“After you and Jonathan marry, I would like to bring you both here to stand before Papa,” Mama mused aloud.

I started. “Marry!”

“Yes, next summer, when you are married.”

“What do you mean, Mama?”

Mama turned a querulous face to me. “What do you mean by such a question, Maisie?”

“But Mama, nothing final has been said.”

Blankly, she repeated, “Nothing final said? But Jonathan disclosed to me his intentions the night before he left on business. He asked for you in the most earnest fashion, and I was certain he had proposed … .” Her voice trailed off as she looked at me.

I could imagine the scene. Up here, above the harbor, and next to Papa, the parlor drama I could see played out between Mama and Jonathan suddenly appeared to me foreign, as though it did not refer to me at all.

Mama repeated, “Maisie, do you mean to say that you are not securely engaged to Jonathan?”

I thought of the kiss and of his words. Until this moment, I had known that kiss to be a loosely binding stitch between us. But then, too, I had stopped him from saying aloud what would make the kiss into a promise. I had merely kissed him. This morning before Papa, that was all that I wished the kiss to mean. Two hearts in a garden amidst that lilac silence. Jonathan might take that kiss as a seal, but I could not.

“That is right, Mama, I am not securely engaged.”

She drew in her breath at that, then turned back to Papa, as if he might help her to understand what I had just said. Agitated, I followed her gaze, but now the tombstone did not comfort.

How little it seemed now—how insufficient! Ludlow Thomas—the beloved Husband, devoted Father. There the man lay beneath the scant phrases, no different from those on the tombs beside him. Father. Husband. And yet, how those words winged backward away from him, ringing hollow around him. For he had lived far more than in his relation to us. And the pages of Miss Grange’s diary now asked the stone, Who, after all, were you? And all the stone replied was, Husband, Father. I struggled to understand. Where, then, did the man go? Where were represented all the complexities of his life? All—it was all come down to these few implacable words written above him.

In that moment, on the hilltop, with my mother beside me and the question of my marriage hanging in the air, the lesson of my father’s tombstone began to speak. For was I not standing here, nearly accepting Jonathan and our marriage, yet not wanting it, all at the same time? How might a stone hold upon it this humming in my chest, this winging indecision, this moment where I stood and gazed down the corridors of my life and all the doors appeared thrown wide?