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Chapters (36)
  1. Title Page
  2. Epigraph
  3. VOLUME I
  4. CHAPTER ONE
  5. CHAPTER TWO
  6. CHAPTER THREE
  7. CHAPTER FOUR
  8. CHAPTER FIVE
  9. CHAPTER SIX
  10. CHAPTER SEVEN
  11. CHAPTER EIGHT
  12. CHAPTER NINE
  13. CHAPTER TEN
  14. VOLUME II
  15. CHAPTER ELEVEN
  16. CHAPTER TWELVE
  17. CHAPTER THIRTEEN
  18. CHAPTER FOURTEEN
  19. CHAPTER FIFTEEN
  20. CHAPTER SIXTEEN
  21. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
  22. CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
  23. CHAPTER NINETEEN
  24. CHAPTER TWENTY
  25. VOLUME III
  26. CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
  27. CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
  28. CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
  29. CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
  30. CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
  31. CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
  32. CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
  33. AFTERWORD
  34. PRAISE FOR Grange House
  35. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  36. Copyright Page

We are grown used to the split house, Susannah below, and I hardly go downstairs to her region. The attic suits me.

And today, I have seen my little one’s grave.

“Are you strong enough?” Sue’s voice trembled as she asked me.

I nodded and handed Susannah her wrap. It was a gray morning—snow already upon the ground, and the sky heavy with more. I leaned upon my sister’s arm and we walked out, down the steps and out across the white fields to the woods. Arm in arm we walked, without speaking, and for the first time in a long while, there was the old capacious ease.

Slowly, we tended toward the place where a part of me lies buried. And at the moment when the clearing appeared through the deep trees, my heart raced forward and I dropped Susannah’s arm and ran to the spot.

It is so little after all, the place. The stone, the mound of earth, the name.

PERDITA GRANGE

Pray for Her

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

When I put down her book, there was scarlet in the sky. All through the night I had read, turning page after closewritten page without looking up, so absorbed in the story, I hardly moved in my chair. So long had I lived in Nell Grange’s world, looking outward through her heart and mind, that when I raised up and saw Miss Grange’s shrouded body before me, I could not affirm with whose eyes I now saw.

I stood and drew to her window. The morning lifted slowly higher, drawing darkness from the waters until the harbor shimmered a reply to the down-turned face of that peach-and-golden sky. The first of the morning’s boats slid past Grange House pier in silence, the long double oars dipped in and pulled, dipped and pulled, past the breakwater and out to sea. How simple, how beautiful the dark boat passing by appeared. And the dark outlines of buoys upon the flat sea mapped a particular world of lobstermen, reefs, and catches, so the fever of those last words upon the page cooled in the dim calm. Here was water marked. Here, ordinary answers clung to the bottom of those long lines where solid weight and flesh slunk and snapped into the rope nettings resting there at the harbor’s bottom. I was a young woman. I was Maisie Thomas. I pressed my palm flat against the middle pane and leaned my brow into the clear glass.