“Who are you?” Candace says to me, wearily, but with keen interest. “Where is Martin? Why isn’t Kat saying anything?”

I have known this moment was coming, but even so, now that it is here, I fumble for a place to start. So much of what I have to say is terrible.

“I don’t know how to tell you everything you need to know,” I finally say.

Perhaps she can hear it in my voice, that Martin is gone, for she asks me before I continue, “Is . . . is he dead?” Her voice is bereft of strength.

“I think so, yes.”

I wait a moment for this news to settle. She looks away from me, toward the desert and its desolate horizon beyond the patio stones. When she turns back to face me, her eyes are glistening.

“What happened to him?”

“Did you know he was living in San Francisco?”

“No.”

“Do you know what happened there? Do you know about the earthquake?”

“Y-yes. Is that where Kat was, too?” Fear injects itself into her voice.

“Yes. But she’s all right. We . . . we had a few rough days, she and I. Scary days. But she’s all right.”

This both comforts and alarms her. “And Martin?” she says a second later.

“We . . . were all in the house before the earthquake struck. He . . . he fell down a flight of stairs just before. And then came the awful fires. He . . . he likely didn’t get out of the house before it burned.”

“Why? Why didn’t he?” Candace says, horrified. Obviously Kat and I got out.

I hesitate. There are so many reasons Martin Hocking very likely perished inside that house.

“Why didn’t he get out?” Candace whispers.

I inhale deep and then let the breath out. “I have so much to tell you. So much. ’Twill be hard to hear, and I’m sorry for that. I truly am. I trust you will be able to bear it?”

She nods slowly, her wide-eyed gaze tight on me.

“I think I need to start at the beginning, well before the earthquake, or none of this will make sense.”

Candace says nothing for a moment. She looks past me to where Kat is sleeping atop sofa pillows. Then she turns back to me. “All right.”

“I was living in New York City until a bit more than a year ago,” I begin. “I had emigrated from Ireland but I . . . I wasn’t happy there. I was hungry and cold and living in a hovel of a tenement because I couldn’t afford anything else. I saw an advertisement in the paper. A man out west was looking for a new wife for himself and a new mother for his little girl. I answered that advertisement. Your husband placed it. Martin told me you were dead, and that he was a widower and that Kat didn’t have a mother. I didn’t know you were alive. I only just found out. I swear to you I didn’t know. He told Kat you were dead, too, and she thought it was her fault. Martin had found a way to blame her somehow; he made it seem that mothering her had made you weak and sick and that it was her fault you had gotten ill and died. She stopped talking when she thought you had been taken from her and that it was her fault.”