“No, not at all. Really, I don’t. It’s mystifying, but I’m sure it happened just as you say. So did you mention Emily, did you tell this Maddison about the similarity, that you recognized her?”

She had been turning her glass between thumb and forefinger. Now she lifted it from the table and sipped and sipped again before putting it down. “I was afraid to broach the subject.”

“Afraid . . . ?”

“I thought . . . oh, I don’t know . . . I guess I thought if I mentioned it, the spell would be broken and she would be gone.”

As the westering sun slowly felled long shadows from the tree-tall masts of those sailing yachts moored nearby, Calista recounted things that Maddison had said, and there was no doubt that many if not all of them were observations that Emily would have made and in much the same language.

“When she said the time had come to go,” Calista recalled, “I urged her to stay a little while. That was when she said something that makes no sense coming from a stranger named Maddison, but that makes perfect sense if . . . if somehow she was Emily.”

David brought his glass to his lips and discovered that he had finished the cabernet without realizing he’d been drinking it.

“Maddison took one of my hands in both of hers and said, ‘I’ve come back just for this one visit, so you will know that I’m happy and beyond all pain, and to tell you . . . be not afraid of whatever comes next, because I’ll be with you always.’ And then she raised my hand to her lips and kissed it three times and . . . and she said ‘I love you.’”

For a long moment Calista and David sat in silence. Her silence was necessitated by the depth of her tenderest emotions. His was the result of desperate hope but also of astonishment, bewilderment, and anxiety.

“I was speechless,” Calista said, “and before I could think what to say, she let go of my hand and was gone. Just gone. I don’t know whether . . . whether I was so stunned by what she’d said that my senses failed me, but I didn’t hear her chair scoot back on the deck or her footsteps or the gate creak like it always does. She was there and then just gone.”

A long, sleek racing boat motored by at the harbor speed limit, its big engine throbbing with pent-up power, suggestive of a demonic entity barely restrained from wreaking havoc.

Aware that Calista needed reassurance, he said, “Remarkable. But the word ghost seems inadequate. Too pulp fiction. If she wasn’t real, maybe spirit is a better word. This wasn’t a haunting, after all. It was much more of a manifestation . . . a visitation.”

“But you do believe me?”

“Of course. You’re not delusional and, just like Emily, you’d as soon bite off your tongue as tell a lie.”