Faith stowed away bones and leavings from her supper, wrapped them in a handkerchief, then sneaked them into a basket and went off, saying she would return from the market with some vegetables and herbs. She wore her cloak and her boots even though the weather was fine. The fiddlehead ferns were unfolding; bloodroot and trout lilies grew in profusion in the marshland. There was a shadow following her, as there always was. Her dear wild heart, her other, who pretended to be what he was not just as she did. People looked out their windows and swore they spied a black wolf that wore a dog’s collar, skulking down the cobbled streets, though most in the area had been killed for bounties or for their fur.

Faith found her way across the meadows and headed into the woods, allowing memory to lead her. The town had grown, but there was still plenty of wild land and acres filled with pine and oak, old chestnuts and elms, witch hazel and fragrant wild cherry, with its delicious fruit and poisonous seed. At last, Faith came to a muddy clearing where Maria had made a path. When she scraped at the ground with her boot heel, the blue stones Maria had carried from the ledge of the lake were still there. The roughly made slatted fence ringing the garden had tumbled down and was covered by wild ivy. There was the tiny tilted house, a neglected hunting shack her mother had worked so hard to make into a home. The windows had been covered with thick translucent paper, but that was torn apart now, for raccoons and weasels had taken up residence inside, and one year a bear had made its home in the cabin through summer and the last smoldering blaze of autumn. The seeds of the grapes he had eaten had sprouted and there were now wild grapevines growing over the roof, with wide green leaves unfolding. And there was something Faith didn’t recognize, the tree Samuel Dias had brought here from a thousand miles away, planted in the hours before Maria Owens left Massachusetts. People in town said that if you stood beneath the magnolia, your beloved would come to you, no matter the season or the time, and when its flowers bloomed those who passed by became confused, imagining there had been snow in May, or that stars had fallen from the sky.