Flour dust hung in the slanted light behind Margot Ellis's Main Street bakery, each mote drifting with the slow patience of something that had nowhere else to be. Outside, Harrow Cove moved in its small Tuesday rhythms. A pickup truck coughed past the plate glass window. The postmaster, Roy Pettigrew, paused to admire the raspberry tarts in the display case before remembering he had somewhere to be. Somewhere beyond the glass, Celeste Marlowe stood on the sidewalk with her hands in her coat pockets, watching the light move inside.
She had not planned to stop.
The plan had been to drive straight from her father's house on Salt Spray Lane to the harbor master's office on Tide Street, to file the paperwork that would let her legally close the chart-making business her family had run for four generations. Drive, park, sign, drive again. That had been the shape of her week since the funeral, all clean lines and simple directions, the kind of geometry she could hold in her hand without her fingers shaking.
Instead she had parked crooked outside the bakery, the Volvo's front tire kissing the curb, and now she stood in the October cold with the heater ticking beneath the dashboard and the smell of lemon curd pulling her forward by some thread she had not consented to.
Celeste pressed her palm against the wooden door. The brass plate said ELLIS SONS, EST. 1947, though there were no sons anymore, just Margot, and the lettering had not been updated since Gerald died three winters ago. The door swung inward with a familiar creak. A brass bell rang somewhere she could not see, and the warmth of the room found her face before she had taken a single step.
Behind the counter, a teenage girl with a name tag that read PHOEBE looked up from a tray of cinnamon rolls. Her smile was the careful kind, the one small-town girls learn to give to women whose fathers have just been buried.
"Miss Marlowe," Phoebe said. "Oh. We heard."
Celeste nodded. "Thank you, sweetheart. Is Margot in?"
"She's in the back. With the morning batch. I can go get her, if you want."
"I'll find her."
She walked down the narrow aisle between the pastry cases, past the long walnut counter scarred with of wedding consultations and Christmas orders, and pushed through the swinging door that led to the workroom. The hinges squealed. The flour hit her like a warm wall.
Margot Ellis stood at the steel worktable with her back to the door, rolling out a sheet of puff pastry with a French pin. She was smaller than Celeste remembered, or maybe Celeste had simply grown larger in the years she had been away. Margot's hair, once the color of a new penny, was threaded through with iron now, pulled back in the same French twist she had worn since Gerald's funeral. Her apron was the deep saffron yellow of a yolk, and her sleeves were rolled to the elbow, revealing forearms dusted white to the wrist.
The radio on the counter played a Brahms lullaby, very softly, the kind of music Margot played when she was alone.
Celeste stood in the doorway. She watched Margot's hands for a moment, the way they moved across the dough with a confidence that had nothing to do with thought, the way her wrists turned and her shoulders dipped with each stroke. Then she said, very quietly, "Margot."
Margot's hands stopped. The pin rested at the far edge of the table, and for a beat the only sound was the radio and the soft hiss of the deck oven behind them. Then Margot turned, and Celeste saw that her old friend's face had not changed so much as settled. The cheekbones were sharper. The lines around her mouth had deepened into something permanent. But the eyes were the same. Hazel, watchful, quick to register whatever was being asked of them.
Margot's mouth opened. Closed. Then she set the pin down carefully, wiped her hands on her apron, and crossed the room in four steps.
Her arms went around Celeste's shoulders before Celeste could decide whether to cry.
The hug was the kind Margot gave: full-bodied, deliberate, a fraction tighter than was strictly polite. Celeste felt the flour on Margot's sleeve transfer to the shoulder of her wool coat, then to the back of her neck where Margot's chin pressed. The Brahms played on. The deck oven ticked. Outside, somewhere on Main Street, a car door slammed.
"There you are," Margot said into Celeste's hair. "I have been calling your father's house for three days. No one ever answers anymore."
"He never did," Celeste said, into the flour and the collar. "He never answered the phone. It was a principle with him."
"Stubborn old goat."
"The very worst kind."
Margot pulled back. She held Celeste at arm's length, her hands on Celeste's shoulders, and looked at her the way Margot looked at everything, as if she were cataloguing it for later. "You look terrible."
"Thank you, Margot. You look beautiful, as always."
"I look like I have been awake since four." Margot smoothed a thumb beneath Celeste's left eye, where the tiredness had settled into a bruise-colored shadow. "When did you sleep last? Actually sleep, not the kind where you lie on top of the covers with your boots still on."
