I ran my hand along the mahogany banister I had polished ten thousand times.

I stood in the great kitchen where an old man had once pulled up a stool and sat with me in my grief for a silent hour.

And at last I came to the main library, and I stood before the grand mahogany desk where Mr.

Christopher used to sit every afternoon, working through his papers in the gray light, and where his son had, three days before, slid four hundred dollars across the polished wood at me and told me to hand over my keys.

I reached into my bag, and I took out the framed photograph — the one of the three of us in the orchard, Mr.

Christopher and me and Lucas as a baby, all of us laughing and squinting in the summer sun.