Grace had set a tray with a pink rose alongside the tea and a sandwich and the phone. Iris was close to tears upon seeing the flower. Get it together. This is not the time to feel sorry for yourself. She put down the tray and turned to the mirror, remembering Tess’s words. “Breathing in, I know I am breathing in. Goddamn it. Breathing out, I know I am breathing out.”

It was nine o’clock in the evening, too late to ring Ireland, but she phoned the airline and after a long wait—listening every thirty seconds to the recorded voice: “We are experiencing a high volume of calls and all our operators are busy. Your call is important to us. Please hold the line and a representative will be with you shortly”—a live voice came on. There were seats available for a return flight the next day. She’d only have to pay an extra change-of-date fee. Iris was relieved. She would be in Ashwood in thirty-six hours. She sat against the bed. She didn’t want to think about anything else. Not Hilary, not the Breast Clinic, not Hector. She took off her now wrinkled blue dress and folded it, laid it in her case, and put on the bathrobe she’d been wearing the last few nights. She pulled aside the bed covers and slipped inside. She returned to the dream of Luke walking out of the sea toward her. He’d been smiling. Why was he smiling? There was nothing to smile about. There was no one there. Hilary was dead. And as for Hector, Iris wished he’d stayed as he was that first morning. Unapproachable. It would have saved her from behaving like a schoolgirl on a first date and, worse, from feeling guilty that she dared to let herself imagine a relationship. Turning from one side of the old bed to the other, she struggled to get comfortable. She turned around to the foot of the bed, buried her head under a pillow, tried to block out the sound of the irritating air-conditioning vent. She was in that zone she knew well: alert, electric, fully charged, a live wire connected to nothing. She rose from the bed, went to her case and took one of the sleeping tablets Dr. O’Reilly had given her. Soon she was falling asleep, trying to picture Luke coming from the sea.

*   *   *

She woke at six the following morning and went down to Grace’s kitchen. She made tea and stood at the window that faced onto a small garden, which she hadn’t noticed in the dark the night they’d had dinner.

When she’d finished her tea, she went out the back door in her bare feet and stood on the grass wet with dew. Her feet welcomed it. The as-yet-unlit garden was enclosed with an herb border made with railway ties fringing a brick wall. Peppermint spurted shoots through its gaps. An ill-shaped bed with a pink rosebush, some blue geranium and nepata, and tall white cosmos, which yearned for a good pruning, was dead center in the garden. She moved to it and began with urgent energy to deadhead the spent cosmos flowers. She did it out of instinct because some part of her needed to weed. She moved closer to the rosebush, and with her fingernail, nipped away thin growth along the stem. Iris bent to pull a dandelion sprouting at its base. She made a small pile of weedings and had the oddest feeling that it didn’t matter where she was, only that she was doing something, and for a moment she forgot where she was.

“Will you stay forever?” Grace came toward her, hands deep into the pockets of her bathrobe, which hung open and showed a knee-length pink nylon slip.

“I didn’t realize you had this space out here. It’s a little oasis.”

“But I could use a good gardener, as you can see. Right?”

Iris smiled.

“Sit down, Iris, please,” Grace said, moving to the garden table and its twin metal chairs. “I want to show you something.”

Iris thought, Dear God, what now? She sat opposite Grace, who handed over a thing she’d been holding in her pocket. It was a copy from a newspaper dated February 15, 1992.

CAR CRASH CLAIMS LIFE OF YOUNG WOMAN

A woman crossing Huntington Avenue died yesterday morning as the result of a car accident. According to eyewitnesses, the driver of the vehicle, a man in his fifties who is recovering in the hospital, swerved to avoid the young woman when she slipped on the ice. The car spun out of control and hit her head-on. Paramedics rushed to the scene to assist the injured woman but were unable to revive her. She was declared dead at the scene by authorities.

After contacting her parents the police revealed the name of the dead woman as Ms. Hilary Barrett, a local resident of St. Botolph Street and librarian at the Mary Baker Eddy Library across the road from where the accident occurred. Ms. Barrett graduated from Boston University and Trinity College, Dublin. She was twenty-four and is survived by her parents, Marjorie and Jack Barrett, of Chappaqua, New York. Ms. Barrett was a valued employee at the library and colleagues expressed great regret at the loss.

Authorities have warned pedestrians in the South End to be mindful of icy road conditions at this time of year and have urged residents to use the crosswalk.

Iris couldn’t articulate what she was experiencing right then, except she felt a jumble of feelings encircling her, like a tornado, of sorrow, anger, despair, fear, but also an odd, and therefore surprising, sense of relief. There it was in black-and-white. Her mission to find Hilary was at an abrupt and sad end.

So was her promise.

There’d been a very good reason why the beautiful young woman she and Luke had met nearly twenty years ago had stopped responding to queries from the Adoption Board in Dublin. Iris looked down at her hands. Grace sat beside her, and when Hector started to come out she shook her head at him and he turned and went back inside. Iris could have called out to him, but she didn’t.

The sun was easing into a space between two buildings and a long, narrow rectangle of light lit up the grass like a neon banner and now it slanted against the wall at the southwest corner. Iris turned to Grace and told her story. The whole story.

Grace reached across the table and laid her hand on Iris’s wrist and held it. They sat this way for a while. What was there to say? What was there that could be said? Inch by inch, the narrow rectangle of sunlight widened. Insects moved from shadowed corners.

“I’m sorry, Iris,” said Grace finally, “I’m so sorry. What you must be going through.” She let go of Iris’s wrist.

“When did you know?”

“About Hilary?”

“Yes.”

“Billy. Billy found out. Yesterday. You’d already left. He’s a wiz with computers. You see … I remembered the name but I couldn’t place it. It was so long ago.”

“Did you know her?”

“No. No, I didn’t. I mean, I knew of her. Afterward. It was in the papers and…” Iris watched Grace lower her head and close her eyes. After a few moments she replaced her hand on Iris’s. “What did he tell you about himself?”

“Hector?” Iris said and gave Grace a look that showed it couldn’t possibly make a difference.

But Grace ignored it and went on. “Probably not much, I’m guessing. The thing about Hector, well, I think I can tell you. It’s not a secret, right? He lost his wife to cancer … years ago. Her name was Julia.” Grace stumbled on the words she spoke. Her eyes darted toward the door of the kitchen and back to Iris, and she dropped her voice. “He thought there was a spark between you. I must admit I saw it, too. So did Billy. I mean, am I right?”

There had been a spark, Iris admitted, but today it was too weak to ignite. Today she felt only shame and sadness.

What was she anyway? The collector of lost and dead souls? No. She wasn’t going to feel sorry for Hector. Julia was years ago, she thought. He should be over it by now. Isn’t that what people said? The first two years are the hardest? For her it’d been, what? Two years and two weeks and a day since Luke died. No. Absolutely not. She wasn’t going to feel sorry for him.