The brass plate on the door read SHERIFF in letters that someone had polished that morning, but Mara Quill's gaze caught on the scuff marks at the threshold instead. The faint grooves where boots had paused before entering. The slight wear where a heel had dragged. Small evidence of hesitation, or perhaps the opposite. She had learned, in fifteen years of knocking on doors that wanted to stay closed, that thresholds told their own stories.
She knocked twice.
"Open."
The voice inside was low, unhurried, the kind of drawl that took its time arriving because it knew the listener would wait. Mara pushed the door inward and let her hand rest on the frame a moment longer than necessary. A habit. It let her read the room before she stepped into it.
Harlan Pike sat behind a desk of dark walnut, the wood so old and so well-maintained that it caught the afternoon light in long amber ribbons. Behind him, a window overlooked the town square, where the courthouse clock ticked out the hour in patient, deliberate strokes. On the wall hung a single framed photograph of the river, taken before the levee went in, back when the water still wandered wherever it pleased. A second frame held a diploma she could not read from the door. A third frame held nothing at all, just a rectangle of cream-colored wall where something had been removed.
"Sheriff Quill's girl," he said. He did not rise. He did not smile. He gestured to the chair across from him with two fingers, a motion that suggested the chair had been placed there for her benefit, as if every visitor to this office had been anticipated and arranged for in advance. "Sit, if you like."
Mara sat. The chair creaked faintly, an old wooden chair with a leather seat gone soft from years of use, and she let the sound settle before she spoke.
"I'm here about Cora Quill."
"Of course you are." Harlan Pike folded his hands on the desk. His fingers were long and clean, the nails trimmed close. The watch on his left wrist caught the light when he shifted, a gold case, no band visible. He had the look of a man who had been sitting in this exact posture for some time, waiting for precisely this conversation. "Word travels in a town this size. Faster than the river, some mornings. Faster than the gossip at the post office."
"I heard her case was closed."
"It was."
"I'd like to know when."
Harlan Pike tilted his head, the smallest possible adjustment, like a man listening to a sound just at the edge of hearing. His eyes moved across her face and came to rest somewhere past her left shoulder, on the window, on the clock tower, on anything that was not quite her.
"February of two thousand fourteen," he said. "Judge Marsh signed the order. My predecessor handled the file. Clean matter, as I understand it. Tragic, of course. A grandmother lost. The river takes what the river wants."
"And if I had questions?"
"Then you'd have questions." He shifted in his chair. The leather creaked beneath him, a soft, formal sound, like a page turning. "The file's in the archive basement. You could request it through proper channels. There's a form. Request eleven-B. Takes about six weeks. That's how it's done here. That's how it's always been done."
"Proper channels take six weeks."
"Proper channels take the time they take." His voice carried no edge. That was what made it unsettling. There was nothing to push against. "Small towns have their ways. Some folks call them slow. I prefer thorough. You'll find the county archivists are very thorough, Miss Quill. They keep their boxes in order. They label their folders. They do not lose things."
Mara let the silence gather. She had learned not to fill it. Most people, when met with quiet, rushed to fill the space with reassurance. Harlan Pike did not. He simply watched the window behind her, his gaze resting somewhere on the courthouse spire, and the only movement in the room was the slow sweep of dust motes through the amber light and the faint tick of the long case clock against the far wall.
"I appreciate the thoroughness," she said at last.
"Good."
"My grandmother's diary is part of her estate. I'm settling her affairs. Is there anything in the file that would help me understand what was in that attic before it became part of her estate?"
He was quiet for a beat. Two. Three.
"Cora Quill kept a great many things," he said. "That was the family's way. Papers, letters, mementos. The constable at the time inventoried the contents of the house. It's in the file. Anything that wasn't listed went to the estate. As estate, as I understand it. As inheritance. As the way these matters were settled at the time."
"And the diary?"
"I wouldn't know about any diary." He said it simply, the way a man says he wouldn't know about the weather in a country he had never visited. "You'll want to speak with the estate attorney. A Mr. Otis Crewe, over on Sycamore. He'll have the paperwork. He's been handling these matters longer than I've been wearing this badge."
He touched his chest then, two fingers against the star pinned over his heart, a small self-conscious gesture that might have been pride or might have been performance. Mara filed it away. People touched what they wanted you to notice.
"I've also been told," Mara said, "that reopening the case would require convincing evidence."
