When I awoke, Cook still sat by my side, and Jessie was nowhere about. I had the impression Cook had watched me as I slept, and I pushed up against the bedclothes so I could sit. She gave me water to drink, and then, still watching me, she said very carefully, “Nell was not your true mother.”

“She was.”

“No, Maisie. That was a book.”

“It was she who wrote the book.”

She shook her head firmly. “A book about the past, about what is past.”

“What is past is fiction. Who I am is not who I am.”

Cook was suddenly impatient. “Did she nurse you in your sickness? Did she teach you how to read, or how to dress your hair?”

I was silent.

“Maisie!” Cook bent her face close to mine. “Maisie, you had a mother. You had one, and now you would toss her away because of a story in a book!”

“But what does it mean—to have a mother?”

Cook took my hand, the tears welling in her own eyes. “Someone who watched you, Maisie.” She blinked. “Someone who watched what you did, who saw you as you moved from room to room in your childhood. Someone who saw … you.”

I turned my head upon the pillow and saw she was speaking of herself—and Halcy. And my own eyes filled.

Then the bemused look in my mother’s eyes, the slight twitching of her mouth as she waited for me to speak came to me. Waiting—the two of them turned round and waited for me to follow, their eyes upon me. But now there was the third pair of eyes watching me from the window, the eyes that had seen me but not known what they looked upon. In Miss Grange’s room, I had felt most … wide, most possible. In her eyes, I was become multiple.

I looked back at Cook bleakly. “Can’t you see? That woman in the diary—she belongs to me. She was my mother, more my mother in kind than my own mother. Had she lived—”

“Had she lived, you never would have known what you do now.”

It was true. This present moment was the child of my parents’ deaths, my knowledge nursed to being by departed ghosts.

“What would you have me do?” I asked her dully. “How am I to speak to my heart?”

“Tell it to remember, Maisie,” said she. I shook my head, biting my lip to stop its shaking. “Tell it to recall—”

“There is nothing to recall but another girl’s childhood,” I said simply, and closed my eyes wearily. “Had she lived, she would have guided me. She would have known what I should feel.”

Cook let go my hand. “It matters little, Maisie, when she who raised you lies next door—and waits for your farewell.”

I shook my head mournfully. “Who am I to bid her farewell, when I cannot even call her by her name?”