“What?”
“Answer the question.”
“Yes, I expect water to come out.”
“Well, that’s a system, too, but you don’t think about it very much, because of how flawlessly it works for you. This is the same thing. You are a good-looking young guy with a cool job who wanted to get married young. I can read countless books from past centuries and hear women in my position described as practically dead.”
“I can read books from past centuries in which people thought interracial marriage was a sin against God. Fuck ’em!”
Laurie nodded enthusiastically. “Exactly. That’s a terrible system, too. I’m not on the only hard path; I’m not even on the hardest one. I’m only saying this is not just a bad-luck Saturday night of app-surfing. This is something you don’t notice because you don’t have to.”
She could feel him looking over at her. “You’re very smart for someone I could always beat at Connect Four,” he finally said.
“I let you win,” she answered.
They crested a hill with a billboard that advertised the maritime museum ten miles north of Calcasset, which Laurie had visited on a sixth-grade field trip—just like Ryan had, and Scott and Joey and Patrick had. The only thing Laurie could remember about it was buying a lighthouse keychain for her mother at the gift shop. Much about those years was a blur of brothers and embarrassments （for a while, Joey hung her bras from the light fixture over the dinner table when he found them in the laundry room）， and much of the time, all she really remembered was noise. Constant noise, from the kitchen and the family room and the driveway and the backyard, until she would go up to her bedroom and put a pillow over her head, because it was before she had headphones that could block it all out.
When she was looking for her place in Seattle, she had asked everywhere about shared walls. She made everyone be silent while she stood in the bedroom for two full minutes and listened for neighbors. This place would not be noisy, except when she wanted it to be. And just in case, she would have every machine and oscillating fan and earplug it took to make it quiet when she was sleeping. Just quiet, that was all.
“What are you thinking about?” Ryan said, snapping the thread.
“Why I live alone,” she said.
The question she was trying not to ask seemed determined to get itself asked: What was all this for? An expensive art piece that she’d insisted on retrieving because her pride was hurt at being swindled, and now she was going to know a secret she’d never wanted to know about her beloved great-aunt and a married man for whom she might have waited around for half her life?
She drove on.
Chapter Twenty
When Ryan and Laurie got back to Dot’s house, he looked at his watch. “When’s your flight?” Laurie asked.
“About two hours,” he said. “I should get moving.”
While he packed the few things he’d brought, Laurie sent a message to the group text labeled “Quack Team.” She just wrote: Success.
Almost immediately, her phone sounded and she looked down to see Nick’s name and his profile photo of the front of the library. “Oh, hello,” she answered.
“So it worked?” he said. “You have it?”
“In my grimy little paw, yes,” she said, flopping down on the sofa with the duck in her hand. She could see now that the neck was even more graceful than she’d thought, but the paint job was a little less precise. And when she turned it over, that mark, that round mark with the CKM stamp, was so beguiling. “I’m just happy to be reunited with it. Have you talked to Rocky?”
“Not yet,” he said. “I’m going to call him in a little while. I plan to be very angry. I’m going to tell him his guy didn’t show up, which is technically true, and that I don’t have the duck, which is also true. So what did you find out?”
“It was crazy,” she said, grinning into the phone for the benefit of nobody but herself. “Are you at work?”
“I am, but I can take my break. Tell me the whole thing,” he said.
She explained about the letter that Ryan had seen, and the photo. They had probably been right that the guy whose back they had puzzled over in the picture was Kittery, and now it seemed like he and Dot had probably been having an affair. He’d even talked about her with his granddaughter, although not by name, and it sounded like the relationship was a long one. “So,” she said, “I suspect this is a case of taking what you can get when you can’t get what you want.”