“They do where I come from,” Mia told him.

  “And where is that?” Nathaniel noticed that this woman didn’t seem to care about her appearance. She ignored the burrs that stuck to the fabric of her skirt and the muddy ground they walked through. She hadn’t bothered to pin up her hair nor did she wear a hat, as his sisters always did, to protect herself from the sun. She was not like any woman he had met before, not like the delicate Beacon Hill ladies he had seen on his trips to the city, or the farm women he’d met in Maine, or the women for hire in the taverns on the rowdy docks, a few of whom he’d gone to for comfort, though afterward he had been burdened by regret for using them for his own pleasure.

  “New York,” Mia told him. “That’s where I live.”

  “Ah, New York.” He’d been there with his uncles and his sisters and had been amazed by the intensity of the city. If anything could happen there, and surely it did, perhaps there were women librarians as well. “I’ll have to look for your library next time I’m there.”

  “You can’t. It was built in 1911,” Mia blurted.

  “Nearly eighty years from now,” Nathaniel said

  Mia covered her eyes with her hand and looked up at him to see what his reaction might be.

  “And how would you know what will come to be?” Nathaniel was caught up in his interest like a fish in a net. He didn’t think he could look away from her now if he tried. This sort of magic happened in books, certainly it occurred in his own stories, but not in real life. He was under a spell; he was certain of it now. He saw details that he would never have normally noticed, as if everything had come into a sharper focus. That there were freckles across her nose and cheeks, that her eyelashes were the darkest brown, that her neck was long, and she wore pearls that glittered blue in the sunlight.

  “In my time cities are lit up and you can reach the other side of the world in a matter of hours by flying across the sky.”

  “Like a sparrow?” Nathaniel should have been put off by such nonsense; instead he was intrigued. What if time was like water, and you could move through it at your will?

  “Nothing like a sparrow,” Mia said with a grin.

  “So you haven’t any wings?”

  “Not any more than you.”

  They had stopped walking, and the sun was beating down, and perhaps that was why Mia’s heart was pounding so. She, too, was under a spell, one she had created, and now it all seemed out of her control. She wasn’t certain what would come next and was unsure of what to say and whether she should commit herself to the truth. And what would the truth do for either of them? And how would it change what was meant to be? She thought of a science class at school, and how she’d read about chaos theory, the notion that if a single butterfly moves its wings, it will affect everything on the other side of the world, changing all that was to happen into something brand new. One step, one bit of truth, and everything might be altered. Standing there in the bright sunlight, Mia wondered if she was that butterfly, and if with a single look, she could ruin his life.

  “You’re not an angel, are you?” Nathaniel asked as he studied her.

  She could tell that his question was made only half in jest, for he had a serious expression and he frankly wondered if it might be true. He’d often thought he needed rescuing. If someone didn’t save him, he sometimes believed he might lock himself inside his owl’s nest and never come out again. He feared that on one dark night of the soul he might find himself walking out his window to sit on the roof, and that the darkness all around him might call to him in a way that daily life did not. He wondered about the time he had sleepwalked and his uncle pulled him back, if there was something inside him that wanted to dive into the cold water, if he had been drawn to darkness all along, and that it was only when he was at his desk, writing, that he managed to escape his own personal curse.

  “What if I were an angel?” Mia asked him.

  She had begun to worry about how little she’d thought out what it would mean to come here and how she might affect him and, by doing so, herself. She too was thinking of a dark place, the depths of the Last Look River, the shiny wet stones in her pockets, her wild imaginings that there was no other way to escape the Community, when as it turned out, all she’d had to do was unlock the door of the barn and run as fast as she could.

  “If you were, I’d consider myself the most fortunate man to have come upon you,” Nathaniel said. “But I would think so whether you were an angel or a woman.”

  They had come to a green pond. Both were broiling hot, and now they looked at one another and with a wordless exchange they realized they both had the same notion.

  “Can you swim?” Nathaniel asked, for he knew that many ladies didn’t.

  “Of course.” Mia knelt to remove her boots, which she left beside her book in the tall grass. Blackbirds swooped across the sky as she walked over the marshy ground, not seeming to mind the muck. Halfway there she called back over her shoulder, “Do you?”

  Nathaniel removed his boots and shirt and followed her, naked to the waist. Mia was already standing in the reedy shallows. It was the most beautiful day, there could not be one finer, and she refused to think of how her presence might wreck both their lives. She would not think of herself as a butterfly, there to create chaos, but as a woman who had finally arrived exactly where she wanted to be. She looked up and counted the blackbirds overhead. Fifteen. The age she had been when she read his book.

  “Won’t you ruin your dress?” she heard Nathaniel ask. He stood with his feet in the mud and watched her wade deeper.

  The water was ice, but she wouldn’t think of going back to shore. “I don’t mind.” Mia made her way through the reeds until the pond was deep enough to plunge in. It was heavenly, though shockingly cold. Diving in woke every part of her and made her feel even more alive. Dragonflies skimmed over the surface of the water; the air was filled with them so that the sky turned a luminous blue. Mia faced the shore and saw that Nathaniel was staring. She looked like a nixie, a mythological creature surrounded by water flowers.

