Now she looked at me in the mirror, and I saw what the words had cost her. And with one hand, as if to forestall any more conversation, she leaned and opened the top drawer beneath the mirror and carefully pulled forth a baby’s curl tied in a blue ribbon, a wedding ring, and a spoon, all three of which she laid on the dressing table before her.

She lifted her eyes to meet mine in the mirror. “These tell the same story as what you have told. But they speak a plainer, sadder truth.”

Now I was a little stung. I folded my arms across my chest. “Do they? I do not hear them.”

She shrugged. “That is because words do nothing but clamor, they are so greedy for attention; they bid Truth lie down within their windy chamber and tell her to hush.”

I burst out laughing.

She shrugged and swept the things back into her hands, then swiftly replaced them in the drawer. “You are more wed to your precious story than to the truth these tell.”

I flushed.

“It must be so,” she finished quietly. “You did not even ask whose ring that was.”

“Whose ring was it, then?”

“Mother’s.”

I took the three steps between us in one and swung Susannah around on her seat. For a long moment, we stared at each other, until Sue flinched beneath my grip upon her arms. I softened my hold. “She gave it you?”

Now she could not keep the triumph from off her face. “Yes.”

“What did she say, then?”

Sue paused and looked away. “She said, ‘For your book.’”

“Nay,” I said sadly.

She sat, rubbing one hand against the place where I had held her too tightly. “I do not know what the ring means, only that it is Mother’s and that she did not wish it to be lost, nor for it to be explained.”

“Nay,” I repeated.

19 April

The grass struggles out from under icy patches in the back field and the earth is a sickly color, as if someone had knocked the breath from out the green—though there is a bluish sky.

April the thirtieth—

The hungry birds are returned; the titmouse hops with the finch upon the short grasses of the lawn, and there is the flutter of wings beneath the eaves up here beside me. All in the world is wet and surging from the moon tide—yesterday, three dories drifted past our wharf, burst free of their moorings, the snapped lines slipping from the bow. Ah—

10 May

Abby’s shriek began it. I lifted my head from off the page to listen, and it came again, a deep, wailing cry this time, long and awful. I rushed to the door, pulling it wide. “Susannah?” I called out. “Do you hear?” Overhead, I heard her come running even as I also ran toward the dining room to find our Abby. But through the long windows of that room, facing front, my eye caught sight of her figure hurrying down the lawn—and then I saw it all, too.