When I share this idea with Belinda and Elliot, they’re both in favor of it, Belinda because she has come to think of me as her big sister and Kat as a niece and she wants us near, and Elliot because he feels he owes me so much for bringing Belinda safely home to him. It is enjoyable in the evenings after the children are in bed to imagine what the little house might look like and where to situate it. It is at one of these impromptu idea sessions over tea and cake after supper that Elliot asks me if I will always want to live here in San Rafaela and, more specifically, at the Loralei. What will happen to the proposed little house if I want to marry again, maybe have other children?

There is so much I could say in answer to this question. I have told Belinda so very little about my life before—a fraction of what I told Candace to gain her trust—and I myself am starting to feel detached from it. I’ve wondered if that would happen someday, and I’ve pondered what it would feel like to see the person I was as a stranger I no longer know. It is not necessary for Elliot to know that I can’t have children, but I can address the rest of his question truthfully enough and without having to revisit a past that feels less and less like it belongs to me.

“I am in no great hurry to marry again,” I reply in a gently sincere tone. “And the house will always be Kat’s to do with as she will. You’ll let her stay here in it even into her adult years, yes?” I ask Belinda.

“Of course,” Belinda says.

“She may want to marry and move on herself,” Elliot adds.

“She might. She probably will,” I answer. “And if she does, I imagine she would let me stay in the little house that her trust money built. But that’s further into the future than we need to look. Right now I just like the idea of having our own little home, right here, at the Loralei.”

We settle on a drawing of the proposed cottage that I share with Kat a few days later.

“It . . . will . . . be ours?” she murmurs. The four words are stitched loosely together, but they still sound as beautiful as a song to me.

“Yes, love.”

“Here?”

“Right here. See, there’s the peach tree.” I point to the tree crudely drawn to the right of the floor plan of the two-bedroom, one-story cottage.

She looks up at me. “Our old house?”

“The fire took our old house, remember? It’s gone and we don’t have to go back there.”

“Father?”

I swallow back a bit of fear that she worries about him finding us, taking her back. Or hurting her for what she did to him.

“He’s gone, too.”

She blinks at me, long and slow, and her eyes are glistening when they open. She is feeling something deep and painful at these words of mine, and I realize I’ve been a fool to think she could cast away any longing for Martin’s affection as easily as I did. She doesn’t know all that he has done, all that he might have done if he had reached Belinda that morning instead of falling down the stairs.