He had a feeling all Millie’s adventures had been in books, and somehow her life had slipped between the pages. Or maybe the accident had rattled her brain as well as his. It didn’t matter. He’d play along with the knight gig. He felt like he’d been playing one part or another all his life.

“Would you like me to move the TV in here? Or get you a book? Or tell jokes? No, forget that. All I know are dirty ones.”

He’d won another smile. “Can we just talk for a few minutes?”

“I’d like that.” Without asking, he began to comb her hair while she sat straight and still. “How did you end up at Clifton College?” he asked after a moment.

She took a deep breath and seemed to relax. “My parents lived in a trailer and moved around when I was a kid. Strange, but wherever we moved, the school and the libraries seemed my home, my safe places. When my teachers said I should go to college, my parents said I’d had enough learning. So I moved out, got a job, and started night classes. When I checked on them, they’d moved on. I think they were accidental parents who never settled into the role.”

“Did you find them?”

“I didn’t look.”

The pieces of her life seemed to explain Millie. An only child. A mother and father who didn’t care about her. She’d finished college alone and shy, with the library as her hiding place.

Her words were orderly, organized, without emotions. “It took me six years to finish my degree, then I drifted from library to library looking for a home. I thought maybe this small place might be where I’d finally settle. I always thought that people who had a hometown were lucky.”

But she hadn’t settled here, he thought. The small house with all her things packed inside was more a storage place than a home. No relations. No friends to call. She didn’t fit in, no matter how perfect the library. Hank would bet she was still looking for home.

He sensed she was a person who wasn’t comfortable in her own skin. It seemed to him that she was a stranger to herself. He’d heard an old legend about a tribe of people who were all that way. They moved over the land like smoke, sentenced to live life over and over without ever finding their place. The elders said they were rootless because Mother Earth would not accept them.