"I don't remember."
"Come. Sit. I am not letting you out of this room until you have eaten something."
Margot pointed, the way she always pointed, with her chin, to the small café table in the corner of the workroom. It was a round oak table with two mismatched chairs, one upholstered in faded velvet the color of port wine, the other a plain wooden ladder-back. The table held a glass vase of late hydrangeas, blue fading to lavender, and a tin of Margot's special loose-leaf tea.
Margot disappeared through another door into the front of the shop and returned carrying two small white cups of espresso on a tin tray, a cloth napkin folded beside them, and a plate with a single generous slice of lemon cake. The cake was Margot's signature. Celeste had not had it in eleven years. The curd on top trembled when she set the plate down, a thick, glossy yellow that caught the light from the window.
Margot sat in the velvet chair. She folded her hands in her lap and waited.
Celeste sat in the wooden chair. She picked up the espresso and held it under her nose without drinking, letting the steam come up into her sinuses. The crema was a deep hazelnut brown, dense as velvet. She could smell the lemon zest in the cake from across the table, the bright bitter edge of it cutting through the butter and the sugar.
She drank. The espresso scalded her tongue and she let it. The taste was the same. Margot still pulled her shots a half-second too long, which gave them that faint char at the back, the taste of something almost burned but not quite.
"I came for the chart books," Celeste said.
Margot did not move.
"The bank wants them by the end of the month. The actual chart books, the originals. They're in the studio on the third floor, and I have to inventory them before I can sign anything over to the Maritime Trust. I thought I would do that first. Before the town meeting."
"Before I have to introduce you to the historical society," Margot said. "Yes. That is a wise order of things."
Celeste set the cup down. The saucer wobbled. She steadied it with her thumb.
"I don't know how to do the meeting, Margot."
"You will not have to do anything. I will introduce you. You will say one sentence about your father's work and one sentence about the future of the business, and then we will serve the lobster rolls and everyone will go home happy. That is how it is done."
"I haven't spoken to anyone in eight years."
"You are speaking to me."
"You're different."
"I am exactly the same. I am simply better dressed." Margot lifted her espresso and drank. Her eyes did not leave Celeste's face. "Eat your cake."
Celeste picked up the fork. The tines were silver, tarnished at the handle, the same flatware Margot had used since the bakery opened. She cut a small piece from the corner of the slice. The crumb was fine and yellow, the curd bright on her tongue. She chewed and felt something in her chest tighten.
Margot watched her. Margot always watched. She had been the keeper of other people's small griefs in this town for so long that she had forgotten how to be anything else.
"I cannot believe he is gone," Margot said. "I keep waiting for him to come through that door and order his usual. The dry biscuit and the black coffee, no sugar, no cream. He would stand at the counter and complain about the weather as if he were the only person who noticed it."
Celeste put the fork down.
"He talked about you," Margot continued. "After you left. He never said anything to your face, of course. He was a Marlowe. But he talked to me. He said you were the only one of his children with the proper instinct for the water."
"I'm not a child of his," Celeste said. The words came out flatter than she meant. "I'm his only child."
"I know, dear. I was making a joke."
"It didn't land."
"Nothing lands with you lately. I can see it." Margot set her cup in the saucer. The clink was small and precise. "How long has it been since you laughed?"
Celeste did not answer that. Instead she picked up the fork again and cut another piece of the cake, larger this time, and ate it. The butter. The sugar. The bright lift of the lemon. The cake was exactly the same as it had been when she was a girl of fifteen, sitting at this same table, Margot still in her forties and Gerald alive and the bakery smelling of yeast and warm apples. The taste of it opened a door she had thought she had sealed.
Her eyes filled. She put the back of her hand against her mouth. The sound she made was not a sob. It was closer to a cough, a thing her father would have made.
Margot stood. She crossed the small space between them and put her hand on the back of Celeste's head and held her there, against her collarbone, and Celeste pressed her face into the saffron apron and let the tears come. They came quietly, the way Celeste did everything quietly. She cried into the flour and the cotton, and Margot held her, and the Brahms played, and the deck oven ticked, and somewhere in the front of the shop Phoebe was explaining to a customer that the raspberry tarts were, in fact, the last of the season.
