One might expect to feel some degree of shame, some shriveling, weighty compunction, after cheating on one’s husband in the wide-open middle of a country lane not a mile from one’s own house, but as we turn and walk Mrs. Wickett northward, each of us assigned to one of her elbows, I feel a child’s giddiness bubbling inside my chest. I have to keep batting down the helium-buoyed grin that keeps rising. I’ve gone insane. But the sky is such a deep, vivid blue, and the ground is sturdy beneath us, and the wind smells like life.

We are here. Alive. Maybe not for long, but for now. I hope Mrs. Wickett can catch this sensation, pull it into herself, drown out the pain and grief and know that this is why she’s still here, for the sheer joy of walking up the heath with Matthew Clare on her arm.

Something is happening to me.

When we reach the old castle walls, I keep my eyes trained on the track ahead, and I see her again, that impression of a dead woman in the far corner of my right eye. I hold my breath and dare a glance, and she’s still there, a stranger in apron and cap, blood spilling down over her cheek, eyes empty and staring. I can see through her to the stacked stones of the wall. The wind blows, I blink, and when I look again, I’m not surprised to find her gone. Even when she was visible, that woman was gone, dead, vanished.

Dead is dead whether it happened five minutes ago or a thousand years past. Time changes nothing. No wonder it’s so layered here, the past so present.

Matty doesn’t say a word as we approach Alder House. He doesn’t serve me with a look of caution, because he knows he doesn’t need to. I draw a swirl on Mrs. Wickett’s back with the palm of my hand, murmuring, “We’re so glad you’re here,” and set myself a new course along the lawn, away from them and into the next dream of this impossible day.

On the edge of the garden, someone’s laid out long folding tables for a makeshift bar. Lannie and Will Miller are hauling wheelbarrows down the gravel drive behind us packed with beer kegs and cider casks. I haven’t seen this many people here since the wedding when there were over three hundred guests and none of them mine. These are mine now.

Brian waves to me from across the lawn, then sticks his hands back in his pockets with a worried expression. I know what he’s going to ask by the time he lopes over. “You don’t mind, do you?”