“Who’s that?” Samuel whispered when he came around the corner and saw Cate for the first time.

“This is Cate,” I said. To Cate, I said, “And this is my brother, Samuel.”

“Which is a fine name,” Cate said, sagging against me. “For a fine boy. Who I hope will lead me to the nearest chair.”

My mother seemed to speak a new language as we filed into the kitchen and sat Cate down at the table.

“What is . . . Can you . . . Ellie, how did . . . ,” she said, backing and shifting around us much as Maisie had when I had first touched Quiet.

“I’m sorry we came down uninvited,” Cate said.

“Came down?” my mother said, which was an odd question since there we were, in her kitchen, come from above, and no doubt about it.

“From up-mountain,” Cate said, and I saw her through my mother’s eyes. A shriveled, gray, hunched woman in a tunic and leggings made of deer hide and a pair of worn-out boots, a tattered rag doll in one hand.

“Thank you for the food you sent up,” she said to my mother. “Especially the venison stew,” though my mother didn’t know I’d taken some. “But more than that, thank you for sending your daughters,” though we all knew I’d gone of my own accord.

“Ellie’s the only one who deserves your gratitude,” my mother said, still jangled from our sudden arrival, but also by a new confusion I saw on her face, in the way she clenched her hands.

“And she has it,” Cate said, though she hadn’t yet told me so.

“I helped,” Esther said too loudly. “Didn’t I?”

Cate nodded. “You did. And brought me such lovely remembrances.”

“Remembrances?” my mother said.

Cate nodded, smiling. She paused. In the silence, nobody said a word. We all watched Cate curiously, as if she were the only one of her kind. And then she said, “Do you not know me?”

My mother leaned closer and looked into those blue old eyes, much as Esther had done.

And then she must have recognized the woman she’d known from Bethel. Who couldn’t possibly be this hag, sitting here in our kitchen as if she, too, had come up through the drain hole like a cold snake or fluttered down through the chimney like a lost bird or threaded her way from a stray seed in the floorboards to sprout branches and leaves above the table and through the window into the sunlight.

I watched as my mother reached out a hand and touched Cate’s shoulder. “Mrs. Cleary?” she said softly.

Cate put her hand over my mother’s. “Not much like I was when you knew me, am I?”

My mother smiled, though there were suddenly tears in her eyes. “No, you’re not.”