“You can tell her, thank you, yes,” she said in a quiet voice. She kept her eyes on the man in the blue and green and white shirt.

The humming continued.

“Coffee. Or … would you like tea?” Billy asked, taking no notice of the guest in the corner. “Mrs. Hale says you might prefer tea.”

“Tea would be lovely. Yes,” she almost whispered.

“Coming right up.” He turned. “Morning, Hector,” Billy breezed past him, but the man made no acknowledgment except a slight nod of his head.

Letting the fall of her hair curtain her face, Iris glanced at the humming man, who was now making small circles in the air with his long-fingered hands, like butterfly wings fluttering. His lips were moving bap bap bap bap. He looked up and stared at her blankly, then returned his attention to his writing.

“Where are you off to today?” Billy was back with the tea and toast.

“I haven’t quite decided,” she replied quickly.

“If I may suggest?”

“Yes?”

“If you haven’t seen the Mapparium, then you should go. Just around the corner, across Huntington.”

“Mapparium?” She pretended to be interested.

“Yeah, it’s awesome. It’s like … it’s hard to explain actually. It’s a giant walk-through globe with a map of the world painted on glass. Inside out, like. Like you’re in the middle of the earth looking out. Really cool. The acoustics are unreal, and—”

From butterfly hands came a groan. “Hey, Billy, pipe down, can you? I need to finish this.” The man hadn’t looked up.

“Yeah, sure, Hector. Sorry, man.” Billy moved so he was masking the tall man from Iris’s view. He raised his eyebrows and shrugged and lowered his voice a notch. “Anyway. It’s three stories high and there’s over six hundred glass panels held together and they’re individually lit from behind. And there’s a glass bridge, midway though the earth, that takes you across from one side to the other and—”

“It’s the world as it was in 1934,” said Hector. He stood up then and strode from the room in a kind of whoosh, but not before first looking directly at Iris, then back to Billy. “And don’t forget to say it’s a whispering gallery.” Whoosh. He was out the front room. Bang. He was passing in the street below the window, striding away, his fair hair like wings beating behind his ears.

“Was it something we said?” Iris said, trying to make light of what was feeling to her like an awkward situation.

“Don’t worry about it. Sometimes he’s like that, Professor Sherr. He’s a real good friend of Mrs. Hale’s. He’s Californian. He stays here a few times a year. He can be really nice, when he’s not composing.”

“A musician?”

“Yeah. He’s playing tonight at the park.” Billy pointed through the room and out the window. “Jazz.”

Iris felt her face blush for no reason at all. Billy kept chatting and he told her he was helping Grace out while she took in a few guests over the summer. He told her he was a sophomore at Boston University, hoping to major in computers. “I’m a bit of a computer geek,” he said.

“So, you’re about my daughter’s age, then?”

“Twenty in September. Twenty-ninth.”

“My daughter’s going to be nineteen at the end of the month.”

*   *   *

Iris didn’t wait for Billy to return with the brochure on the Mapparium that he’d proposed to get. Instead she went up to her room to change her shoes again and brush her hair. She looked at herself one long moment. Will she remember me? A few minutes later, map in hand, she left the guesthouse and walked in the direction of St. Botolph Street. The day was already hot. Iris passed alongside a long expanse of iron railings that enclosed a park. Children’s voices rang in the near distance. Redbrick townhouses, like Mrs. Hale’s, with double wooden doors and bowed windows with lead glass lined the other side of the street.

Would Rose have come from a house like this?

Would she have played in this park?

Would she have loved growing up here?

Anxiety, which had been briefly diverted by the Hawaiian-shirted man, returned. Her breath quickened and her chest hurt. What was she was going to say to Hilary Barrett when she found her? She’d been operating on gut instinct and her usual impulsiveness, but had she really thought it through? No. Of course not. Of course you didn’t, Iris. For a moment she wished she could beam herself home and wake up, relieved, as if from a bad dream. But there was too much at stake; she’d come too far to turn back now. At the end of the park, an almost paralytic terror gripped her.

I am keeping my promise, Luke.

At the intersection of West Newton and St. Botolph, a three-story building spanned the corner, curving with it. It was unlike the other buildings on the street. This one was a bit more elegant, with a kind of turret at its corner capped with lead. Iris walked across the street, closer to it and looked up at its doors, which stood at the top of a set of brick steps.

99 St. Botolph Street.

These numbers were etched in a glass panel above its black frame. If this is the place, nothing about it said it could be the home of Rose’s birth mother. It might have—once upon a time—housed apartments, maybe, but what Iris now saw as she stood fixed to the sidewalk was not someone’s “home.”

Iris climbed the steps to the door and knocked.

Nothing.

She knocked again.

Nothing again. No one came to answer the door.

She turned around and half slumped her back against the door. A surge of heat rushed to her chest and face. She tugged on the neckline of her dress and felt perspiration gathering in the folds of her skin. How could 99 St. Botolph Street be the home of Hilary Barrett?

It was a restaurant.

After a few moments she went down the steps and crossed the street. She walked dazed, an ache in her heart, a kind of numbness buffering the pain of her thoughts. She turned abruptly and came back. There was a fruit and vegetable stand outside a small shop called Megaira’s Market. Botolph’s was across the way. She stepped into the market and, feeling conspicuous, took up a Boston Globe from the stack of newspapers just inside the front door. She looked back toward the restaurant, peering through stacked shelves of cans of tomatoes and lentils and jars of stuffed cabbage leaves and boxes of rice. A stoic-looking lady with small dark eyes and gray hair, standing inside behind the counter, snapped at her.

“You want that paper?”

“Sorry?”

“Globe’s two dollars. You want it?”

Iris crossed to the counter and stood for a moment in the whir of a fan.

“They’re not open,” the woman said, opening the till.

Iris looked at her questioningly.

“Botolph’s, not open until lunchtime.”

Iris smiled weakly. “Oh.”

“Where you from?”

“Ireland. I’m Irish.”

“Ireland? Never been. I always wanted to visit places where foreign languages were spoken.”

Iris didn’t know what to say to that, although she could have said, The world feels like it’s speaking a foreign language today and I don’t understand.

From her post at the checkout the woman eyed Iris but as Iris met her gaze directly, something in the old woman lightened.

“You looking maybe for a place to eat?”

“No, thanks.” Iris put her things down and opened her purse.

“Looking for a job? Maybe you got an interview or something. You meeting someone?”

“No.”

“None of my business, then,” the woman said, this time sounding cross.

Iris was about to pay when she spotted some postcards of an urban garden. “I’ll take these, too, please.”

“Titus Sparrow Park.”

“How much are they?”

“Six for five.”

“Unusual name,” Iris said.

“It’s Greek,” the woman said and shuffled along behind the counter and made a noise that sounded like spitting.

“No, sorry. I meant … I meant Titus Sparrow.”