After Samuel left, Maria and Abraham Dias settled into the routine of two people in mourning. They comforted each other, for each knew sorrow. Men who were sailors rarely became accustomed to living on land, and Abraham Dias longed for the life he’d once had. He spent his days waiting for his son, even though Samuel might be gone for months at a time. The old man’s memory had begun to fail more each day, still he knew that he was in New York, and that he lived in his son’s house with a beautiful woman whose name he sometimes forgot, especially in the evenings when Maria returned from searching for Faith and poured him a glass of port. All the same, Abraham shared his stories with her as he sipped his nightly drink. He always remembered these stories, even though he’d often forgotten what he’d had for his supper that very day. He told her about the joy of riding on the back of a whale, the salt spray filling his mouth, and about a land where all the bears were white and it was so cold the earth was covered with ice even in the heart of August, and about the Barbary Coast, where the leopards and lions would eat beef from the palm of your hand if you had the nerve to reach out to them, and where diamonds glittered up through holes in the earth, as if there were stars not only above but below. The stories that she loved best were when Abraham recounted his son’s early days at sea, when the young Samuel was so captivated by the starry heavens above he didn’t sleep at night, but instead lay on his back on the deck memorizing the position of the stars so that he might chart the sky.

Abraham Dias tired easily and went to bed directly after he had his nightly meal, which was just as well. He would have been confused by the women who came to the door in search of remedies once darkness had fallen. He likely would have looked among them for his wife, who had been gone for so long. She had been young and beautiful when he first met her and he had loved her too much, so much that she still appeared in his dreams, although she had been burned to ash long ago. Her name was Regine, but she was called Reina, for to Abraham she was a queen.