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thought it would be. There was happiness nearby. Anna could feel it rising in place of the listening silence.
    Paul looked at her closely, answering her smile with the slow southern warmth that had first warmed her loins and then come to warm her heart. "Good. I brought you to this church, my church, the house of my God, because I know you're not exactly on a first-name basis with the Almighty. Maybe you don't always think he-"
    "She."
    "-she exists." He reached out, stroked her cheek with such gentleness she felt tears prick at her eyes and confuse her mind. "I brought you here to ask you to marry me because I want you to know my belief is enough. God comes or doesn't, is or isn't, manifests or vanishes according to forces I cannot begin to understand. I have chosen this," and though he didn't gesture at the church, Anna felt as if he had. "What you choose is for you. I will never push or pry or expect. Freedom of religion. An American marriage." Again he smiled. Again the kryptonite flashed. Anna felt a new sort of joy bubbling up around her. From somewhere in the dark of her mind she heard Zach whisper. "Pigeon, you're my person..." and she found an inner voice responding to the old litany: "No, you're my..." Again she shook her head to rattle out the vision, and she wondered when Zach had changed from an angel to a ghost.
    "No. No. Don't say no," Paul was murmuring and reaching out to take her face between his hands. Dislodged, the diamond in its box fell into Anna's open palm. A sign.
    "A good catch," she argued aloud.
    "I am," Paul promised. "I will be."
    "I'm sure you would be," Anna said pulling herself out of the jewel-lit church and back into the stony gloom of her office with its firing slit for a window. Born of the flashback-not the first she had of Paul's offer of marriage-a juxtaposition of joy and haunting filled her lungs as it had in St. James Church. She blew it out on a gust of air.
    "I'm about to lock up," Teddy called back. "Are you going to be awhile?"
    "No. I'm done," Anna replied, glad to have the impetus to move. The message about the water-system meeting she left on the desk. The note from Paul she carried with her. When she got back to her quarters she would tuck it in a painted box Molly had brought her from her trip to Russia when Anna was still in college and her sister was already a rising star in the field of psychiatry. The box was too full to close, but though she felt mildly absurd because of it, Anna couldn't bring herself to throw the notes away.
    "Got everything?" Teddy asked, sounding like a kindergarten teacher asking a five-year-old if she went to the bathroom before letting her on the bus for a field trip.
    Anna held up her net bag as proof she was allowed to go, and slipped out into the stark sun and shade of the parade ground. A brick walk, not original to the fort but added by the National Park Service, circumnavigated the inner court next to the casemates.
    Anna's temporary quarters were directly across from the sally port, so one direction was no shorter than the other. The most direct route was across, but the grass was Serengeti brown, the air still and bright and seeming to hold the glare as well as the heat of the day. She turned south, taking the shaded side.
    Lanny Wilcox had left or, if Daniel was correct, been snatched away from Fort Jefferson hurriedly. Nothing of his had gone with him but for a suitcase of clothes. As a consequence-housing in short supply in a place so small and so removed-Anna had arrived having no appropriate place to perch. After much discussion (including that of making her roommates with Duncan, the historian and interpreter, his wife and their seven-year-old son-an arrangement that had everyone concerned up in arms) the powers that be had grudgingly allowed her to live in the superintendent's quarters. "Superintendent's quarters" was something of a misnomer. In reality they served as VIP guest quarters. Mostly they sat empty, ever clean, ever