Luce wanted to scream from sheer disappointment. She wanted to yell, Bring my mother back! But there was some subtle impulse that restrained her, some insight that she couldn’t quite put words to. She knew only that asking the voices to repeat the past for her was the wrong thing to do. No matter how much she wanted to hear Alyssa again, it would be a terrible mistake.

It took a powerful effort of will for Luce to ignore her longing and concentrate on the present. If she was going to win her father back from the voices she had to understand them much better than she did now.

“Tell me what you are,” Luce insisted. “I want to know.”

The old voice moaned, and a dried leaf lying on the beach not far away abruptly crumpled as if crushed in an invisible fist. The other voices clacked with agitation, and bits of dead grass ripped with peculiarly sharp movements up and down the beach. The voices obviously thought she was being unreasonable, but apparently they couldn’t actually force her to go.

“We are your lost hopes,” the voice explained at last. It sounded as if each word was something painfully carved from old bones. Luce suddenly understood how hard it was for the voices to do anything except repeat the past. Creating new sentences seemed to be a form of torture for them. “We are the ring rolled away down the drain, the words you should have said, and should have said, but that you left instead under the water . . .”

The voice gave out, its final words trailing away in exhaustion. Luce was momentarily distracted by the mention of the ring. Someone had told her a story like that once. It had been an old wedding ring that rolled away, the only memento of someone’s grandmother . . . Alyssa’s grandmother. Her father had dropped the ring as he and Alyssa were on their way to get married in Vegas, and Alyssa probably could have lunged and caught the ring in time if only she hadn’t been holding their new baby in her arms . . .

“Leave now?” the voice breathed hopefully.

Once again Luce had to fight her way back to the present. What the voice had told her wasn’t enough, and she couldn’t afford to stop asking questions. “Why do you want the man?” Luce demanded. “Can he leave?”

That upset the voices again. They rushed at Luce, gabbling and tugging at her, but for some reason they seemed wary of actually forcing their way inside her head again. Instead they only lashed her cheeks with fronds of breath, squeaked and gibbered to her. “And how ’bout for a boy?” Luce suddenly heard her father’s voice asking, but it was immediately swallowed by the chaos of random whisperings.