“I’m going to return the key,” Kate said. “We have about three minutes and they’re pretty strict here with check out.”

Tilly nodded. “I just have to get my stuff together and put my sandals on. I can pull the door behind me and meet you at the van?”

When Kate came out of the office, Tilly was leaning against the van, waiting. “Are you hungry?” Kate asked as they clipped their seat belts.

Tilly sighed. “Starving, actually.”

“Perfect. Let’s grab something before the ferry,” she suggested. “Something will be open down by the pier.”

Nothing was open down by the pier. All three cafés were closed, and the kiosk at Mornington Pier café was only serving coffee. Outside Doug’s Seafood, a woman wearing an apron was shifting a chalkboard easel out to the footpath. Putting the car into park, Kate turned in the driver’s seat. “How long has it been since you’ve had fish and chips for breakfast?”

Down by the water’s edge, a father baited his young daughter’s fishing hook. As Kate slid the carton of fish and chips from the paper bag and arranged their tartare sauce, she watched Tilly, watching them.

“Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if I’d been raised by my parents,” Tilly said.

The child cast her line out into the dying flow of a wave.

“Pretty different, I guess.” Kate pinched the wedge of lemon over her portion of fish and ignored the seagulls that flocked to see what they had to share. “Growing up in a convent made for an unusual upbringing.”

Tilly nodded. She picked out a chip and dusted the extra salt against the corner of the box. “I doubt God would have played such a strong role in my life.”

Kate examined her. “You’re probably right,” she said honestly.

“Yeah,” Tilly said, squinting at the glare off the water. “Probably.”

Clearly, Tilly was upset. It must be a horrible, sinking feeling, Kate thought, to feel as though everything you valued was borne of circumstance. Kate chose her words carefully. “I think that if your parents survived and you hadn’t been raised by Sister Hattie, you still would have felt God’s spirit. Maybe just in a different way.”

Tilly searched her gaze. “In a different way?”

Kate leaned back, palms on the grass. “I mean, you live your life thinking that God is inside all of us, right? All around us?”

Nodding, Tilly unbuckled her sandals and slipped them off.

“So maybe you wouldn’t feel Him the way you do now—in churches and in prayer—but your parents were good, genuine people with kind spirits.”

Tilly’s brow furrowed in confusion.

“So you already had God’s love in them, right? You didn’t need to step foot on Lords to find it.” She paused. “Maybe when you lost them, God just happened to take the more obvious avenue to keep you close.”

Tilly searched her eyes. “Do you really believe that?”

“I don’t really know what I believe.” Gently, she nudged Tilly’s shoulder with her own. “But I do believe in making you feel good about yourself.”