Maybe there’s some truth to what they say about second sight, or intuition, or whatever you want to call it, because on the morning Ursula Kassmeyer receives the message from Scotland, she wakes up thinking vividly of Mutti.

Her sisters don’t remember this woman they once called Mutti, but Ursula does. There’s a little irony in this, because Frederica and Gertrud were the ones who wept so bitterly as that long-ago train rattled northward from Florida to New York, who cried and cried for Mutti’s fragrant, loving arms, while Ursula remained dry-eyed and comforted them. But eventually the younger ones dried their tears, they called for Mutti less and less, and by the time they were settled in a little villa outside Paris, near a village on the Marne river where Maman’s uncle still lived—Nurse said she was not their nurse anymore, but Maman—only Ursula stayed awake in her bed at night and remembered all the little details of Mutti, her smile and her kisses, her patient instruction at the piano, her pale hair that felt like silk against your cheek. Only Ursula gazed upon the painting of the Madonna in the village church and thought of Mutti. Only Ursula recalled the beach and the picnics, the magical man with the ginger hair and the gigantic laugh who swung you up screaming in the air and caught you just before you dunked in the water. Mr. Thorpe. She even remembered his name.

Maybe if Maman had been less drunk, if she had spent less time sick in her bed or else out all night, sometimes all the next day or even several days together, Ursula might have forgotten Mutti, instead of holding the little shards of memory close to her heart and turning them over and over, examining each tiny facet, each glint, each inclusion. But what other comfort did she have? Only God and her great-uncle, who was old and not well himself. When he died—this was maybe a year or so before the Great War started, when Ursula was twelve years old—Maman moved them all into Paris itself, a few grubby rooms on the top floor of a building in the Montparnasse, where there was little food, less heat, and almost no money at all.

But isn’t this how Ursula became what she is today? Those lean days in wartime Paris, scrounging for food and knowledge. This morning, as Ursula forces her body out of bed, the dark, frozen air brings back the memory of those nights in Paris, huddled under a moth-eaten blanket with her sisters. The days in Paris, helping out Madame Pistou at the boulangerie around the corner, shaping the dough into endless loaves, in order to earn some bread for them to eat. The stinking gutters, the wounded soldiers hobbling down the street with their stricken faces.