“I tell you, a name means nothing, Maisie Thomas,” Cook said. “She was Mama, once.”

When I heard the door shut to, I pushed aside the bed curtains. A child looked back at me from the glass: the little white face and wide eyes staring from beneath the shock of hair. I could not see it. I could not imagine the long carriage ride home from Grange House after Susannah had given me into Papa’s arms. The big man and the baby cozed tight against him. The stops in Portland, Portsmouth, Boston, Providence, New Haven. Down the long, fingered coastline between Miss Grange and Mama, down he traveled with me. When did he decide not to tell the whole secret to Mama? When did he think it best to leave the lie buried beneath the rocky topsoil of Maine?

When I woke again, sunlight streamed through the sheer curtains, and there was no one by my bed. I rose upon my elbow and looked out the window and down the lawn. An old woman stood alone there in the middle, as if she had forgotten whether her direction lay up or down. She looked weary, from my post, and a little lost. For several moments, she stood in the midst of that bright, shining green lawn; then she turned, and I saw it was Mrs. Hunnowell.

With a cry, I sprang from my bed and pulled open the door into the passage. Cook was hurrying up the stairs toward me.

“Come!” she said. “They have brought him back.” She took my hand and led the way to Bart’s door, then flung it wide, and we stopped upon the threshold.

He lay upon the bed, a sheet pulled up to his chin, his hair combed from off his face, and his hands crossed upon his chest. I stood unmoving for some time, afraid to venture closer, my eyes riveted to his beloved face, stilled upon the pillow. It was all I knew to do, my poor heart formal, implacable, and my brain reciting: Dead. Dead. I watched because my eyes simply refused another task. And the grave that was my heart stirred its soil. My father and Miss Grange lay in me, entwined, as would Bart. As would Mama also. In me, there need not be dividing lines, my own body a graveyard without the little plots. What did it matter who had borne me? All of them were gone.

Cook still held my hand in hers, and just then I grew sensible of her abiding touch. “Come,” she whispered, and she pulled me forward to where my love lay upon the bed.

My heart saw the sweet lips. My heart saw the strong hands resting upon the coverlet. “How did he come here?”

“Night seiners pulled him from off a drifting spar.”

I turned cautiously round, not daring to understand what her words promised.