Her mother is one of the reasons she has asked the question. Lily sees her more often now, along with other faces from long ago. Contrary to what she might have expected, the past seems to be drawing ever closer. Events that once seemed vague and distant are becoming clearer; people whose faces she has long forgotten appear before her like hazy photographs coming back into focus. She feels the weight of them pressing down on her, dragging her backward. She wonders if this is a symptom of her illness. Her “little turns,” as she and Edna have taken to calling them; so much nicer than “ischemic incidents,” which is the name the doctor uses. Her fractured mind is trying to piece itself back together, even if it has to dive decades into the past to find its material. But there are still huge gaps, too. They warned her there might be memory loss, though she’s never let on to Edna, nor anyone else, just how far those gaps extend.

Whatever their provenance, she doesn’t want to be alone with the ghosts when Edna is gone. And, despite her earlier question, neither of them has any real doubt who will be the one left behind. Mini-strokes or not, it is Edna who is living on borrowed time.

She looks up to find Edna watching her. The book has fallen discarded in her lap, the page left unmarked this time. She’s shaking her head again, a small smile playing on her lips. “For heaven’s sake, woman, how many times do I have to ask you to drop your hair in the basket? It’s a small miracle we don’t have rats in this place.”

Now it’s Lily’s turn to sigh, though she isn’t as good at it as Edna. She bends and scoops the ball of hair from the carpet, drops it into the bin. “There’s no need to snap at me. I’m not a child.”

For all the secrets that lie hidden in the corners of this cottage, thoughts are by now painfully transparent, so Lily knows Edna is thinking, Yes, you are. They stare at each other in silence until Edna sighs once more and picks up her book. But rather than resuming reading she finds her page and marks it with a tasseled leather bookmark edged in gold leaf that Lily remembers they bought on a trip to Cockermouth where . . . they eat a cream tea and listen to the rain drumming against the café window. She asks Edna if she can see the bookmark, and Edna extracts it from the small paper bag given her by the woman in the shop. It has a golden silhouette of Wordsworth and a few lines of poetry. She can’t make out the poem; the writing is too small and the glinting gold of the letters . . .

“Lillian? Lillian!”

“Hmm?”