Tova learns Erik had a girlfriend named Daphne

Tova learns that Erik had been seeing a girl named Daphne, a disclosure that turns an unnamed possibility into a persistent question about the son she thought she knew. The news comes indirectly: Adam recalls Erik’s plans from the last day he saw him, then Sandy later passes along the name Adam could not remember at first. For Tova, the revelation does not solve Erik’s disappearance. It opens a new absence inside an old one: she had not known there was a girl to ask about.

The recollection at the chophouse

At the Elland Chophouse, Tova tells Adam that she welcomes what people remember. His recollection is specific in its ordinary details. The last time he saw Erik, they ate nachos at the snack bar in the afternoon, before Erik started work. They planned to go the next day to Adam’s family cabin, where Erik intended to sneak beers from Tova’s refrigerator, as he had done before. Adam apologizes for the beer theft, but Tova waves the apology away; that familiar mischief sounds like her son.

The account changes when Adam adds that Erik wanted to impress a girl by bringing her to the cabin. Tova’s response is a stony chuckle, followed by the admission that she does not remember Erik having a girlfriend then. Adam qualifies his description: he cannot say exactly what the relationship was, but insists that the two were involved. His uncertainty is about the label, not whether there was a girl. The distinction matters to Tova, who has just heard a piece of Erik’s private life that does not fit what she remembers.

Adam cannot immediately supply the girl’s name. That missing detail leaves Tova with an outline rather than an identity: Erik was planning to bring someone to the cabin, but she does not know who. The conversation’s ordinary circumstances—a meal, a planned outing, stolen beer—make the discovery more unsettling, not less. It is a glimpse of a future Erik expected to share with a friend and a girl, set against the fact that he never came back from the night he disappeared.

The question takes hold

The phrase that there was a girl starts recurring through Tova’s daily routine. While making the bed, waiting for coffee, or dusting the baseboards on Wednesday, she finds herself turning the thought over. The narration renders this repetition as an intrusion into habitual tasks: even the crossword cannot hold her attention. She knows the answer to a clue asking for a daredevil’s move is STUNT, but her pencil seems drawn instead to the word GIRL, or to the name she still does not have.

The uncertainty is sharpened by Tova’s memory of the police inquiry after Erik disappeared. The police had spoken at length with several of his former girlfriends, not as suspects but as people who might know what he had been doing that night. Ashley Barrington, who had gone with Erik to the Sowell Bay High School homecoming dance the previous autumn, was away on a family cruise when he disappeared. Jenny-Lynn Mason, his prom date earlier that spring, had been in Seattle and stayed overnight with a friend. Stephanie Lee had come to the house for what Tova called study dates; after checking her account that she had been home asleep, the detective found that she could offer no information.

That history makes Tova ask how she could have missed another relationship. She wonders whether the name might lie somewhere in her own memory, unrecognized because she had not thought it important. She also tries to locate Adam in the phone book, without success, and doubts whether he will remember their conversation at all. He had been drinking several martinis at lunch. Tova knows he was Erik’s school buddy, but not a close friend; his memory might be right, yet its reliability is not assured. The revelation therefore brings no clean certainty. It leaves her weighing a vivid recollection against the limits of the person who supplied it.

Sandy supplies the name

The answer arrives later in the produce section of the town’s only grocery store. Sandy Hewitt is weighing cherries when she apologizes for Adam’s behavior at the chophouse, especially his drinking at noon. She explains that he has been under stress from the move and work, then says there is something else about that conversation. Tova waits, aware of her heart beating faster.

Sandy tells her that Adam remembered the girl’s name. He had not thought Sandy should say anything, but Sandy reasons that a parent who had lost a child might want even a small piece of previously unknown information. She reports that the girl was named Daphne and that Adam remembered she went to his high school, though he could not recall her last name. As Tova leans on the produce scale, the piles of cherries blur; she repeats Daphne as if testing a name that has suddenly become consequential. Sandy’s eyes water, and Tova thanks her.

The information is both concrete and sharply limited. Tova now has a first name and a connection to Adam’s high school, but no surname, no account from Daphne, and no confirmation of what the relationship meant to Erik. Adam’s earlier qualification remains: he did not know what they were, technically, only that they were a thing. Sandy’s report gives Tova something to hold onto without resolving those uncertainties.

A discovery that does not close the case

The disclosure changes Tova’s understanding of Erik’s last known plans, not the known facts of his disappearance. On the afternoon Adam remembers, Erik expected to go to the cabin the following day and intended to bring a girl he wanted to impress. The name Daphne makes that plan newly legible as part of a relationship Tova had not known about. But neither Adam nor Sandy connects the relationship to what happened that night, and the revelation supplies no explanation for Erik’s absence.

Its force comes partly from the contrast between what Tova knows and what she has missed. The police had investigated several girls she could identify, yet Daphne was not among the names she recalls providing. Now an old acquaintance’s lunchtime memory and a secondhand message from Sandy reopen the past through a single first name. Tova’s persistent question is no longer only what Erik did on his final night, but how much of his life remained outside her knowledge. The event offers no answer to that larger question; it makes the gap impossible for her to ignore.