Brooklyn

In March she went to Brooklyn.

The Duvals had a floor of a brownstone on Seventh Street with a stoop and a radiator that knocked all night, and their three children, who were nine, seven and four, regarded a visitor from the country as a resource to be exploited without mercy. Nina Duval was Hollis's father's sister, a woman with a loud voice and a talent for feeding eight people out of a kitchen the size of a closet, and Ray Duval ran a small import business out of a warehouse in Red Hook, which meant that he went out at five in the morning and came back at seven with stories about shipping containers.

Hollis stayed three weeks, and for the first two of them nobody in that house asked her a single question about Ashford. In the palm house at the botanical garden the youngest put his hand flat on the glass until the print fogged over, and then moved it an inch and did it again, and Hollis watched him do it eleven times without once looking at a tree. At the matinee the middle one fell asleep with her mouth open against Hollis's arm, and Hollis let the whole second half go by rather than move. She read to the children out of a library book about a canal, and the eldest asked what a lock was, and Hollis drew one on the back of an envelope with a pencil, and it took forty minutes and neither of them noticed the time. She and Nina sat up until one in the morning twice, and on the second night Nina said, "You have lost weight and it is not the children."

"I have been walking."

"You have been thinking. Tell me about the young man with the trucks."

So Hollis told her about Julian Reyes, and about Sylvie on the kitchen floor, and about the letter with the postscript about the ball gown. She told her about Dex Cray and about the letter from the old Ashcroft and the ten-thousand-dollar check. And she told her about Roman Ashcroft, and she told it the way she had told it all winter, which was as a very funny story about a very rude man, and she did not say the part about the hand on the back of her neck.

Nina, who had been listening with her chin on her hand, said: "And where is this one?"

"Palm Beach. The city. The foundation."

"And where are you?"

"I am on your sofa."

"You are on my sofa because you are hurt, and you are hurt because you have decided the whole world is one thing, and it is not." Nina got up and put the kettle on. "Your Uncle Ray is taking us up to the Berkshires in June. Lenox. There is a house on the lake that belongs to a man he ships for, and we have it for two weeks, and you are coming, and Sylvie is coming if she will. There is an estate up there. Ironwood. The Ashcrofts'."

Hollis sat very still.

"Ironwood is closed," she said. "The family is in the city."

"It is open to visitors three days a week. The housekeeper shows you the pictures and the long gallery and the portrait of the old man, and you stand in the drawing room and say how nice it is. I have been wanting to do it for years."

"Nina."

"I am fifty-one years old and I want to see the conservatory." Nina set a mug down hard. "And if the man himself walks in while we are there, all the better. You will have to be civil for half an hour. You have been nothing but civil all your life to people who matter less. Do not start being uncivil now, when it would cost you something."

In April, back in Ashford, there was a letter from Sylvie, which said that Camille Reyes had written again to say that the marriage between Julian Reyes and Odette Wray was expected in the autumn and that everyone in the family was delighted.

Hollis read it twice, and then she wrote to Corinne Nash: He has done it. He has taken her happiness and handed it to a woman with a foundation, and he did it because he thought we were provincial, and I will never forgive him.

Corinne wrote back: No. You will.