The flaring police lights came back on, the siren emitted a quick squeal and Brad drove away, leaving Colleen at the roadside. Remember where you are. But in his deep southern accent, which seemed to have become pronounced in her absence, he might just as well have said, Remember who you are.

Colleen leaned against the bumper of the Jeep, closed her eyes and raised her face to the naked South Carolina sun. She and Hallie had always believed that it was their sun, made for them, shining on them.

I know who I am, don’t you worry, mister, she wanted to holler at Brad’s fading taillights. I’m a New Yorker. A travel writer, and a damn good one.

•   •   •

After a dismal job hunt spent traipsing up and down the streets of New York that first spring, from one interview to another, the spent cherry blossoms dusting the sidewalks like pink snow, Colleen had refused to give up and go home. She’d been relentless, undeterred, returning again and again to those who’d told her no, as if the intimate rejection of her sister and Walter had padded and softened other rejections, rendering them inconsequential in comparison. Eventually, she’d landed her first job, writing for the Daily News about local getaways for New Yorkers. She’d sold her engagement ring at a pawn shop and got by on small jobs until, one by one, in what felt like agonizingly slow succession, she’d been hired for better jobs, and bigger publications, able to leave Maggie’s basement.

In the decade since then she’d compiled a record of every locale she’d visited and every article she’d written. For a long while she’d collected bumper stickers, not to put on a car, but as a reminder of where she’d been. Now she carried in her mind a watercolor montage of travel. She couldn’t tell someone if she’d gone to Poland before or after London, but she could describe the emotional impression of each city, each landscape imprinted in her personal geography.

If she wanted the longitude and latitude, the name and coordinates, of every place she’d been, she could dig through piles of papers and notes and final published articles. But what she actually remembered was visceral and palpable. The window of her hotel room in Zermatt had framed the Matterhorn as it thrust from the earth in a pinnacle of glory, its snowy crown white and glistening. At a Navajo dance around a campfire in Arizona the flames had seemed to lick the stars, wanting to eat them alive. At the observatory at Mauna Kea in Hawaii the earth had faded away, overtaken by the sky with its multitude of stars and bringing to life the ancient belief that gods were hidden within the constellations.