When the worst of it had passed, Margot eased her back into the wooden chair and pressed a cloth napkin into her hand. The napkin was damp and cold and smelled of lavender. Celeste pressed it to her eyes.
"I am sorry," Celeste said.
"Do not apologize to me. I have cried in this room more times than you can count. Gerald's heart. My mother's stroke. The time the espresso machine caught fire and we lost a thousand dollars' worth of panettone. This room has held everything."
Celeste lowered the napkin. Her eyes were swollen. Her nose was running. She wiped it with the back of her hand, a graceless gesture, a child's gesture.
Margot sat down again. She cut a piece of the lemon cake on Celeste's plate and put it on her own. She did not ask. She simply took. That was Margot's way. She made the sharing of grief a transaction, so the grieving person did not have to do anything except sit.
"Your father," Margot said, and waited. She had learned, in her years of running the historical society, that silence was more useful than any question.
Celeste looked down at her plate. The cake was half-eaten. The curd had begun to weep at the edges, a thin syrup pooling on the white porcelain.
"He left me a map."
Margot's hand, halfway to her mouth with the cake, paused.
"A chart," Celeste said. "A chart of somewhere I cannot find on any other chart. He drew it himself. It is half finished. It has no title. It has no legend. It has no coordinates I recognize, Margot. None. I have been looking at it for six days."
Margot set her fork down.
"What do you mean, no coordinates?"
"I mean the lines are not latitude and longitude. I mean the numbers in the margins do not match any system I was taught at the maritime academy. I mean I cannot find this place. I cannot find this water. And my father died before he could tell me what it was."
Margot folded her hands. She looked at Celeste the way she had once looked at a particularly complicated catering contract, her eyes narrowed, her lips pressed together, the gears visibly turning.
"Did you bring it?"
"It is at the house."
"Will you bring it here?"
"I don't want to, Margot. I don't want anyone to see it until I understand what it is."
"I am not anyone. I am your oldest friend. I am also, for what it is worth, the president of the Harrow Cove Historical Society, which means I am professionally obligated to look at old documents."
Celeste almost smiled. Almost. The corner of her mouth twitched. "You are professionally obligated to gossip."
"That is also true. But I can do both." Margot picked up her espresso. "Eat your cake. Then we will go to the house together, and you will show me the chart, and we will figure out what the old goat was up to."
Celeste took another bite. The cake was so good it made her want to cry again. She finished the espresso. The cup was small, and it left her wanting more. Margot poured a second shot from a silver stovetop pot she kept warming on a hotplate at the edge of the worktable. The coffee came out black and thick and slow, with the faint hiss of steam.
"Tell me," Margot said, sitting back down, "everything. From the beginning. From the moment you got the call."
Celeste set the cup down. She looked at Margot across the small oak table, across the hydrangeas and the linen napkin, across all the years they had not spoken.
"The moment I got the call," she said, "I was in Boston. I was at my desk. I was drawing a chart of Georges Bank for a client in Halifax, and the phone rang, and it was the harbormaster, and he said the words, and I sat very still for a long time."
Margot nodded.
"Then I drove north," Celeste said. "I drove for eleven hours. I did not stop. I did not turn on the radio. I drove past the welcome sign and I drove down Main Street and I parked outside the house and I sat in the car until the neighbors noticed me and called the police, who came and knocked on the window and asked if I was all right."
"And were you?"
"I was not." Celeste looked down at her hands. The knuckles were white around the cup. "I am not. I have not been all right in a very long time, Margot. I came back to settle the business and sell the house and leave again, but the chart was on his desk, half-finished, and I cannot leave until I understand what it is. I owe him that. I owe him that much."
Margot reached across the table. She took Celeste's hand. Her palm was warm and dry, dusted with flour that had not yet been brushed away. The flour settled onto Celeste's wrist, a fine white powder, the kind that clings and does not easily come off.
"We will figure it out," Margot said. "Together. As we used to."
Celeste squeezed her hand.
Outside, on Main Street, the noon bells of the Congregational church began to ring. They rang twelve times, slow and bronze, the same bells that had rung for her father's funeral, the same bells that had rung for Gerald Ellis, the same bells that would ring for her someday if she was fool enough to die in this town. The sound came through the brick wall of the bakery muffled, as if it were coming from a great distance, or a great depth.
