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should I do to let her know I don’t want her living here? Signed, Polite but perplexed. “You were there alone?” he asked to make conversation.
    “Two days,” she said. “I’m staying all week.” Then she giggled. “If I can make it. Last night I was frightened because it was so incredibly quiet here with no cars and only the surf. Tonight I was scared because it was so stormy. I guess I’m just not a pioneer woman type, am I?”
    Her voice was amazingly like her brother’s, though higher pitched, even when she spoke low, like now. The way she rushed at her words at the beginning of a sentence, then slowed down at the end, was like him. How her a’s were broad, not at all like a New Yorker’s, more like a New Englander’s. The facial resemblance was strong too, the clear-cut nose, the deep-set eyes, high cheekbones, the large forehead. The bottom half differed, however. Jerry’s face was square, almost too square. His chin almost too wide, dimpled twice. His lips, especially his lower lip, were large too, as though to fill in all that space. Not hers. Her face, her chin were nicely pointed. Her mouth was small, fitting the smaller oval of her face, the smaller nose.
    “I suppose you have the right to know why I’m out here all alone,” she suddenly announced in a deeper voice, as though imitating someone older: her mother?
    The last thing Jonathan wanted was the confessions of a frightened teenaged girl. “That’s not necessary,” he said, as calmly as possible.
    Her gray eyes opened wide; he could see they were flecked with different colors: blue, gold, brown. Then she lowered them to gaze at the steaming mug in her lap.
    “I guess you’re right. It’s not necessary.”
    “You’re Sally,” he said.
    “Stevie!” She looked up. “It’s really Stephanie, but somehow they began calling me ‘Stevie’ and it stuck. I wasn’t a tomboy.”
    That explained the confusion. Dan always thought the reference Paula Locke made to Stevie was to another, younger brother: one unseen, and thus even more desirable than the deliciously known Jerry.
    “And you’re Jonathan Lash, the famous composer,” she said.
    “Hardly famous.”
    “More famous than anyone else I’ve ever met.” Her eyes searched the room. Looking for signs of his fame? The scrolled honors, the autographed photos? “You know,” she said, “I’m such a jerk sometimes. Here I am talking as though I were across the street or something, and your lover is probably trying to get to sleep.”
    “He’s not here. He’s in London, directing some films for the BBC.”
    Her eyebrows rose and fell; he read this as surprise, and/or being impressed.
    “And no,” he went on, “you aren’t interrupting me atall. No intrusion. No bother. I’m sort of glad to have company.”
    “I tried playing solitaire,” she said, then bit her upper lip, and fell silent, looking down at her mug.
    Conversation lapsed. The rain still thundered overhead, lightning frequently brightened up behind the curtained windows, unpredictably, now on one side of the large room, now another; the fire settled, crackled, popped.
    “May I tell you”—she suddenly looked up at him, as though begging, and embarrassed to be doing so—“may I tell you why I’m out here alone? I’d like to.”
    Jonathan didn’t know how to respond. Good Lord, no! he thought, but nodded yes.
    “I was supposed to be in college yesterday. Second year. I’m supposed to get engaged next month to a boy I’ve been seeing. And I don’t want to. Isn’t that strange? I don’t want to go back to school, and I don’t want to get married. I’m having a crisis. It’s all very adolescent and typical of me that it’s happening now, at eighteen, instead of when I was thirteen, like everyone else. An identity crisis, I suppose it’s called. So I came out here to be alone, to think, to make some clear-headed decisions about my life.”
    She sighed and sat back when she was done, relieved at