“I do speak plain.” And I rose then and moved toward the door.

“What is it you want, Miss Grange?”

I turned to him, my hand on the knob. “A story.”

He chuckled. “I would say that you had one.”

“Would you?”

“Yes. Let us review.” He rose and, with his finger pressed to his lips in a dramatic fashion, crossed to me and gently pushed shut the door once more and led me back into the room.

“Here we are. A man and a woman, alone in a room on a beautiful cloudless day. What could we be doing in here? Your readers have their ears pressed to the door to discover, and indeed, there are several possibilities for the scene.”

“Which are?”

“Well.” He took the chair I usually sat in and drew my closed book to him as if to open it again and write, but seeing the alarm rise swiftly on my cheeks, he smiled at me and did not do so. “Let us make a list of chapter headings for this story taking place right here.”

“The Conversation,” I obliged.

“The Plot,” he countered.

I raised my eyebrows.

“Let us say,” he continued, “what is happening here in this front room of an old house on the coast of the northernmost state between a man and a woman is”—he paused and looked at me—“thick with intrigue.”

“How so?” I moved closer to the table where he sat.

“How so indeed?” he responded, studying me. “You are the writer. Prod us forward gently”—he smiled—“into the plot.”

I regarded him in silence, this man sitting so very still in the chair, waiting for me to answer. And then there was Mother walking toward us slowly through the woods, her skirts kicking around her boot tips as she came and her tall form gliding effortlessly along toward us. I remember we were hiding from her, Sue and I, and had crept behind the great boulder that had come to rest beside the old well where we played. And the moment stretched before me again in all its lovely silence—how rich we were just then before her voice broke open the air between us—to be hidden, yes, but soon to be found—Mother’s laughter cleaving open the thick green glade. I felt the strings—this man, the table where he sat, and Mother and Sue in the woods, the sunlight stretching between the two scenes from now and from another time—tremble tight in me, who held them all together.

“What is it?” he broke in.

I shook my head slowly. But the dual moment shivered and fell away.

“How full the world is.” I smiled. “How wide.”

He did not reply, but stared openly at me.