Lily glanced at the arch over the wishing well—there was the house name, Sea Garden, its letters just a little more rusty, a bit more filigreed from the salt air, than they had been nine years earlier. The sight gave her a pang so deep, she gasped out loud. Lily was really home. A breeze blew off Long Island Sound—salt water, just like the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Maritime Canada, where she had lived and hidden these last nine years. But this night breeze was warm, gentle, filled with scents of marsh grass and sandy beaches—instead of the fjord's arctic cliffs and cold, clear water flowing straight off the pack ice.

“Oh my,” she said out loud, alive with the thrill of finally coming home. The roses greeted her—their perfume filled the air, and if the ones growing up the trellis beside the front door were slightly less well tended than they'd been nine years ago, they were still profuse and extravagant. Lily reached up, through the thorns, to feel underneath the shingle just beside the dark porch light, and there it was—the key her grandmother had always kept hidden there, guarded by the roses' foliage and thorns. “She didn't move it,” she whispered.

“Of course she didn't,” Liam said in her ear, standing behind her with Rose. “She never stopped hoping you'd come back.”

“Maeve is coming home too,” Lily said, opening the squeaky screen door, holding it open with her shoulder, fumbling with the key in the rusty old door lock. “Right? Tell me she's going to be okay—”

“She will be, Lily,” Liam said.

Lily felt the key turn. Nine years later, the door made the same bump as it opened, one of the hinges hanging just slightly. Stepping into the kitchen . . . smelling beach-house dampness encroaching from the absence of its owner. Yet someone—Clara, obviously—had opened a few windows. Lily walked through the first floor as if she were a ghost, haunting her most beloved, familiar place on earth.

Lily began to smile. “It's all the same,” she whispered. The moon had risen out of the Sound, casting a gleaming white light on the calm water, its pale light flooding the room. Lily saw the familiar slipcovers, braided rugs, pillows she had needlepointed for her grandmother. She ran her fingers over her old shell collection, books in the bookcase, moonstones gathered at low tide on Little Beach.

She had to see everything, yet she couldn't turn on a lamp yet. If she turned on a light, it would mean she was committed to this. “This” meaning that she was really here, that her exile was over, that she had returned to the land of the living. Neighbors would see the light and come over. People would know that she was back.

Edward would find out.

“Where does Rose sleep?” Liam asked.