I put my hand upon her arm. “Nay, Aunt,” I said simply.

And her name upon my lips did not soften the thick woman before me, thick and slow with the secrets she had wrapped round her year by year.

“Aye.” She nodded again, still sad. “You cannot see me, though you look. You see Susannah of the diary.” She nearly laughed. “And then you see Cook of Grange House.”

“There is a vast gap between,” I admitted.

She pursed her lip, studying me for an instant. “There, then. Look there in that gap. Look there—for me.”

Slowly, she took my hand from off her arm, but she kept hold of my hand in hers.

“Now. Go to her,” she uttered.

And so, at last, I turned my feet in the direction of Mama’s room. I stood a long while in the passageway outside the door, my hand upon the knob. My hand? And hers, and hers, and hers, and all of them written into these walls; we finally turned the knob on her door. Jessie slept in the chair beside her, and the lamp was low. I looked again at the bed, my eyes filling with tears at my poor mother’s frail white form. For there she was after all: the hand I had held, the cheeks I had kissed, the shoulder I had sobbed my childish pittances upon. It was as little as this—her body was all that remained behind to remind me of my own small self. And I understood then what Susannah had said. For there, before me upon the bed, lay all my past—suspired within her bosom, the gentle casing of my own heart.

Like the quarry, like the ocean—there is the surface, and then the deep. Who they had been, these women before me, was all round me in that room. The Widow Grange, Miss Grange, Susannah—even Halcy, my own lost cousin. I had seen. I had sat beside. I had considered that I knew.

And yet the attic story was my mother’s story, the one I lived beneath and never knew. I was a grave, repeating. It was I my mother buried by her words. And then set free.

“Mama,” I whispered into her ear, “it is Maisie.” And then I could speak no more; I laid my forehead on her still hand and wept.