“No ma’am.” Foster stood blinking at her. His dogs behind the gate curled into the sawdust, already sleeping, as if the strange woman was speaking a lullaby to them.

“I don’t sound like some old woman going on in years with her head tilted by all this tragedy in her family? I don’t sound that way to you?”

He grinned at her. “What you sound like is my dad. He had this theory that almost everything people do is not what they want but what they think the world wants them to do. He’d wonder what sort of world it would be, after things got sorted out, if everybody just started doing what they really wanted. And he would grin and say it would be paradise for those that survived the blood of it getting sorted out. I think he was talking about the same sort of thing you’re talking about.”

“It’s the nature of a human to be vicious.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“But all any of us really wants, in our hearts, is that one long golden day.”

“Yes ma’am.”

They were both quiet then. After a time Prudence said, “Except for the part about Peter we do not know, any of us, what she found. Who she found. But there was nothing said that made us think she found her mother. But what it seems like, is the person she was addressing—we think it was the boy, the white boy she thought she’d killed all those years ago. We think maybe he wasn’t killed after all. That he survived. You talk to Abby. She was the one there. Hearing Mother. She’s told me but still she’s the one for you to ask.”

Foster nodded. Then asked, “The boy, the white boy, the one who attacked her? He was the son of the man who owned her?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes to both. But he was more than that. He was her half brother.”

“Now wait,” Foster said.

But she did not wait. “He was her brother. Because her father was the man that owned her mother. That owned her too. That owned his own daughter.”

He sat up in bed in the dark room. The old house still but for nightsounds around him. The creak of a joist. A settling snap of a stairboard. The room of his grandfather. His own father’s room had long since been turned into a sewing room by Abigail. He’d not explored the heavy old furniture, the fixtures of the room. But had opened the old valise that had once been his mother’s to find a fresh shirt for the morning and turned back the covers and blown out the lamp and stripped down in the dark and got into the big old soft bed. Where his grandparents had slept. The mattress still heaved up in the middle to a soft ridge. And pushed himself up to sit. An unfamiliar dark room.