Harlan Pike looked at her then. Almost. His gaze came within an inch of hers and slid past, the way a coin skips across water before sinking.
"Who told you that?"
"A friend."
"Friends in this town have long memories." He leaned back. The chair sighed beneath him. "The short of it is this, Miss Quill. Your grandmother died in the summer of nineteen ninety-eight. The investigation was reopened in two thousand six. Closed again in two thousand fourteen. Judge Marsh, bless him, signed the final order. The matter is closed. If new evidence were to surface, and I mean real evidence, the kind a judge could hold in his hand and turn over in the light, then yes. Something could be done about it. But hunches, Miss Quill. Recollections. Old diary pages that might say anything and prove nothing." He spread his hands, palms up, a gesture of openness that did not open anything. "Those don't open files. Those open wounds. And there are people in this county who have spent a long time healing."
"I'm not here to open wounds."
"Of course you are." He smiled for the first time. The smile did not reach his eyes. It did not try. "You're a journalist. That's what journalists do. They open things. They pry. They make their names on the quiet sorrows of small towns that never asked to be made into a story." He lifted one hand and let it fall against the arm of his chair. "I've read your pieces, Miss Quill. The one about the nursing home in Cedar Bend. The one about the chemical runoff in Bishop's Holler. You write very well. Genuinely. And that is exactly the sort of pen that makes men in this county nervous."
Mara kept her hands folded in her lap. She had learned to keep her hands folded when men like this spoke, because it kept them from shaking, and because men like this read hands the way other men read ledgers.
"I'm not here for a story."
"Then what are you here for?"
"For Cora."
The clock on the wall ticked. Somewhere out in the corridor, a door closed with a soft, definitive sound, the kind of sound that said a conversation elsewhere had ended and another was about to begin.
"Cora Quill was my predecessor's problem," Harlan Pike said, after a moment. "He handled it. I inherited the office. I inherited the file. I inherited the questions you've come here to ask, Miss Quill, and I'm answering them as well as I can within the limits of what the law permits." He paused. The dust motes turned in the light between them. "Unofficially. As a courtesy. To the granddaughter of a woman who used to bring my wife scones on Sunday mornings, back when my wife and I still attended services at the church on the green."
He had mentioned his wife. Vivienne. The name hovered in the air between them, a card laid gently on the table, neither threat nor promise but a reminder that there were other players, other stakes, other rooms where other conversations might be taking place.
"I appreciate the courtesy," Mara said.
"Good." He stood then, finally, unfolding himself from behind the desk with the slow, deliberate grace of a man who knew his height and meant you to know it too. He crossed to the window and stood with his back to her, his hands clasped behind him. The afternoon light caught the side of his face, the clean line of his jaw, the silver at his temple. "You'll want to be careful with the diary. If there is a diary. Documents have a way of being misread. Especially old ones. Especially by people who weren't there."
"I was six years old when she died."
"Exactly." He did not turn around. "You were six. I was already grown. I remember the search parties. I remember the smell of the river that summer. I remember what the town went through, Miss Quill, and what it cost us to go through it."
The walk from the development office to Ruth Vance's bungalow on Lilac Lane took eleven minutes, if Mara counted her steps, and she did count them, because counting was easier than thinking about the way Harlan Pike had stood at his window with his back to her, offering the view of the river as if it were something he had purchased along with everything else.
She counted. Fourteen blocks of cracked sidewalk, two crosswalks with faded paint, one stretch where the elm roots had buckled the concrete into ridges she had to navigate like a dry riverbed. The afternoon had begun to soften toward evening, and the air over the pavement held that particular amber quality of late summer in river country, a smell she had not realized she remembered until it pressed against her face: warm grass, distant water, the faint sweetness of someone's roses drifting over a fence.
Ruth Vance's house sat at the end of Lilac Lane in a row of bungalows that had been built for mill workers in the nineteen-twenties, and which the mill had never quite finished paying for. The paint on the trim was a particular pale blue, the color of a robin's egg, that Mara knew without thinking had been Ruth's choice because Ruth had always liked robins, had fed them in winter, had pointed them out to her students on the first warm morning of March and called it the true beginning of the year. The lawn was clipped close, the hedges squared off with the precision of someone who had spent forty years teaching children how to hold a ruler.
