“Terns, of course. So we can fly to the coast.”

“And from there?”

“We fly over the dunes and then over the water, where our wings slap the waves. The ocean is a mirror beneath us, and the sun is the sun, and we soar on and on, chasing the edge of the world, and the start of the sky, and the place where the wind begins. ‘But where exactly are we going?’ you ask, ’cause you always have to ask something, and in answer, I say…I say…”

“Everywhere.”

I stayed by his side the next night. And the next three after that.

There was too much to talk about, so many days and months to cover. I told him about the Holdridges and how they’d surprised me by being more than I could’ve hoped for. I didn’t love them as I loved Mama—but I did love them. I told him how I adored books and theater. Fine assemblies with dancing. All the things he’d helped me learn, things that had felt so foreign to me in the past, I now enjoyed.

Asa told me all about the privateering he’d been doing. After escaping the Royal Navy, just as Tom Hackett had predicted he would, Asa had gone right back to seizing British ships for profit.

“They’ve been dangerous years, but good ones. This war turns on the sea. I’ve been fortunate to know what to do about it.”

With no home nor family to care for, he’d poured his prize earnings into starting his own fleet. He now had the Endurance and two schooners, and was also part owner of two more schooners with his uncle.

The judge’s secret political allegiance surprised me. How could a man who’d upheld England’s laws support the American cause? A man who’d almost been tarred and feathered by a mob shouting for liberty? But Asa explained that his uncle wanted peace and justice above all and no longer had faith that England could deliver it.

While Asa had prospered in the war, his father had lost two ships to foul weather, and another two to privateers. This had put him upside down with creditors and led to his ruin—which had severed clean his relationship with Asa.

“He blames me for his demise. My ships weren’t the ones that seized his, but they easily could have been. To him, I am every American privateersman.”

Though Asa claimed otherwise, I knew their estrangement still caused him pain. Some relationships just didn’t end well. I knew that from Sewel—and from my parting with Asa years ago.

With our lost years taking shape, we started debating ideas just as we had on the Ambrosia.

“ ‘We can only love what we know,’ ” I read from the book on my lap. “That is Barbauld. I think it’s wrong, as I love surprises and those are unknowns. What do you think?”

“I agree with you, and poems are my proof. Does one know them and love them, or does one feel them and love them?”