1503951243 by Laurel Saville Page A

brown, bristled tulips—littered the mossy ground. She’d expected a cabin, something modeled after a traditional log lean-to. But this was a cottage. The style was Craftsman, not Adirondack. When they went inside, she found the bed was iron, not wood; the cover chenille, not quilted; the walls whitewashed bead board, not peeled logs; the curtains linen, not lace; the rocker on the little porch simple Shaker, not birch twig. It was a spare, unfussy hideaway. Miranda imagined that the woman who created it, Dix’s mother, had been someone full of art, ideas, good taste, and the confidence and skill that allowed her to express restraint. And also a woman who must have remembered and called upon the daydreams of the girl she once had been.
    Miranda did not want to leave. There was so much comfort to be had here. She turned to Dix and smiled. He nodded. The deal had been struck, accepted, wordlessly. He left her alone in the cottage, closing the door quietly behind him. Miranda listened to his few footfalls on the porch. Then, they were lost in the grass beyond. A raven gurgled and was answered. Ducks quacked at each other as they flew somewhere overhead. She sat in an upholstered chair in the corner of the room and levered off her shoes. Silence settled. She closed her eyes. This was a place where she could heal. She felt that. And at the same moment, she was overwhelmed with the realization of just how much healing there was for her to do.

DARIUS AND SALLY
    His given name was David, but he called himself Darius. It was not a nickname. It was a name he had chosen for himself. He liked that both his names shared the same first letter, but the new name had a not-easy-to-place exoticism to it that thrilled him. He’d always felt the name his parents had chosen for him was generic and bland. He’d known too many others with that name, and they were all boring, he’d decided. He’d been named after a grandfather he didn’t like much, someone who had started life in a small town in rural Pennsylvania, built a chain of hardware stores, and, while he made tons of money, stuck to frugal, simple ways. Unsophisticated, Darius thought. Antiquated. Vaguely embarrassing. His grandfather was someone who smelled of dust.
    Darius’s father had taken the hardware-store money to Wall Street, where he grew it exponentially. In contrast, he created a lifestyle that expressed his wealth in the subtle ways that were visible to other wealthy people: the Harvard MBA; the blonde, sincere but insubstantial wife who served on cultural groups’ boards; the leather briefcases; the shoes and belts with discreetly placed logos that identified high-end brands; the monogrammed shirts; the summer house—not in the Hamptons, where one might have to mix with crass celebrities—but in an older-money enclave in Rhode Island.
    Darius had first heard his new name when he was in high school. He had been playing a video game and drinking pilfered gin and tonics in the basement of a friend’s house while an adult cocktail party carried on overhead. A heroic warrior character in the game was named Darius. Then, after dropping out of college and while driving across country, the name came back to him, and David decided to become Darius. The new name was part of his effort to describe, and maybe even begin to release, a man he was sure was lurking somewhere deep within himself, someone more grand than he yet was, someone destined for greatness, who needed only naming to become flesh and blood.
    He had left college during his senior year without telling his parents. He had no plan. He had simply joined a friend on a skiing trip to Jackson Hole over winter break and then never returned to the University of Vermont. When the friend went back to college, he told Darius—then still David—that he could stay in his parents’ condo because they were skiing in Europe over the winter. Darius and the friend had filled their days on the mountain slopes and their nights