A wind chime made of small copper fishes hung from the porch eave, and it turned without wind, the faintest current from the river moving the air enough to set them clicking against each other with a sound like distant coins, or like the ice breaking up in March, which was a sound that mattered here, more than most people understood.
Mara climbed the three concrete steps. The paint on the railing was cooler under her hand, where the sun had not reached, and slightly tacky, recent. She could see, through the screen door, a thin rectangle of hallway wallpaper, a pattern of small pink roses that she would have known in her sleep. She pressed the brass doorbell, which gave a sound somewhere between a chime and a sneeze, and listened to the house absorb the noise.
Footsteps. Slow, deliberate, with the careful rhythm of someone navigating between furniture they had arranged long ago and had no intention of rearranging.
The door opened.
Ruth Vance was smaller than Mara remembered, or perhaps Mara had been smaller, which was of course the truth of it. Her hair, which had been steel-gray at the funeral six months ago, was now a softer silver, pulled back and pinned low at her neck. She wore a blouse the color of weak tea and a cardigan the green of old moss, and reading glasses hung from a beaded chain against her chest. She smelled, as she had always smelled, of lemon wood polish and the faint staleness of old paper.
"Marigold Quill," Ruth said.
She said the name the way she always had, in two distinct syllables, with a faint lift at the end of the second, as if it were the answer to a question she had been waiting to ask. Then her face shifted, the muscles around her eyes tightening almost imperceptibly, the way a page shifts in a book when the wind turns it, and Mara understood that Ruth had been expecting her, and had been dreading her, and had prepared for her, all at once.
"Miss Vance."
"Come in. Don't stand there letting the flies in."
Mara stepped into the hallway, which was exactly as she had known it would be, and the knowing was a particular kind of pain, a tenderness without location. The wallpaper was the same. The runner on the floor, the dark wooden floor, the small table with the brass bowl where Ruth kept her keys and the pen she used to mark the crossword. The house smelled of lemon and old paper and, beneath it, something warmer, bread perhaps, or the memory of bread.
Ruth led her to the front parlor, which was not a room one used, in the way of small towns, but a room one kept, the lace curtains drawn halfway against the afternoon, a quilted throw on the back of the sofa, a framed photograph of a class of children on the wall above the mantel, the faces small and brown and lost in time. Ruth gestured to the chair by the window and lowered herself into her own, with the careful descent of someone whose knees had begun to have opinions.
"I heard about your grandmother's estate," Ruth said. "About the house."
"I came to settle the papers."
"So I assumed."
The silence held for a moment. A clock on the mantel ticked, a small brass clock with a glass face, the kind that had been common once and was now common only in places like this.
"Miss Vance."
"Ruth."
"Ruth." Mara paused. "I found something in the attic."
Ruth's hands, which had been folded in her lap, shifted slightly. Her eyes did not move.
"A diary," Mara said. "Cora's."
The clock ticked. Outside, a car passed on the lane, its engine fading into the distance like a held note. Ruth's face did something complicated. It began, Mara thought, as a color, a draining, the way a photograph drains when held up to a window, except in reverse: the warmth leaving, the pink receding, the lips going faintly gray.
"Cora kept a diary," Ruth said, and her voice had acquired its reedy waver, the one Mara remembered from childhood, when Ruth would read aloud from the chapter books and her voice would thin at the moments of greatest feeling.
"Yes."
"For many years, I imagine."
"For many years."
Ruth looked at her then, directly, with the eyes of a woman who had spent four decades ensuring that children understood they could not hide behind their own evasions. The look was steady, and it was also, somewhere beneath, afraid.
"I cannot remember," Ruth said.
The words landed in the room like a stone in still water. Mara felt them settle.
"Cannot, or will not?"
"Marigold." Ruth's voice sharpened. "Do not come into my house and put words in my mouth. I taught you better than that. I taught Cora better than that."
"I remember."
"Then remember this." Ruth leaned forward slightly. "There are things in this town that people have agreed not to remember. There was a time, when you were very small, when things happened, and after those things, certain agreements were made. By certain people. For reasons that had to do with survival, or with mercy, or with both. I was a younger woman then. I am an old woman now. I have kept my agreements."
"With whom?"
"With everyone. With no one. With the river." Ruth's lips tightened. "You have been to see Harlan Pike."
It was not a question.
"Yes."
