“I can manage them,” I say, laughing lightly. I’m their mother, after all. And yet Emma’s climbing the furniture and Charlie’s trying to push me into the wall and Max is drooling onto my boots and I’ve been home less than five minutes and I’m already ready for a break.

Sally’s eyes crinkle. “She likes to do it. And she wants the distraction too.”

They’re not related by blood that I know of, but Sally’s always doted on Avery like a substitute grandmother. It’s the way of things here. When there are vacancies, we fill them.

I turn toward the tall western windows and see Avery making her way across the long lawn in a blousy floral sundress, the overgrown grass turning her usually elegant gait into the clomp of a normal teenager.

She was a promising ballerina until a few years ago. I remember her as a reedy tween, practicing stretches against the school fence, toe to her ear, everyone’s jaw dropping. She went off to study at an elite school in Cardiff, still going despite the war, but two weeks in, a boy dropped her, and her ankle snapped in a way that’ll never be fully repaired.

Poor Avery’s been a little adrift since she got back. Her on-off local boyfriend’s away at war and not always able to answer emails, and her future’s a question mark. She works part-time at the village school, but right now, all the kids are gone except for mine.

Except for mine.

My heart flips. Avery picks her way toward the stone steps, her blond hair blowing behind her like a banner.

It’s the first time I’ve realized it in any practical sense. That’s why it’s so quiet here today. Everyone else sent their children to Sunnan. Only my children are still here. And Avery herself, eighteen now, still practically a child. There’s a wrongness about it. They’re not where they’re meant to be.

Or maybe it’s the opposite. A sick sense of rightness. John said the reverend would never have allowed Charlie on the boat. He had to be here, and he is.

“Do you have any thoughts on the Day?” Sally asks behind me, and I startle. I nearly confess that I’m starting to think it’s a pretty dubious holiday when she gently puts in, “A dinner for the islanders or something of the sort?”

“Oh!” I blink, seeing Emma perched too high on one of the armchairs. “Down, Emma, on your bottom.” I turn back to Sally. “Is that the tradition?”

“It was once.”

I wonder how many years ago “once” indicates. Time is a funny thing on Lute, all those centuries smudged together in the stories, in the landscape.