With Kat out of earshot, Candace and I have the first chance to speak openly again about our situation. I first thank her for taking care of the hotel, the meals, and the transportation. She seems surprised at my gratitude.

“Of course I would pay the expenses of you minding Kat for me,” she says. “I will pay you an hourly wage, as well.”

I swallow back the sting of those words. “I don’t need a wage.”

“Nonsense. You are providing a service to me. Of course you need a wage.”

I let the observation fall away. I won’t take a penny for loving Kat, but I don’t say this.

“Did she . . . talk about me last night? Did she say anything?” Candace asks.

I shake my head.

“Does she ever say anything about what happened to Martin? Does she ever ask about him? Does she wonder why you’ve not heard from him?”

My mind takes me to the first night in the park, when Kat and I slept under moonlight and she asked where her father was and I told her I’d sent him on his way. It was the last time she spoke of him.

“She hasn’t said much of anything since the day Belinda came,” I answer.

“Maybe she doesn’t remember what happened.”

“Maybe.”

“What will I tell her if she starts talking again and she asks why her father hasn’t come back?”

I bristle at the thought of Kat asking Candace this a year or two or three from now, and not me. “I think you can wait to decide what to tell her when and if she asks. Don’t borrow tomorrow’s burdens, my gram used to say.”

“Yes, I suppose you’re right.”

Candace is quiet for a moment. “What was Kat like when you were with her in San Francisco? Was she happy? Did she have favorite toys? Little friends to play with?”

I tell Candace about the lovely house Martin had secured and our neighbor Libby and her little boy. I tell her about teaching Kat her letters and how brilliant she is at jigsaw puzzles and reading. I tell her about the back garden and our flowers, and the time Martin and I took her to the circus and to the seashore to collect shells.

Talking exhausts Candace, I know this from yesterday, so when she asks me next to tell her about Ireland, I fill the next hour with the happiest memories I have before everything changed for me, both to fill the silence and so that I won’t seem like such a stranger. I tell her about the fishing boats and the pewter gray Irish Sea, and my gram’s cottage with the curtains made from her wedding dress. I tell her about helping my mother watch the wee ones in the lane while their mams helped their fathers at the docks, and about my father, who wanted to go to university and was told he was not smart enough nor was there the money for it, so he took it upon himself to become a learned man. I tell her about the word book he made and how every time he read a book he collected all the words inside he did not know, found out what they meant, and wrote them down, and that he shared those words with me so that I, too, could know what he knew.