A sea change. Perhaps that was true for all of them.

After Dunne’s ship was released from its moorings, Hazel meandered up Campbell Street, making a mental list of all the things she needed to do. It was a Sunday; the practice was closed. When she got back to the house, she would read a chapter in a medical book Dunne had suggested and prepare some remedies with the herbs she’d hung to dry. Perhaps she and Maeve would take Ruby to Mount Wellington for a picnic supper: cured ham, boiled eggs, cheese, apples. They’d bring the currant cake Maeve had baked that morning and left on the table to cool.

As she approached the house, Hazel saw Maeve kneeling in the herb garden. It was a perfectly ordinary scene, Maeve gathering mint. But something seemed amiss.

Hazel felt a finger of fear run down her back. Why wasn’t Ruby with her?

“Maeve,” she called, trying to keep her voice steady.

Maeve turned with a smile. “There you are!”

“Where’s Ruby?”

Maeve sat back on her heels and dusted off her hands. “In the back, with a friend of Dr. Dunne’s. I told him the doctor was away, but he wanted to meet her—said he was on the ship when she was born. I told him I’d make tea. He asked for mint.” Maeve held up a sprig.

Hazel’s skin felt clammy. She couldn’t quite catch her breath. “What is his name?”

“Tuck. I think.”

“Buck,” Hazel breathed. “No. No.”

“Oh dear,” Maeve said, seeing Hazel’s stricken expression, “did—”

Hazel ran up the steps and flung open the front door. “Ruby?” she called. “Ruby!”

No one was in the parlor or the examining room or the kitchen. She threw open the door to Ruby’s room. Empty. She looked in Dunne’s bedroom, then in the small room Maeve was staying in. She could hear her own jagged breathing. Her thudding footsteps.

Maeve, behind her now, said, “I’m sorry, Hazel, I didn’t—”

“Shh.” Hazel held up a finger and stood very still, her head cocked like a hound’s. She went to the back door and looked through the pane.

There he was, about fifty feet back in the long garden, standing beside Ruby as she bent over the fairy houses. Too close. His sandy hair was slicked back from his forehead, his beard roughly trimmed. His shirt and trousers looked clean. Respectable, even. But there was a strangeness to his look, something off-kilter. He was painfully thin. Gaunt. As if he hadn’t eaten in weeks.

Hazel saw the glint of a knife in his hand. “Stay here,” she told Maeve. Stepping outside, she called, “Hello!” Fighting to keep her voice calm.

Ruby flapped her hand. “Come see my new fairy house!”

Buck gave Hazel a long look across the grass.

Her heart tick-ticking in her chest, Hazel walked toward them. She felt like a deer in a clearing, aware of the hunter, every fiber of her alert. She saw the scene in front of her with heightened clarity: a cluster of insects above the lavender, two orange-breasted kingfishers swooping among the trees, the tiny green shells looped around Ruby’s neck. Buck’s grimy fingernails. The dirt that rimmed his collar.