“Move here full-time!” Calista declared as he settled at the table, in the chair immediately to her right. “Oh, child, how lovely that would be. You always say this place inspires you, gives you ideas for your books. Living here, the writing will come more easily, too. I’m sure it will, dear.”

“Whatever has you so buoyant?” he asked. “You look as if you might soar up out of the chair like a helium balloon.”

“I had a visitor at breakfast. I’m almost afraid to tell you, as if the telling will take all the magic out of it.”

“Someone visited and talked about ghosts.”

“Not exactly, no.”

Calista sipped her wine, put the glass down, and crossed her arms over her breasts, as though to compose herself and restrain herself from babbling out the story in torrents of words that might somehow diminish it.

After a pause, she said, “I was sitting right here, just where I am now, listening to the harbor, enjoying the early sun, eating a morning roll and having coffee. This girl spoke to me from the promenade, said she thought my kimono was beautiful, and just like that, we were chatting as if we were old friends. I invited her in, and she came through the gate and sat where you’re sitting now. I offered her coffee, but she said she needed nothing.”

Balboa Island and Little Balboa were connected by a bridge, and a promenade encircled each of them. People walked the islands at all hours, and locals frequently stopped to visit.

“I thought I recognized her voice, but she wasn’t a local. She said she’d been here when she was younger but hadn’t been back in a long time.”

After fifty-four years of blindness, Calista’s ear for voices was uncanny. When a passing local called out a greeting to her, she nearly always answered with the person’s name—and rarely ever got it wrong.

“She said her name was Maddison. She was here more than an hour, and we were like old friends from the get-go. David, I can’t describe how fluid our conversation was, from the serious to the silly, back to serious, each of us so easy with the other. It was like . . . maybe you remember . . . like Emily and I were together.”

“I remember,” he said.

“It was exactly like Emily and me. And gradually . . .”

“Gradually, what?”

She searched his face with her sightless eyes. “I don’t want you to think I’m a crazy old woman.”

“You’re the farthest thing from that.”

“Gradually, I knew it as well as I know my own, even though I hadn’t heard it in ten years. She sounded just like my Emily.”