After his service, he’d avoided the politics that gripped the nation and delved into his studies with a single-mindedness that surprised even himself. After seeing war, or, at least, an aspect of it, history comforted him, its decisions already made, its passions reverberating in time passed. He did not speak of his time in the military and now, middle-aged and carrying a degree of tenured respect, doubted that any of his colleagues knew he’d been a part of the war. In truth, it often seemed to him as if it had been a dream, perhaps a nightmare, and he’d come to think that his year of conflict and death only barely existed.

His third adventure, he knew, had been Ashley.

Scott Freeman took the letter in his hand and went over and sat down on the edge of Ashley’s bed. It had three pillows on it, one of which, inscribed with a needlepoint heart, he’d given her on Valentine’s Day more than ten years earlier. There were also two stuffed bears, which she’d named Alphonse and Gaston, and a frayed quilt, which had been given her when she was born. Scott looked at the quilt and remembered that it had been a small joke, in the weeks before Ashley’s birth, when both her prospective grandmothers had given the child-to-be quilts. The other one, he knew, was on a similar bed, in a similar room, at her mother’s house.

His eyes traveled over the rest of the room. Photographs of Ashley and friends taped to one wall; knickknacks; handwritten notes in the flowing, precise script of teenage girls.