Maria laughed. “That is none of your business,” she told Abraham in a firm, gentle voice.

“Love is my business,” he insisted. “Long ago I was an artist. You didn’t know that, and why should you? You don’t know everything about me. That was what I did before I went to sea. I made the most beautiful marriage contracts that could be had. A bride-to-be would have her family pay any price for my work. I constructed them from a single piece of parchment that I cut into shapes and words with a small pair of shears. When the brides-to-be saw the documents, they wept. The grooms fell to their knees, grateful to be alive in the world. Believe what I say. I know about love.”

Maria was forced to lean close, for she could hardly hear him. His voice was a whisper; it was leaving him now. The light inside him was rising up. She opened the windows so his spirit would be free once it left his body. We are birds, Hannah had once told her. They sit inside of us waiting to fly away.

“No one can fall in love with me,” Maria told Abraham. “Don’t wish that on your son.”

“I know love when I see it,” Abraham Dias insisted. “I see it in you.”

He gave her his ring and told her the secret that he had learned about love during his time on earth. Then he closed his eyes. He had nothing more to say; he wasn’t even in the room anymore, not in Manhattan, not in the year of 1691, not in a house on Maiden Lane. He was with his wife when he first met her. How beautiful she was, with her straight black hair that was so long she could sit on it, or wear it wound atop her head so that she looked like a queen who wore a dark crown. When you fall in love like that, time doesn’t matter. This was the secret he told Maria, the last words he ever said.

What belonged to you once, will always belong to you.

Be grateful if you have walked through the world with another’s heart in your hand.