I felt disloyal to Richard at first, focusing thus on the doctor, but then I stopped and realized how much time had passed—how much life had been lived since he’d been there. And how I felt a different person now anyway, with scales falling from my vision week by week, and a heart softening in new ways. I closed my eyes and breathed in the air spiced with autumn and spoke to my companion. “It seems like an eternity since I’ve come . . . and no time at all.”

Bridget stood, wiping her arm across her brow. “Comin’ round to the place, are you?”

I shrugged, tossing another armload of leaves onto my basket and stuffing them down. “For now. I’ve become used to it, but I cannot help but think every day about what I’m missing out there.” I looked down at my hands, cracked and dry. How removed my former life seemed, how surreal. Just another of my vivid dreams.

Nurses appeared at the asylum doors, opening them and ushering out the long-stay patients, who limped, shuffled, and stumbled out into the grassy expanse for their airing out. They marched in a large, odd-shaped circle with the slower ones on the inside, the more able-bodied ones rounding out the edges. Something softened in me when I spotted Anna wrapped around her music box as she shuffled forward, a lost look upon her face.

Bridget swept up another armload of leaves from beneath an ancient beech tree and dropped them in the wheelbarrow. “Did I ever tell you about my Michael? A widower with four of his own when I met him, and not a woman in five parishes would have him because of it, until me. We’ve been wed nigh on eight years now, and he’s a good ’un.”

“You’ve not said much about him.” I didn’t push—Bridget had a way of unraveling the facts as she talked if a person only let her. “Do you miss him very much?”

“Of course I do.” She paused to shove the cloth back onto her hair and sighed. “That man can melt me from the inside with a look. He has me heart on a platter. But it weren’t always that way. He were a disappointment at the start, you know.”

“Was he terribly difficult?”

“Terribly quiet, is all. Well see, he ain’t me big brother. He’s no fiddle-playin’, knee-slappin’, big-laugh man full of life and fun. Such a disappointment, and never once in those early years did I look him full in those chocolate eyes and feel their own unique magic. Fool thing it was, wasting the first six years mournin’ the way I thought things should be. Nearly missed the blessin’ of what was.” She leveled a meaningful look at me. “It’s like they say—clouds don’t stop the sun shining, just you from seeing it.”