"Then you have already heard one kind of answer. A careful one. A lawyer's answer." Ruth's hand went to the reading glasses at her chest, her fingers closing around them, a small gesture of comfort. "I cannot give you another kind. I am sorry. I am old, and I am tired, and I have been sorry about Cora Quill for a long time."
Mara sat with that. The clock ticked. A fly walked across the window glass in slow deliberation. Outside, the wind chime clicked its small copper coins against each other, and somewhere further off, a dog barked twice and was silent.
"She was my grandmother," Mara said, and the words came out quieter than she had meant them to. "She raised me after my mother left. She taught me to read, using your books. She used to talk about you. She used to say you were the only teacher who ever made her feel like her mind was worth something."
Ruth's hand tightened on the glasses. Her mouth trembled, once, and was still.
"I know," Ruth said. "I know who she was."
"Then help me understand what happened to her."
"I cannot remember."
"Ruth."
"Child, I am telling you the truth." Ruth's voice was very thin now, the reedy waver pronounced, almost a whistle at the edges. "There are kinds of remembering and kinds of forgetting, and I have spent thirty years cultivating the second kind because the first kind would have broken me, and I had a classroom full of children to get through the next morning, and a town to teach, and a life. You understand? I had a life to keep living. So I put certain things in a box. I put them in the river. And I do not open that box."
She rose then, with the same careful descent in reverse, and Mara understood that the conversation was over, that the dismissal was not rudeness but something closer to preservation, the way one might gently close a door against a wind that was beginning to come up.
Mara stood too, and followed her into the hallway. Ruth walked slowly, her slippered feet whispering on the runner, and Mara saw that the brass bowl on the table held, in addition to the keys and the pen, a folded piece of paper, cream-colored, slightly yellowed at the edges, as if it had been there for some time, waiting.
Ruth did not look at the paper. Ruth opened the front door, and the screen let in the smell of the evening, warm grass and distant water and the faintest trace of wood smoke from somewhere across the river.
Ruth turned to her, and in the dimness of the hallway, her face was composed and pale and old.
"You were a good student," Ruth said. "Cora was a good student. I taught you both to be careful with words. Words are how we keep things, and how we lose them. Be careful."
And then Ruth Vance took Mara's hand, the way she had when Mara was six years old and had been sent to the front of the classroom to receive a ribbon, and pressed something into her palm, and closed her fingers over it, and let go.
The screen door closed behind her with a soft click. The copper fishes turned. The evening came on.
Mara stood on the porch steps and looked down at her hand. The paper was small, folded twice, soft at the creases from having been folded and unfolded before. She did not open it. Not yet. She stood with it in her palm and listened to the chime, and to the river, which she could not see from here but could feel the way you feel a presence in a room, the way the air changes when someone you cannot quite name has just been there.
Mara stood for a long moment on the porch steps, the paper in her palm, the chime singing its thin and endless note somewhere inside the house. The screen door had not latched properly. It swayed once, twice, and then stilled, and through the mesh she could see the dim hallway, the brass bowl, the pen and keys, and Ruth Vance's slippered feet moving away down the runner toward the back of the house.
She did not go after her. She understood, in the way you understand things that are not said, that Ruth had given her what she was willing to give, and that to ask for more would be to break some unspoken rule of the exchange.
The evening was coming on. The sky over the river had gone the color of a bruise, purple at the edges, gold at the center where the sun had been, and the first bats were out, stitching the air above the lawn in long looping threads. Mara could hear the river now, a low continuous sound, not water but the idea of water, the way a road sounds from a house when no cars are on it, a kind of held breath.
She looked down at the paper.
It was small, no bigger than a playing card, and it had been folded twice, in unequal halves, the way you fold something when you are in a hurry, or when you have folded it many times before and the creases have become the natural shape of the thing. The paper was soft at the folds, almost cloth-like, and the edges were faintly yellowed, as if it had spent years in a drawer, or in a pocket, or pressed between the pages of a book.
Mara unfolded it.
The handwriting was not Ruth's. Ruth's hand, when she had signed the guestbook at the library, had been small and upright and precise, the hand of a woman who had marked a generation of essays with a red pen. This hand was different. It leaned. It was the hand of someone older, or someone tired, or someone writing by a window that was going dark.
The ink was brown, not blue or black, and the letters were large, as if the writer had wanted them to be easy to read across a room, or across a distance of years.
There was an address.
