“It is all right, Maisie. She has come at last.” And she reached her hand out toward the approaching figure, waving her forward, closer and closer, as if to hurry her on. Her face wore such a childish look of anticipation in that moment, such glee, I could not stop from smiling also, and then she gasped once.

Blank followed. I thought someone breathed, and listening closely, I found it was myself The room was only a room, but there was a hollow in it. When Papa left, there had been so many others with me, watching my face, coming around to hold me in their arms. The living claimed me; we had cried out against the irrevocable silence of his figure on the bed. But Miss Grange had left only me behind in this blank room. It might be I who had died.

Suddenly I feared nothing from the still form or its dim visitor. It might have been I who had died. I understood then the slim line between us, that I stood in a room full of my longing for those who had left me behind, haunting them, just as we imagined them to be haunting us. All of us—dead and living—pressing our noses up against the cold transparency of memory between us. Softly, I folded Miss Grange’s hands across her chest, closed her eyes upon earth, then leaned to kiss my old friend farewell.

I sat back in the chair. The night stretched open and long before me. What course should I follow now? I did not wish to go downstairs. Her soul was close, I knew—and should she wish to step away, she should have someone to leave, something to step away from. So I remained. My eye fell upon the letter there by the lamp, and calmed by my name in her handwriting, I took it up.

Miss Grange had given very precise directions. I was to reach below the skirts of her bed and pull from it what lay beneath. I was to read her diary then and there. I was not to leave her room until dawn.