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Gerald Eliot had already been working on the sun room for eleven months—admittedly, off and on—but what was left to be done? Ah, but the windows had been delayed; for some reason, the drywall couldn’t go up until the windows were in; Eliot had had a cash flow problem; he’d sailed off to his next job. Mountain breezes swirling through the house at night had forced Barbara Burr into the hospital—with pneumonia. Cameron Burr had moved into their guest house. The last I’d heard, Barbara’s pulmonologist had put her on a ventilator.

All this I had to hear while Bobby drank cup after cup of my coffee. He asked me if I’d been to Milan. He said he did his book there. I told him I was the pastry chef for a huge celebration outside the cathedral. At another cathedral, I made my crème brûlée for a hundred clergy. Where was that, he asked. In my town of Clermont-Ferrand, I told him, where, when I was eleven, I helped smuggle a Milanese Jewish woman and her French husband, also Jewish, out of the town. They went to Switzerland and then America.

When Ian’s Images was not engaged in a shoot, Leah allowed Merciful Migrations to use the space for elk-tracking, fund-raising, and salt-lick distribution. The beautiful young man who wouldn’t take off his shirt looked as if he could use a lick of salt, especially on the side of a glass of tequila. My heart went out to him. The man seated next to Hanna and Leah, photographer Ian Hood, had a handsome, fine-boned face, wavy salt-and-pepper hair, and a trim beard. Ian’s photos of trotting elk, grazing elk, big-buck elk, and mom-and-baby elk graced the libraries, grocery stores, post offices, banks, and schools of Aspen Meadow and Blue Spruce.