in fact, the very next autumn that his parents had taken him to Texas and all their troubles began. The camp had been owned by a man named Mr. Hale—a high school biology teacher with the deep voice and barrel rib cage of a linebacker, which he once had been. He was a friend of Wolgast’s father, though he’d never acknowledged this friendship through any special treatment that Wolgast could recall.
Mr. Hale had lived upstairs during the summers with his wife, in some kind of apartment. That’s what Wolgast was looking for now. He stepped through a swinging door off the common area and found himself in the kitchen: rustic pine cabinets, a pegboard of oxidizing pots and saucepans, a sink with an old-fashioned pump, and a stove and refrigerator with its door half open, all surrounding a wide pine-plank table. Everything was coated with a heavy scrim of dust. The stove was an old commercial unit, white steel, with a clock on the faceplate, the hands frozen at six minutes after three. He turned one of the burner dials and heard a hiss of gas.
From the kitchen, a narrow stairway ascended to the second floor, a warren of tiny rooms tucked under the eaves. Most were empty, but in two he found a couple of cots, the mattresses turned over to face the walls. And something else: in one of the rooms, on a trestle table by the window, an apparatus of dials and switches that he took to be a shortwave radio.
He returned to the car. Amy was still sleeping, curled beneath the blanket. He shook her gently awake.
She rose and rubbed her eyes. “Where are we?”
“Home,” he told her.
He found himself, in those first days on the mountain, thinking of Lila. Strangely, his thoughts did not include a more general curiosity about the world, what was happening out there now. His days were consumed by chores, by setting the place to rights and attending to Amy; but his mind, free to go wherever it wished, chose to move over the past, hovering atop it like a bird over some immense body of water, no shoreline in sight, only the distant reflection of himself in its shining surface for company.
It was not true that he had loved Lila right away. But something had happened that felt like falling. He’d met her on a wintry Sunday when he came into the ER, suspended by the shoulders of two friends reeking of gymnasium sweat. Wolgast wasn’t much of a basketball player, hadn’t played at all since high school, but he had let himself be talked into playing on a team for a charity tournament—three-on-three, half-court, the stakes low as could be. Miraculously, they’d made it through two rounds before Wolgast went up for a jump shot and came down to a wet pop in his left Achilles tendon and then, as he melted to the floor—the shot bouncing sadly off the rim, adding insult, literally, to injury—an explosion of pain that brought tears to his eyes.
The ER doc who examined him declared the tendon ruptured and sent him upstairs, to an orthopedist. This was Lila. She stepped into the room, spooning the last of a cup of yogurt into her mouth, dropped it in the trash, and turned to the sink to wash her hands, all without once glancing at him.
“So.” She dried her hands and looked briskly at his chart, then at Wolgast, sitting on the table. She was not what Wolgast would have described, right off, as classically pretty, though there was something about her that caught him short, a feeling like déjà vu. Her hair, the color of cocoa, was held in a bun by some kind of stick. She was wearing a pair of black eyeglasses, very small, that rode down the slope of her narrow nose. “I’m Dr. Kyle. You hurt yourself playing basketball?”
Wolgast nodded sheepishly. “I’m not what you’d call an athlete,” he admitted.
At that moment her handheld buzzed at her waist. She peeked at it quickly, frowning. Then, with calm precision, she placed a single outstretched finger on the soft spot behind the third toe of his left foot.
“Press here.”
He did, or tried to. The pain was so fierce he thought he might be ill.
“What kind of work do you do?”
Wolgast swallowed. “Law enforcement,” he managed. “Jesus, that hurt.”
She was writing something on the chart. “Law enforcement,” she repeated. “As in, police?”
“FBI actually.”
He looked for a flicker of interest in her eyes but