The talk in the queue for breakfast is whether or not blowing up a mile-long path of buildings and homes on Van Ness will stop the fire’s progress. If it does not, the inferno will be headed in our direction. And if that happens, the only thing that will stop it is the ocean.

I am given biscuits and slices of summer sausage wrapped in wax paper to bring back to our tent. I’m not looking forward to another day like yesterday, of mindless traipsing through a sea of bedraggled refugees and injured souls, but what else can we do today except look for Belinda and the baby?

I walk past the bulletin board on my way back to the tent, and again my note is gone—this time nowhere to be found. I don’t know that I’ll ever find Belinda in this mess, and I don’t know how much longer I can wait. I am thinking that as soon as we are given the all clear to leave the park and find our way out of the ruined city, I will take Kat to Arizona as I promised and assume Belinda will find her own way home. I’ll have to find a way to open that strongbox to see if there’s anything inside it I can pawn for cash to buy a train ticket.

As I’m walking back to Kat, pondering my options, I hear a woman call out and at first I don’t turn. I don’t recognize the name being shouted as my own or the voice that calls it. But then it is as if a clockwork bit slides into place and I remember why I’m there and who I have been looking for and why, and I turn toward the sound.

“Sophie!”

It is Belinda. She’s getting out of a carriage with the baby in her arms and wearing a dress I don’t recognize. A nurse is handing her a bag made from a pillowcase but Belinda hasn’t grabbed it; she is instead calling out to me. I pick up my skirt, holding tight to the summer sausage and biscuits in my other hand, and for the first time in many hours I am running toward something instead of away from it.

Even though I have known her only four days, it is the most natural thing in the world to envelop Belinda and that baby into a tight embrace as though we are sisters. She is crying and I find that I am also shedding tears of happiness and relief that something good can still happen in this upside-down world.

“They took me somewhere else!” she is saying. “And they wouldn’t bring me here to the park where I knew you were! They wouldn’t bring me and there were no carriages, and then the fire was headed toward us. I begged them to take me here instead of the Presidio with the others!”

“I’m so glad,” I tell her. “So glad. Kat and I have been looking for you in every corner of the park. I was beginning to think . . .” But I do not finish. I don’t want to say I was beginning to think about abandoning her in San Francisco. I pull back from her to look at the infant in her arms. She is absolutely beautiful. I don’t see a hint of the man who helped create her and I am glad I don’t.