“And she wore it ballooning with you,” Dani said.

“That’s right. She had it with her when we landed. Our trip took longer than she’d anticipated. We got a ride to the Pembroke estate, and I offered to drive her back to North Broadway, but she insisted on walking. She was already late. Why fret about a few more minutes?” Mattie’s voice cracked, and she had to fight off tears herself. It wasn’t easy. “I never saw her again.”

Dani’s hands, she noticed, were twisted together, shaking. Beside her on the couch, Zeke impassively sipped his iced lemonade. Yet Mattie sensed his anguish.

She forced herself to continue. “Before I realized she’d disappeared, I felt quite smug. I’d thought Lilli needed to give her father a good jolt, remind her family not to take her for granted. I remember every detail of that night. I took a bath and put on baggy jeans and one of Nick’s old sweaters-it came to my knees. It was cool, and I lit a fire.” She sighed. “Then Joe knocked on my door.”

“What time was that?” Dani asked.

Still no eye contact, Mattie said, “Around ten o’clock.”

“We’d decided to leave Saratoga,” Zeke added.

“Why?”

“Because Joe said so.”

Mattie shot him a look, sensing there was more. Her heart pounded. Did Zeke know something she didn’t? But he didn’t continue, and she had to get this next part done. “I knew he’d come to tell me why he’d traveled a thousand miles to see me. There had to be a reason.” She shut her eyes, feeling the tears hot against her lids. “He told me my father was dying of cancer. He’d been to see Doc Hiram-I knew him when he was a little boy-and he said the cancer was all through him. So I asked Joe-” Her voice broke, and she didn’t think she’d be able to go on.

Zeke placed his hand over hers. He didn’t squeeze or pat, just left it there. “You asked Joe if your father had sent him.”

She nodded, blinking back tears. She hadn’t cried because of her father in years. Decades. Even before she’d left Cedar Springs, she hadn’t permitted him to make her cry. “He hadn’t. He was an old man and dying, and still as far as he was concerned, I had never been his daughter. It wasn’t even as if I’d died at eighteen. It was as if I’d never lived at all. I was a stranger to him.”

“Your sister sent him?” Dani asked. Her voice was carefully controlled. She hadn’t moved. If she did, Mattie thought, she’d shoot up like a too tightly coiled spring.

“No. No, Naomi didn’t send him. It was Joe’s idea to come. He said he owed Naomi because she’d been a friend to him and Zeke, encouraged Zeke in his studies. He-Joe said his brother wanted to become a doctor.”

Dani’s eyes met Zeke’s, just for an instant. Then they were back on the fireplace.

“Naomi had my address here in New York,” Mattie said. But she didn’t care to explain the rest, how she’d tried through the years to get her sister to join her, first in California, then in New York. Her letters home were returned unopened, presumably but not necessarily by their father, and then Mattie heard her sister had married Wesley Hazen, a vice president at the mill, and finally gave up. A few years later Nick went to Tennessee, and he and Naomi had had their affair, and Mattie had tried one more letter. Naomi had sent back a postcard. You can relax now, Mattie, she’d written. I’m free.

“She told Zeke he was wasting his time because I’d never return to Cedar Springs.” The tears had vanished, and Mattie sniffled, removing her hand from under Zeke’s. She went on in a strong, clear voice. “She was right. As I stood there talking to Joe, I knew that if I didn’t go home soon, I’d never see my father again. That chance would be gone forever. At first I didn’t know what to do. For years when I’d think of home, it seemed as if nothing should have changed since I’d left. If I went back, I’d still be eighteen, Naomi would be eleven, and our father would still be strong and unyielding. But he was dying, and I knew I’d never be able to step back into Cedar Springs-into my childhood-as it had been. Everything had changed after all. Time hadn’t stopped. I’d left home at eighteen and had never gone back.”

Dani, she saw, was staring at her with her wide, black eyes as if seeing her for the first time.

Mattie didn’t have it in her heart to feel guilty. “I thought leaving home would make everything perfect, and of course it didn’t. But it made living possible.”

She paused, again aware of the silence. Even in the distance-and here they were in the city-she couldn’t hear the wail of a siren or the honking of cabs.

“I know I must sound heartless-I don’t expect anyone to understand. But Cedar Springs is quicksand for me. If I’d gone back to see my dying father, I’d never have extricated myself again. I’d have suffocated. So I told Joe to say hello to Naomi for me, to tell her I’d missed her. And I told him to tell my father-if he’d listen-that I’d never judged him. That I’d always loved him in my own way. And I did. And do.” She didn’t know if Dani or even if Zeke beside her heard her last words. She added, “I wrote and I tried to call, but the letters were returned and he refused to take my calls.”

“Joe wanted to make things right between you and your father and Naomi,” Zeke said. “He just couldn’t understand what had gone wrong and stayed wrong between you. It didn’t make any sense to him that a father would disown two daughters. Do you wish we’d never come?”

She shook her head. “No. Never. Joe wrote to me after he enlisted. He sent me a copy of my father’s obituary-and the photograph of Lilli and me in the balloon.” It was her turn to touch Zeke’s hand. “I came to care about him a great deal. I’m sorry about what happened to him.”

Zeke nodded but said nothing.

Dani jumped to her feet, almost didn’t land before she started to pace. “So you know about Quint Skinner’s book?”

“I read it in one sitting at the New York Public Library when it came out. I refused to have such a book in my house.”

“Did you believe what it said about Joe?”

“It doesn’t matter what I or anyone else believes. It only matters what Joe was. To me, he was a friend.”

But that answer didn’t satisfy Dani, and she continued to pace, her arms crossed tightly over her chest. Zeke stretched out his long legs, watching her without comment. Her volatility didn’t seem to bother him in the least.

“And until this week I’d never even heard of him.”

Mattie leaned back against the soft cushions of the couch. “Darling, I was in my forties when you were born,” she said, hearing the rhythms of her southern upbringing in her voice. “In my fifties when Lilli disappeared and Joe was killed. I’m eighty-two now. I’ve had many years to develop the habit of not talking about certain parts of my life. I don’t like to think of myself as keeping secrets, but simply as keeping my silence.”

“Maybe,” Dani said, “if you’d told someone about Joe Cutler twenty-five years ago, before he was killed-” But she stopped herself. “I’m going to do everything I can to get to the bottom of whatever’s going on. I don’t run away from my problems.”

Mattie was stung by her granddaughter’s anger, but she understood it. She said quietly, “Be glad you’ve never faced a problem that left you no choice but to run.”

Without replying, Dani banged out of her grandmother’s town house.

Zeke stayed put. “Are you all right?” he asked.

Mattie nodded. “I knew I’d have to face this day at some point. It’s better off behind us.”

“You told her everything you know?”

“Yes.” She studied him, sitting so stolidly beside her in the cool, dim room. “But there’s more, isn’t there?”

He was on his feet.

“Zeke-”

Stopping in the doorway, he turned to her. “I’m also used to keeping my silence. You’ll be okay here?”

“I always have been.”

She let him go to her granddaughter, which, she thought, was as it should be.