The flour on Celeste's shoulder had not yet settled.
bell faded into the plaster and the wood and the racks of cooling loaves. In its wake the bakery returned to its quieter sounds: the tick of the wall clock, the creak of the old ceiling beams settling under the heat, the hiss of the oven's last breath through the damper.
Margot withdrew her hand. She rose from the chair with the careful deliberation of a woman who had learned, over the years, that sudden movements invited comment. She moved to the window and looked out onto Main Street, her back to Celeste, one hand resting on the sill. The flour from her palm had left a faint print on the white-painted wood.
"You have not asked," she said.
"Asked what?"
"About him."
Celeste did not answer immediately. She looked down at the cup in her hands, at the dark surface of the tea, at the tiny crescent of lemon peel floating near the rim like a piece of lost sail.
"No," she said. "I have not."
Margot turned from the window. The light from outside caught the silver in her hair and turned it briefly to something brighter, almost theatrical, before settling back into its usual pewter.
"Well," she said, "you should know."
She crossed back to the table and sat down. She did not pour herself tea. She folded her hands on the tablecloth, the fingers laced, the knuckles smoothed by years of careful lotion and the absence of rougher work.
"Declan never married."
The words landed in the room with a particular weight, the weight of things that have been carried for a long time and set down at last. Celeste did not look up. She watched the lemon peel drift on the surface of her tea.
"I am not surprised," she said.
"Everyone else was."
"That does not surprise me either."
Margot made a small sound that might have been a laugh or might have been a sigh. It was difficult, with Margot, to tell the difference. "He had his chances. Plenty of them. There was a woman from Camden, two summers after you left. A marine electrician. She was good for him, I thought. Practical. She did not want a fairy tale. She wanted a man who would show up when he said he would and fix what needed fixing."
"What happened?"
"She showed up when she said she would. He did not." Margot unfolded her hands and refolded them, the other thumb on top now. "There was a girl from Ellsworth who came up every August with her parents for the boat show. She had a long red braid and she laughed at his jokes. He took her sailing three times. Then she went back to college and he did not write."
"And after that?"
"After that there were others. Fewer. None of them stuck. Some of them lasted long enough that I bought a gift. I have a drawer in the sideboard full of half-wrapped presents I will never give."
Celeste looked up. Margot's face was composed. It was the particular composure of a woman who had trained herself, over decades of public life, to deliver information that wounded without showing the wound in return.
"His father Will died three years ago," Margot said. "A heart attack. He was in the boathouse. They found him sitting in his chair with the morning paper still in his lap. The crossword was finished. He had gotten it right, as far as anyone could tell. He had simply stopped."
Celeste set her cup down. The china clicked against the saucer.
"Three years."
"Three years in October."
"I was in Edinburgh when he died. I did not know."
"How would you have known?" Margot's voice was gentle, but it had an edge to it now, the edge of someone who has seen this particular pattern of grief enough times to be tired of it. "You had not been back. You had not called. You had not written. There was no one to tell you."
"I know."
"I am not scolding you."
"You are scolding me a little."
"I am scolding you a little," Margot admitted. "He would have wanted you to be told. He would have insisted. But he was dead by then, and his son was not thinking about it, and I did not have your number, and so the weeks passed, and then it seemed too late, and then it was three years."
The clock ticked. Outside, a car passed on Main Street, its tires hissing against the wet asphalt. Celeste watched the shadow of it slide across the bakery floor.
"Declan and Theo run the yard now," Margot said. "Just the two of them. They took out a second mortgage to keep it. Twice during the recession he nearly sold. I know because I know which men came sniffing around with their briefcases and their calculations. I made a few phone calls. I called in a few favors. I may have implied, inaccurately, that the historical society had an interest in the property. I may have suggested, also inaccurately, that the deed contained a restriction I knew perfectly well it did not contain."
"Margot."
"It worked. Both times."
Celeste almost smiled. It was the first time in many hours that the muscles of her face had moved in that direction. "You should not have done that."
"I should not have. I did it anyway." Margot lifted her teacup at last, found it empty, and set it down again with a small, acknowledging grimace. "He does not know it was me. He thinks the buyers simply lost interest. I prefer to keep it that way."
"What is Theo like?"
Margot considered. She had the particular habit, when weighing a question, of tilting her head slightly to the left, as if she were listening to something only she could hear. "He is twenty-six. He came back from Portland two years ago. He had been working at a shipyard there, doing fiberglass work, very competent, very steady. He came back because his father was failing and because Declan asked. He has not left since."