17 Stillwater Lane.
Mara knew the address. She knew it the way you know the address of a house you have passed every day of your childhood, the house at the end of the lane where the pavement gives up and the gravel begins, the house with the porch that sagged and the elms that had grown up around it like a fence. The Croft house. The old Croft house. It had been empty for as long as Mara could remember, since before she left, since she was a girl, since the summer the river came up and took the footbridge and left a line of debris on the bank that the town walked down to look at and then walked back up again and never spoke of.
And beneath the address, in the same brown ink, in the same leaning hand, a single word.
Ask Elias.
Mara read it twice. She read it a third time, in case the meaning had changed.
Ask Elias.
She did not know an Elias. She had never known an Elias. There was no Elias in the pages of her grandmother's diary that she had read so far, no Elias in the names Ruth had spoken, no Elias in the ledgers and receipts and folded letters in the box under the bed in the spare room at her grandmother's house. The name was a stone dropped into a pond she thought she had been mapping, and the rings were still going out.
She folded the paper again, along the same creases, and put it in the pocket of her jacket. The chime inside Ruth's house had stopped. The bats were gone, or had moved to another part of the sky. The first mosquitoes had found her, and she slapped at her wrist without thinking, and the small bright pain of it was a kind of confirmation, a way of being sure she was here, on this porch, on this evening, holding this piece of paper that pointed her toward a house she had not thought about in fifteen years.
Ask Elias.
She turned the name over in her mind. It could be a first name. It could be a last name. It could be a name that belonged to no one in particular and was meant to be spoken aloud to whoever answered the door at 17 Stillwater Lane, a kind of password, a kind of key. It could be the name of a person who had known her grandmother. It could be the name of a person who had known her grandmother's secret, the secret that had sent her to Ruth's door tonight, the secret that was written in the diary in the attic in a language she had not yet learned to read.
Or it could be a name she was meant to find. A name that would come to her, the way names sometimes do, in the middle of a night, or in the middle of a sentence, or in the middle of turning a page.
Mara sat down on the top step. The wood was warm from the day. She could feel it through her jeans, the stored heat of the sun, and she thought, briefly, of all the people who had sat on this step before her, Ruth's students, Ruth's friends, Ruth's husband, who had been dead for twenty years and whose name Mara could not, for a moment, remember. She thought of her grandmother, sitting here perhaps, on an evening like this one, with the river making its sound and the bats making their loops and the house behind her holding, in its walls and its floors and its chimed wind, the accumulated weight of everything she had not told anyone.
Ask Elias.
The mosquitoes were worse now. Mara got up, and brushed at her arms, and walked down the steps and across the lawn toward the gate. The gate latch was stiff, and she had to work at it with both hands, and when it finally gave, the click of it was louder than she expected, and somewhere down the street a dog barked once and then was quiet.
She did not look back at Ruth's house. She did not look back at the porch or the screen door or the dark windows. She knew that if she looked back, she would want to go in again, and ask, and sit in the chair with the crocheted afghan over the back, and wait for Ruth to come back down the hall and tell her the rest of it, and Ruth would not tell her, because Ruth had given her the piece of paper and the piece of paper was all Ruth intended to give, at least tonight, at least for now.
Mara walked.
The town was quiet. The streetlights were on, and they threw their circles of yellow onto the sidewalks, and between the circles the dark was deep and soft. She passed the library, closed for the night, its windows dark, its clock tower showing a moonface that was not quite the time. She passed the post office, and the diner, and the park where the bandshell stood empty, its paint peeling in long curls. She passed the house where she had grown up, which was not her house anymore, which belonged to someone else now, a family she
Mara did not know where Elias lived. She had the piece of paper in her pocket, and she had the diary in her bag, and she had the weight of Ruth's silence in her chest, and none of these were a map.
She walked anyway. The town was small enough that asking would not be necessary. She would knock on doors until someone pointed her the right direction, or she would go to the river and wait, because Ruth had not specified, and Ruth never specified anything she did not want specified.
The river came into view before she expected it, the way it always did in this town, suddenly and completely, as if the street ended and the water began. The boardwalk was old and listing slightly to the east, its planks silvered with age, its pilings dark with the river's constant work. The water moved below it, slow and brown and smelling of silt and the faint metallic tang of the bridge upstream.
Mara stopped at the railing. She set her bag down. She took out the piece of paper and looked at it again, as if the words might have changed while she was not watching.
