She sent Libby another smile. “I always say that there are some born here. Some who visit. Some who leave. Others who stay. And it isn’t because of circumstances or opportunities. When we stay, it’s because the islands know our names, and they whisper them to us on the wind. But others—others keep their names locked away, held secret from the Scillies. And because they won’t let the islands know them, they can never really know the islands. They can never love them.”

As fanciful, certainly, as one might expect of a fairy. But a fairy who likened ideas to the Bible, so perhaps it wasn’t just fancy. Perhaps it was something else entirely.

Taking in another sweet-scented breath, Libby tilted her head. Listened to the wind whispering through branches. “Do they know my name, do you think?”

Another pat of a featherlight hand on her arm. “How could they not, when you show them that sweet heart of yours?”

The thought made her lips curve in a way she couldn’t ever recall them doing before, and she followed Mamm-wynn’s gentle guiding toward another offshoot of a path. Perhaps she was only spending a summer here, but all the same she relished the idea that she could belong. By virtue of simply knowing and being known. Of loving it.

If that were truly how one knew when one was home, then it was no wonder she’d never felt so secure in London, where she felt the need to guard her true self at every step, every word, every introduction. And even Telford Hall . . . she’d always known it wasn’t meant to be where she stayed forever. How could a daughter not know it, when from the time she was old enough to carry on a conversation, her elders spoke always of family alliances and good marriages and making a match that would benefit them all? They might as well have shouted, “Your role is to leave us as quickly as possible!”

How could one feel truly at home in a place always ready to foist one away?

“Here we are.” Mamm-wynn drew her to a halt in front of a weathered slab of granite with two holes in it, one directly above the other. They were near the walled edge of the garden now, it seemed. Just beyond it was a building—a church, from the look of it. Which meant St. Nicholas’s. Where Oliver Tremayne could be even now.