Adrienne’s suggestion, they drove up and down the streets of Old Bethany for nearly an hour. Maybe he’d gotten the address wrong. Maybe it had been torn down. Maybe. But try as he did to superimpose the house in his memory on the landscape before him, it didn’t work. Beach Haven was a figment.

“God,” Adrienne said when they stopped for coffee and she took a good look at the crumpled mess that was the rear of the Stratus. “I’m in for it with Budget.” A little laugh escaped her. “Of course, at fifteen bucks a day, I waived the collision coverage.”

“I’ll pay you back.”

She shook her head. “Forget it. My credit card will cover it. It’s just—there’s going to be a ton of paperwork.”

Going inside the Dream Cafe, they found themselves the target of half a dozen stares. “My God, what happened to you?” the waitress asked, seeing the matted blood behind Adrienne’s ear.

“I hit my head,” she replied, and got up to go to the ladies’ room.

While she was away, Duran sat, brooding over his latte. He knew, now, that something was terribly out of whack—that he wasn’t who he seemed to be, that his memories weren’t his own. Not the long-term memories, at least.

But last night was real—of that he was sure. He was sure because he hurt in so many places. His ribs ached, and his tongue was cut in a way that made it painful to speak. And not only that: his imagination wasn’t up to inventing the sound he kept hearing, the crack of his assailant’s neck as Duran drove his foot into the man’s chin.

The noise was eidetic, like the pain that he felt, and like the pain, it wouldn’t go away. So that was real.

But Sidwell? Had he gone to Sidwell—or just to the reunion? Because he’d certainly been to the reunion—he could hear the polite hellos, see Adam Bowman peering at his name tag. He’d remembered the school, but had the school remembered him? Not really.

“I used every, single paper towel,” Adrienne told him as she sat down, hair wet, but free from gore.

“You ought to see a doctor,” Duran told her. “You took a bad knock.”

She shook her head. “I’m okay. I just need a scarf.”

At Hickman Realtors—this was another of Adrienne’s ideas—they asked about a house called Beach Haven, owned by a family named Duran. The agent, Trish, said she’d grown up in Bethany, and thought she knew everyone—but she didn’t remember the Durans, and she was certain there wasn’t a house called Beach Haven.

“I don’t think so,” she told them. “But I’m not infallible.” She offered to look in the computer. “Even if Connor or one of the other firms handled the place, it’ll be in here,” she said, tapping the keys.

But it wasn’t.

“What about another place?” she asked. “Pretty good pickings this time of year. Low rates. Get you a deal!?”

Duran began to stand up, when Adrienne surprised him. “Sure,” she said, tossing a glance at Duran. “Nothing too big or expensive—so long as it’s got a working phone.”

Trish tapped the keyboard, manipulated the mouse, and studied the possibilities. “I can put you a block from the beach… two bedrooms with cable.”

“How much?” Adrienne asked.

“Three-fifty a week.”

Duran sat in his chair, barely listening, as Adrienne finalized the arrangements. Though his face was impassive, and his body still, he might as well have been hanging from a cliff. It seemed to him that the more he found out about himself, the less he knew. The more he looked, the less there was. And now, seated in a real estate office in the imaginary playground of his fictional childhood, it seemed to him as if his whole perspective—his stance toward the world and himself—was sliding toward a vanishing point from which there was no return, or no return that he could imagine.