What happened after all? Was he the man to love a woman who once went over the falls, who whirled a wheel of life, who quilted a river? Did his daughter witness the death of innocence like a comic opera in the forlorn, rustic lobby of a run-down mountain inn? Did fate take its course and did revenge seize its bounty?

Will we tune in another time.

What he couldn't understand, finally, was Samantha, his heart's half-daughter, the distant and improbable sister to his own grown girl.

Couldn't by definition. He hadn't raised her with her mother, hadn't earned (had he raised or earned anything with Tevet, with Beth, his own daughter?) her heart's intervention.

It wasn't that she was distant, in fact she took him in as she did all others. Her mother's daughter, she had an eye for floating things and for the ever-flowing form of a directionless world.

There was no single blue for her. She was one who wanted to open things so all threads showed, diurnally, measuring their progress in the stories and occasional proximities. It was November and winter would follow. He hoped his own daughter would like her.