I wanted the woman to ask how I met Martin so that I could gauge her response, but even after she came back with her cup, she didn’t ask. While she was off to look for the porter, I imagined how I would’ve replied. I withdraw the photograph now from my handbag and remind myself of that answer as the pier grows ever nearer.

I’ve not met him yet, I would’ve said to the woman. I answered his newspaper advertisement. He was looking for a new wife for himself and a new mother for his little girl. He didn’t want a woman from San Francisco. He wanted someone from the East, where he is from. Someone who doesn’t need coddling. Someone who is ready to step into his late wife’s role without fanfare. I wrote to him and told him I didn’t need coddling. I wanted what he could offer me—a nice and cozy home, someone to care for, a child to love.

The woman, surely wide-eyed, might’ve replied, But . . . but what if you are unhappy with him? What if he is unkind to you?

And I would’ve told her that this is what I’d contemplated the longest in my tenement room before I left it, while rats scurried back and forth in the hall, while babies cried and men drank their sorrows and women wailed theirs, while the couple in the room above banged the walls while they fought and the couple in the room below banged the walls while they pleasured each other, and while my stomach clenched in hunger and I shivered in the damp.

It can’t be worse than what I’ve already known, I would’ve said. Besides. He doesn’t look like someone who would hurt people, does he?

I look at the portrait now, at this visage of a man who looks as near to perfection as a man could.

Would the woman have tried to talk me out of what I am about to do? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Half of my flatmates thought I was crazy, and the other half were jealous I’d found the advertisement and they hadn’t. Mam does not know what I will do when I get off this boat, and I’m not writing her of it until it’s already done.

Even after I finally tell her how miserable the tenement was, Mam will still want to know what possessed me to marry a man I don’t know. This was not the plan when I left Ireland to come to America. This was not what she’d wanted for me when she helped me pack my one travel bag. I had pondered what answer to give to that question, too. I’d already started the letter I would send to my mother.

I want a home, I’d written in broad terms, so that if another reads the letter—perhaps one of my two older brothers still in Ireland—they, too, will understand. I want what I had when I was a little girl. A warm house and clean clothes and food in the pantry. I want to sing lullabies and mend torn rompers and make jam and cakes and hot cocoa, like you did. And I want to have someone to share it all with. I just want what you had, back when you had it.