“Samuel Mallory had his faults,” she says. “We all do, I guess. But he was an honorable man. He was a good man. He always wanted to do the right thing, even when he fell short. He loved me. He loved his daughter. Everything else came second. He would have died for us both. If you’re going to write this book of yours, you have to make that clear, because unless you understand that, you can’t understand Sam at all.”

“What about his wife? Didn’t he love his wife?”

This brings her up short. She studies the question for some time. So long, in fact, that I start to wonder whether she means to answer me at all, whether we will ever get to the heart of the matter.

I continue. “Men, you know. They talk all the time about love and fidelity, but in the end they just follow their own inclinations to populate the earth, and who suffers? The wives and the children they leave behind. And that’s something I take personally, because the same thing happened to me. My father left my mother for another woman, and I wound up getting myself in the kind of trouble that a girl often gets into when she loses a father, the kind of trouble she never recovers from, the kind of trouble that haunts her all her life.”

“I see,” she says. “What kind of trouble, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Ah, but we aren’t talking about me, remember? We’re talking about you and Mallory and what really happened in that space of time between Los Angeles and Sydney, Australia. Not what the newspapers reported. Not what the photographs showed, God knows. The truth.”

Lindquist crosses her arms and kicks a tuft of grass and stares out to sea. A gust of wind dares to tangle her famous hair, the hair that Mallory first cut for her on Howland Island.

“All right,” she says. “I’ll tell you the truth. I just don’t know if it will be enough for you.”

One last thing, the most important thing, though I’ve never told a soul until now. Remember that fellow at the law firm, the married lawyer who impregnated me? That was my stepfather.

Aviatrix by Eugenia Everett (excerpt)

August 1928: Australia

Irene had some inkling what to expect when they touched down in Sydney, a little more than forty hours after their rescue from Howland. The captain’s briefing, the radiograms from Morrow, had all made clear the worldwide sensation their disappearance had caused, how everybody in America and around the globe had followed the story with utmost interest.