I wasn’t lost anymore. I was the Other Woman, clichéd in my immorality. I was the demon my mother always accused me of being, someone who left chaos in her wake. A taker.

So I made one last moral decision: hide. Tuck myself away in a retirement community with Gran and do as little harm as possible. I stayed there for as long as I could stand it. Three years in stasis. I might have stayed in Florida forever if not for Gran insisting we check off her biggest bucket list item, crossing the Atlantic in a Cunard ship. I might have gone back to Florida forever if our cabin hadn’t been so small, if Gran hadn’t gone to sleep at nine o’clock every night, if she hadn’t snored loud enough to make me throw on a cheap evening gown and venture out alone.

And meet Hugh. And feel the world tilt.

It’s tilting now. Fuck. The wind blows panic into me, so fierce I wonder if my heart will give out.

From the corner of my eye, I see someone slumped against the bumpy edge of the old castle wall. Another death. I turn, hands pressed to my chest, but there’s nothing there. A trick of the light against the uneven stone, and yet I could describe to you exactly what I saw—the corpse of an old woman dressed in gray linen with a thick cap on her head, blood pooling out from the edge.

Not there, I confirm again. I’m imagining things. Lute goes funny on the Day.

I breathe in the salty air, blinking hard against the light. Stay calm. Alert but calm.

And here comes that marching sound again. This time to the north. There and then gone. I’m losing it.

I’m approaching the war memorial from the southeast, treading the same footpath through the rocky green as everyone always has, for as long as this place was occupied, maybe. I could walk anywhere, there’s no rule, but every day, I keep to the path. Even Max, when he escapes his lead, sprints straight down the path until a smell leads him astray. We’re pulled to a place, to a path, without knowing it’s happening. Without any compelling reason why except that it’s the way of things.

The war memorial stands in the meadow, forming the third point of a triangle with the church and the edge of the village. It mirrors the church, a miniature spire. I feel the need to see it again, to take it in, the blankness of it, so I walk closer, enough to press my hands to it.

The north face is etched with a poem, a copy of the one on the cenotaph in London, Hugh said.