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Sarah collected her key and walked toward the elevator, her heels clacking sharply on the white marble floor.
    “Mrs. Cooper?”
    She turned and the concierge handed her an envelope. She pressed the elevator button and while the cables clanked and whirred behind the glass door, she opened the envelope. It was a message from Benjamin in Santa Fe where he now lived with that woman. He had phoned at eight that morning and again at ten. He wanted her to call him back. It was urgent, he said.

FOUR
    B en and Eve had been in bed watching an old Cary Grant movie on the TV when Agent Kendrick called. It was a little after nine. Eve had lit candles and the flames were catching a draft from somewhere, sending shadows tilting and wobbling on the rough whitewashed walls and across the paintings and swaths of cloth that hung there. Pablo was asleep in his bedroom next door. Ben had only a short while ago looked in on him and stumbled through toys to tuck another blanket around his skinny shoulders. The boy shifted and murmured from some unknown corner of a dream, then settled again, his long dark curls spread like an aura on the pillow.
    It was Saturday and they’d had the kind of perfect spring day that seasoned residents of Santa Fe took for granted but Ben continued to find miraculous. The dry desert air laced with the scent of lilac and cherry, the sky a clear deep blue and the light—that vivid, washed, almost shocking New Mexican light with its shadows sharp across adobe walls, the kind of light that could make even a color-blind philistine want to pick up a paintbrush—still, after four years of living here, could induce in him something close to euphoria.
    The three of them had driven out in the Jeep for a late breakfast at the Tesuque Village Market then browsed the stalls of the flea market, Pablo running ahead of them like a scout, finding things and calling them to come and look. Eve bought an antique dress in purple and brown and orange swirls, cut on the bias. There was a hole under one arm and she haggled the woman down to thirty dollars and whispered as they walked away that it would be easy to fix and was worth at least a hundred.
    In the mellowing sun that afternoon in the little backyard, the cherry tree groaning with an absurd overload of pink blossoms, they barbecued tuna steaks and sweet red peppers and zucchini while Pablo played chasing games with the little Swedish girl from next door. Eve’s house was one of an enclave of six that stood on the south-facing side of a valley of sage and pinyon that funneled down into the town’s west side. It was on one floor and made of cracked adobe, its angles rounded and its doors of ancient, grizzled pine. Both house and yard could have fit three times over into the house on Long Island where Ben had lived all those years with Sarah and where she now lived alone, but he already preferred it. He liked its spare, worn functionality, the way it belonged to the land that surrounded it. He liked it too because it was Eve’s and even more because it wasn’t his. It made him feel—as Pablo also made him feel—unencumbered, that his association was entirely of his own choosing. And this, of course, made him feel younger and more footloose than a man of almost fifty-two years deserved.
    Just when the food was ready to be served the children came running up the path, all excited, saying the hummingbirds were back. They had seen one down by Eve’s studio where the yard became more jungle than garden. Eve asked them what kind they thought it was. It was too early for the rufous, she said, and from what they were able to tell her they concluded that it must have been a black-chinned. After supper, with Pablo bathed and in his pajamas, they rummaged for the feeder jars in the closet and filled them with sugar water then hung them from a low branch of the cherry tree.
    Pablo wanted to wait up to see if the birds would come and while Eve took a bath Ben sat with his arm around him