Ask Elias.
She folded the paper and put it back in her pocket. She looked down the boardwalk, both directions. The concession stand at the far end was closed, its windows shuttered, its awning tied back against the wind. A single light burned above the bait shop, casting a yellow circle onto the planks. The river kept moving.
She was about to pick up her bag and walk toward the light when she saw it.
A boat, tied to the lower dock, small and white and very still in the current. On its stern, in letters that had been repainted recently and not yet weathered, a name.
Vivienne.
Mara's hand found the railing. Her knuckles went white against the wood. She did not move for a long time. The river made its small sounds below her, lap and gurgle and the occasional soft knock of a piece of driftwood against a piling.
Vivienne.
She knew the name. She had read it in the diary, in Cora's careful, slanted hand, in the margins, in the lists, in the places where Cora had stopped writing and started writing again, as if she could not stop. Vivienne. Vivienne Pike. Harlan's wife. The woman who had come to town the summer the river took the old boat dock, the summer the offer came in for the Quill land, the summer Cora had written in the diary in such a frenzy of small, desperate marks that the pages had been almost illegible.
The diary was in Mara's bag. She took it out. She opened it to the page she had been looking for, the page she had marked with a torn corner of a receipt, and she read it again in the yellow light from the bait shop, her lips moving slightly, the words coming up out of the dark and the water and the twenty years since they had been written.
The summer Vivienne came, Cora had written, I knew. I knew before she stepped off the boat. I knew from the way she held her handbag, and the way she did not look at the river, and the way she said the name of the town as if she were tasting it for the first time and finding it bitter. I knew, and I did nothing.
Mara closed the diary. She picked up her bag. She walked down the boardwalk toward the dock where the boat was tied, her footsteps loud on the old planks, the sound of them carrying out over the water and coming back to her changed, as if the river were answering.
The boat was empty. The light inside its small cabin was off. A line was tied to the cleat, and the line was new, and the knot was the kind of knot a person ties when they intend to come back soon. On the seat inside, a paper bag, and in the paper bag, the smell of bread, and something wrapped in waxed paper, and a small notebook with a leather cover that had gone dark at the edges from being handled.
Mara did not touch the notebook. She stood at the edge of the dock and looked at it, and then she looked at the river, and then she looked back at the notebook, and she felt the weight of Cora's diary in her bag, and she felt the weight of the piece of paper in her pocket, and she understood, suddenly and completely, why Ruth had not told her where Elias was.
Ruth had not sent her to Elias. Ruth had sent her to the river. Ruth had sent her to the boat. Ruth had known whose boat it was, and Ruth had known what was inside it, and Ruth had known that Mara would come here eventually, because Mara had come back to this town for a reason, and the reason was not the estate, and the reason was not the diary, and the reason was not the land.
The reason was the name. The reason had always been the name.
Vivienne.
Mara sat down on the edge of the dock. She let her legs hang over the side, and her shoes hovered an inch above the water, and the river moved below her, slow and brown and carrying everything it had ever carried, including the summer, including the boat dock, including the offer, including Cora's silence, including whatever was in the notebook on the seat of the boat that bore Vivienne's name.
She did not open the notebook. Not tonight. Tonight she would sit here, and she would look at the river, and she would think about the diary, and she would think about her grandmother, and she would think about the woman whose name was painted on the stern of the boat, and she would think about the summer the river took everything, and she would not open the notebook, because the notebook was not hers to open, and the boat was not hers to board, and the name was not hers to speak.
Not yet.
She sat on the dock until the light in the bait shop went out, and the river got darker, and the town behind her got quieter, and the only sound was the water and the occasional creak of the boat against its line. Then she got up, and she brushed off her jeans, and she picked up her bag, and she walked back up the boardwalk toward the street, and she did not look back at the boat, because she had decided, somewhere in the last hour, that looking back was a thing she was done with.
She would come back in the morning. She would knock on the door of the house where Elias lived, if she could find it. She would ask her question. She would let the river give her what it was going to give her, when it was ready, and not before.
The moon was up now, and it laid a path across the water, and the path was bright and broken and moving, the way all paths on water are moving, and Mara walked beside it for a little while, and then she turned up the street toward the house where she was staying, and the chapter of the night that had been Ruth's was over, and the chapter that was coming was not yet hers to write.