"Is he happy?"
"He is not unhappy. He is not anything, I think, that requires a strong word. He goes to work. He comes home. He has a small apartment above the chandlery. He keeps it very clean. He reads paperback westerns in the evening. He has a dog."
"A dog?"
"A mutt. Found it on the breakwater during a nor'easter. He named it Compass, which is the sort of name a boy raised around boats would give a dog."
Celeste wrapped her hands around her cup again. The tea had gone lukewarm, but she did not mind. She held it for the warmth of the cup itself, for the small honest weight of it.
"He does not talk about me," she said. It was not a question.
Margot was quiet for a moment. The clock ticked three times before she answered.
"No," she said. "He does not."
"Not at all?"
"Not in my hearing. Not in anyone's hearing, as far as I can tell. Theo would say something, if asked, but I have not asked, because I am not a cruel woman, Celeste, whatever else you may think of me."
"I do not think you are cruel."
"Then you are the only one in this town who does not."
"I think you are occasionally ruthless in the service of what you believe is right. I do not think you are cruel. Those are different things."
Margot looked at her for a long moment. Something shifted behind her eyes, a small rearrangement, like a drawer being quietly closed.
"Thank you for that," she said, and meant it.
The noon hour was passing. The light through the bakery windows had moved from the counter onto the floor, a long pale stripe that reached almost to the table where they sat. In it, the flour dust on Celeste's sleeve glowed like something finer than flour, like pollen, like ash.
"He did not finish the chart," Celeste said.
Margot blinked. The shift in subject was sudden enough that it required a moment's adjustment. "What?"
"My father. The chart on his desk. The half-finished one. I do not understand it. I have been staring at it for three days. I have taken it out of the house and spread it on the dining room floor. I have held it up to the window. I cannot read it."
"Cannot read your own father's work?"
"I can read the work. That is the problem. The work is his. The notations are his. The compass roses are his. The hand is his hand. But the geography is wrong. There are islands in the chart that I do not recognize. There are depths marked that do not correspond to any chart of this coast that I have ever seen. There is a notation in the margin that says simply, in his hand, in his careful hand, 'She will know.'"
Margot set down her cup with a small decisive click. "She."
"She. My mother, perhaps. Or perhaps not. My mother did not read charts. My mother could not tell a fathom from a foot. She would have laughed at the suggestion."
"Then who?"
"I do not know. That is why I am still here. I keep thinking that if I look at it long enough, the answer will arrive. The way it used to, when I was a girl and he would call me into the study and ask me to look at something. He would say, 'What do you see, Celeste?' And I would look. And I would see."
"And you do not see now?"
Celeste turned the cup slowly in her hands. The lemon peel had sunk to the bottom. "I see a chart. I see my father's hand. I see something he was trying to tell someone, or to remind himself of. I see the word 'She.' I do not see what he saw."
Margot reached across the table. She did not take Celeste's hand this time. She simply laid her own hand on the tablecloth, palm up, an invitation rather than a claim.
"Perhaps it is not for you to see yet," she said. "Perhaps it is for you to find."
"There is a difference?"
"In this town, there is always a difference." Margot withdrew her hand. She sat back in her chair, and for a moment she looked very tired, the way women of her particular kind looked tired only when they were sure no one else was watching. "You were always too impatient, Celeste. You wanted the chart finished in one sitting. You wanted the answer before the question. That is why you left at eighteen. That is why you have not come back until now."
"That is unfair."
"I did not say it was fair. I said it was true."
The church bells had stopped. The town had moved on past noon into the longer, slower part of the afternoon. Through the wall they could hear the muffled sounds of Main Street: a door closing somewhere, the distant clang of a bell on a out in the harbor, the high bright laughter of a child somewhere on the sidewalk, though they could not see who.
"Listen to me," Margot said. Her voice had shifted. It was no longer the voice of a woman delivering information. It was the voice of a woman offering a warning. "I am going to say something to you, and I am only going to say it once, and you are going to listen, because you have been gone long enough that you have forgotten how this town works, and if you do not listen you are going to walk into something you cannot walk out of."
Celeste set down her cup. "I am listening."
