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Leah Larsen dropped her backpack on a table in the café and nodded at the other customers as she went to place her order. She wouldn’t have done either in New York but since coming to this small lakeside town in the Adirondacks nine months previously she had come to know, if only by sight, most of its inhabitants. Even though she could have recited its contents she studied the chalkboard menu, itching—as she always did—to correct the four spelling errors. She craved a latte but ordered a plain black coffee. With small economies like this she could afford to live here for another few months. But then what? A racoon-eyed, sooty-haired woman with Yakuza-like tattoos snaking up her neck took her order. “Thanks, Flory,” Leah said, accepting a brimming mug. She returned to her table. Maybe I could get a job here. Flory would probably need help after the thaw, when the cabin dwellers and tourists flocked back to the town. If she did, the first thing she’d do is rewrite the chalkboard. She sat down and pulled a laptop out of her pack. Her visits to the coffee shop were in part to counter a worrying preference for solitude, but mainly to access the Internet. Today, her research was completed quickly. In no rush to head back out into the cold she topped up her half-empty cup with milk from the condiments table and tasted the lukewarm liquid. Poor man’s latte. If Flory noticed, she didn’t say anything. Back at her table she studied her computer screen, wondering what else to do. She didn’t have an email account and avoided social media. She was about to access the New York Times website when she remembered that she hadn’t checked on her parents in a long time. Calling up Google she typed in “gabriel findlay larsen musician.” Family and friends knew her father as Fin, but the Internet didn’t. There was little new in the results since her last search. She leaned forward and scrolled through the lines of images of her father as a young man intermixed with more current ones. The deep-set eyes and raptor-like features remained the same but the luxuriant dark hair was threaded with gray, and he now wore glasses. Her father was rarely photographed alone. She recognized some of his companions: other musicians and singers, a famous film director, a Canadian prime minister. One picture was of him and his wife. By no conventional standard was Leah’s mother a beauty, but her high cheekbones and slightly Asiatic stargazer eyes were memorable. In this picture, Fin was sharing a laugh with someone out of the frame while her mother looked abstractedly in the other direction, like she was reflecting on the mysteries of the universe. As she probably was. Leah moved the cursor to the query box and typed in “alexandra tarnovsky physicist.” The images had caught her attention first, which was why she didn’t immediately notice the lead item of the search results. It was an obituary—her mother was dead.