Martin had also arranged for a cold supper to be delivered just before he came to the ferry terminal for me. It had been laid out in the dining room on plain white bone china plates that the doctor’s wife likely thought would not survive passage to Argentina. When Martin is finished showing me the house, we arrange ourselves at the table, choosing chairs that I suppose we will continue to sit in for every supper thereafter—Martin at the head, me on his right, and Kat on his left. Under the cloches are cold roasted chicken, pickled beets, and sweet peppers stuffed with rice and currants and capers.

No one says anything as we begin to eat.

“My gram used to make chicken like this,” I say after several long minutes.

Martin looks up from his plate. Meals for Martin and Kat have likely been very quiet of late. He smiles slightly, and it is not a bona fide invitation to continue but I simply cannot eat an entire meal in silence. I begin to tell Martin and Kat about Ireland. I tell them about Gram’s cottage on the hill, and my own family’s little house closer to the water, and the thousand shades of green on the hillsides and in the fields. I tell them about my favorite dishes that Gram used to make, like smoked eel with apple glaze and cinnamony sweet barmbrack.

After we finish, we move to the sitting room by the fireplace to eat slices of the little spiced cake Mrs. Lewis made. I tell them how my brothers and I would walk along the harbor wall when we were young, while little waves licked the slippery stones on one side and brightly colored fishing boats pulled on their mooring lines on the other, and that ahead of us would be the lighthouse, tall and as white as snow with its steady, fiery light. I tell them how the bells at the Donaghadee parish church would ring out on Christmas morning and that I never tired of hearing them. I speak of only happy things, the things I miss.

When the hall clock strikes eight, Martin says it is time for Kat to go to bed.

“I’ll start bringing up the trunks and bags,” he says, and he starts with Kat’s things, taking them to the first room off the second-floor landing. She and I follow him. The child enters the room almost like a sleepwalker, slow and uncertain.

“Might I tuck you in, Kat?” I ask.

Kat hesitates before nodding a wordless consent. Martin leaves to attend to the rest of the luggage.

The room had been the bedroom of the doctor’s sons; this is obvious by the matching bedcovers adorned with a pattern of toy soldiers and the two rocking horses in the far corner. I am going to have to do something with this room. No five-year-old girl would be at home in it. I help Kat with her buttons and get her into a nightgown, which also seems tight and short. The child needs new clothes; she has grown since her mother’s illness and death, and Martin perhaps has not noticed.