"Harrow Cove is not Boston. Harrow Cove is not Edinburgh. Harrow Cove is not any of the places you have been. Harrow Cove is a small town on a cold coast at the end of a road that does not quite go anywhere, and in Harrow Cove, wounds do not close. They freeze. They go hard and white and they look, from the outside, like they have healed. But underneath the ice, the wound is still open. It is still bleeding. It is still warm. And anyone who touches it, even by accident, even with the best intentions, will find that the blood is still there, and that it will stain."
"Margot."
"I am not finished. Declan Ashworth is one of those wounds. You are another. When you are both in the same room, when you are both walking down the same street, when you are both standing on the same dock, the wound opens for everyone who has ever watched the two of you. Do you understand me? Not just for you. For the whole town. For everyone who has been carrying the weight of what happened between you, because this town carried it, Celeste, even when you were three thousand miles away and thought you had left it behind."
Celeste was very still. The light had moved past her now, onto the floor, leaving her face in shadow. Her hands lay flat on the tablecloth, and she was aware, suddenly, of the flour on her sleeve, and of the weight of her own wedding ring, and of the smell of lemon and butter rising from the kitchen.
"I did not know they carried it," she said.
"Of course you did not know. You were not here to see it. That is precisely the point. You did not have to live inside the weight of what you left behind. He did. He has been living inside it for fourteen years. He has been living inside it while running a boatyard that nearly bankrupted him twice, while burying his father, while raising a brother who is not his brother, while not marrying any of the women who would have been good to him, while not finishing the upstairs of the house, while not replacing the porch that rotted through in 2019, while going down to the breakwater every morning at six to check the moorings even when there was no one to check them for."
"Margot."
"He is tired, Celeste. He has been tired for a long time. And he has never once, in my hearing, said your name."
The words sat in the room. The clock ticked. The oven ticked as its metal cooled. Somewhere in the kitchen, a tray shifted on a rack with a small bright clatter.
"Then why," Celeste said, and her voice was rougher now, the huskiness coming through, the careful Boston polish stripped away, "why did he keep the chart?"
"What chart?"
"My father's chart. The half-finished one. There is a notation on it. 'She will know.' But there is another one. Smaller. In a different ink. Drier. 'He will have it.' My father's hand, and then, beneath it, in another hand, in a hand I do not recognize, 'He will have it when he is ready.'"
Margot's face went very still.
"That is not Declan's hand," Margot said.
"No."
"That is not Theo's hand."
"No."
"I do not recognize that hand either."
"No one does. That is why I am still here. That is why I cannot leave until I understand who wrote that, and why, and what they meant by 'ready.' Ready for what? Ready when? Ready how?"
Margot looked at her for a long time. The light had moved entirely off the table now, onto the floor, and the bakery had gone cooler, the warmth of the oven fading slowly into the brick. Outside, the town went about its business. Inside, the two women sat in the long shadow of noon, and the cake cooled on its rack, and the chart waited in its folder in a house on the harbor, and somewhere in Harrow Cove, in a boathouse that smelled of salt and old varnish, a man whose name had just been spoken for the first time in fourteen years in this room was, perhaps, lifting a thermos of coffee to his lips, or tightening a bolt, or looking out at the water without seeing it.
"Listen to me," Margot said again, more quietly now. "Some wounds in this town never fully close, even when the harbor freezes over. I have watched this town freeze over many times. I have watched the ice come in and cover everything, and I have watched it go out again in the spring, and underneath it the water has always been moving. The wound is still open, Celeste. It has always been open. The question is whether you are willing to stand at its edge in the cold, and look down into it, and decide what to do about it."
Celeste looked down at her hands. The flour had settled into the lines of her palms. The wedding ring caught a stray beam of light and threw a small bright point onto the ceiling, like a star, or like a signal, or like the kind of thing one charts on a half-finished map.
"I have to see him," she said.
"I know."
"I do not know what I will say."
"You will say what you came here to say. You may not know yet what that is. That is all right. He will wait. He has been waiting a long time. He can wait a little longer."
Outside, the noon bells of the Congregational church had long since gone silent. The town had moved on. The harbor lay flat and gray under a sky that was beginning to clear at its edges. And on Main Street, in a bakery that smelled of lemon and butter and the long memory of flour, two women sat at a table with the remains of a cake between them, and the work of many years ahead of them, and the knowledge, at last, of what had to be done next.