Tom doesn’t answer.

“Or did I make that all up in my head?” I ask, adding a dry chuckle.

“No, no,” he says. “I remember. Of course I do.”

“I think Pearl’s been seeing her.”

“Who?”

“The same woman. I think Pearl’s been seeing her. You can’t pass that kind of specific thing down through your DNA, can you? She keeps talking about this silver-haired woman who’s been helping her with various things. I’m used to her making stuff up—she’s met with more than her fair share of fairies, gnomes, elves, and autonomous shadows. She has an extraordinary imagination. But this one, this ‘kind, silver-haired woman,’ as she refers to her, has me a bit unsettled.”

Tom stands and walks to the deck rails, staring out over the water we can no longer see in the darkness. The red-orange of the torches flickers on his back, dancing his shadow around us in many different forms and angles.

“You must have mentioned it to Pearl at some point,” Tom says in what I imagine is his diagnosis voice. “That’s the only explanation. Pearl heard the story, and now she’s taken it on as her own.”

I shake my head. “I’ve never talked about that with anyone. Not a single soul.”

I wish I was having this conversation with Tom inside, where I could read his face. As it is, his back faces me, and the darkness keeps me from noticing even a slump in his shoulders or an uncomfortable shifting of his weight.

“Shirley saw the woman in the weeks before she died,” he says.

“What do you mean?”

“As she was dying, she said she was seeing the woman Mary had always talked about, the one from the field the first night we met.” He paused. “The woman we all knew was imaginary.”

“Maybe you knew that. I was never so sure.”

He clears his throat but doesn’t say anything. I hear a splash in the lake where it edges up against the woods.

“How’d Shirley know it was her?”

“I asked the same. She said she just knew.”

I reach up and touch the knot on my head tenderly with my thumb. “Is it a psychological thing?” I ask. “I mean, Pearl hasn’t had a father. He’s been gone for a long time. Her mother died when she was a baby.”

“She has you.”

“You know what I mean. Could be she’s wishing for a parent?”

“It’s possible.”

“But you don’t think so? In your professional opinion?”

“I’d have to spend some time with her to get a better feel for what’s going on.”

“The woman isn’t real,” I say. “Is she?”

“That depends on what you mean by ‘real.’” He is still facing the water out beyond the trees. “If you mean something that everyone else sees, I would guess not, or someone else would have seen this woman by now. But if you mean something that actually occurs to someone in their own mind, then yes. I would say what Shirley explained to me was very real to her.”