  “Are you afraid of drowning?” Mia called.

  In fact, he was. Up in Maine, he’d heard so many stories of people who had drowned, and had written the tales of some of them, and then had nearly drowned himself when he was sleepwalking. Now, though, despite his nagging fear, he dove into the green water and swam to her. Mia laughed and applauded his bravery, for it was so early in the season few would dare to swim here. The water lilies on their green pads were not yet blooming.

  “Promise we won’t drown,” Nathaniel said, gasping in the cold.

  “We won’t,” Mia vowed. She laughed to think of all she might have missed if she had left the black stones in her pockets, if she’d failed to read the book that had fallen open in the grass. If she only had a few hours here, it would be enough. It would be a dream that could last a lifetime.

  They floated together past the reeds and Mia’s dress spread out all around her like a black lily, and when she drifted too far, Nathaniel seized her arm. She could feel the heat from his touch go through her, right to the center of her chest.

  “You’re floating away,” he said, concerned. It was so cold, it was freezing, and yet he was overheated.

  His hand was at her waist, though she certainly didn’t need rescuing. “I’ve already told you,” Mia said. “I can swim.”

  “What else can you do?” Nathaniel asked, puzzled by her every word and action. To say she came from another time, and knew what others did not, was madness, surely, and yet she seemed perfectly sane.

  “I can tell you that you will be a great writer,” Mia told him. “And your book will mean everything to me.”

  “I doubt that,” Nathaniel said, embarrassed and flattered at the same time.

  Mia thought of how one person could save another’s life or ruin it without even meaning to. She had already said too much, and now she swam away from him, back to shore. She slipped on her boots and thought of the day when she went to the library and found his book. She’d grabbed the first volume she could reach so that Sarah would not be suspicious, for Mia always took out at least one book. She thought of standing at the river with the pile of black stones. She had read somewhere that every person who had tried to end their lives and had survived vowed they had regretted their attempt the moment they’d leapt from the bridge or swallowed the pills or dove into the rushing waters. She’d regretted it before she even tried, all because of him.

  Nathaniel followed Mia through the mud. He was chilled to the bone, but he was also in a state of wonder. He felt as if he had wandered into one of his own tales. A woman arrives in a field and changes everything; she has secrets she won’t tell, she has a history that is the heart of the story.

  “Will I see you again?” Nathaniel asked as he came up behind Mia. She was wringing water out of her long red hair. There was a green puddle below her on the ground.

  “If you find me,” Mia said. Now that she was standing there, drenched, she knew that she had opened the door, and that she was about to walk through it.

  “I will,” Nathaniel said. “If you don’t run away.”

  “Tomorrow then,” Mia said. If she were wise, she would leave him and immediately go back before she changed the world without meaning to. Instead, she walked on. This was madness, she knew; she had no home, no food, no other clothes, yet she had no desire to leave. She wandered farther into the woods, thinking she would make a camp of some sort beneath a tree, but then she spied a low roof under the branches of an old oak. Thinking it was a cow barn, Mia went on to discover that it was a small ramshackle cottage. She pulled away the canopy of vines growing over the door and stepped inside. The place smelled like wet earth and had clearly been abandoned for some time, but inside there was a small bed and bureau and a spinning wheel. Someone had lived here once, and had cherished the place, and Mia gave her thanks to whoever the previous occupant might have been.

  She spied a cradle in the back of the tiny house, covered by sumac that had grown up through the floor. There were cups, as well as two small bowls. She wished that Ivy could have lived in a cottage like this, that the vines would have covered the roof, that flowers would have grown up through the dirt floor, and they could have kept Dottie the sheep here and spun her wool on the tall wooden spinning wheel. Ivy had always insisted they had no choice, that Joel would find them wherever they went, but what if she had never gone to the Community and had made them a home in the forest as someone had clearly once done here? What if they had been invisible and had lived cut off from the rest of the world?

  Exhausted, Mia climbed into the small iron bed. The mattress was stuffed with straw and still smelled sweet. She fell asleep in no time and dreamed she was in the apple orchard with her mother. In her dream, she grabbed on to Ivy’s arm and made her run as fast as she could, and when the truck slipped down the hill the only damage it did was to knock down one of the old, twisted apple trees, a cutting from the one Johnny Appleseed had left behind on his travels through Blackwell.

  There were holes in the roof of the cottage, and when Mia’s dream of the orchard woke her in the middle of the night, she could see the stars shining. It took her a moment to remember where she was, in a time before The Scarlet Letter had been written, in the year when Nathaniel was a man who thought he would fail at everything, on a night when he was already awake in his cluttered room on Herbert Street in Salem, waiting for the moment when he could see her again.

  * * *

  THEY MET EACH MORNING at the pond. Nathaniel told no one, but the secret of where he went each day burned inside him, making it impossible to talk to his sisters, for he was not a liar and never had been, and at this stage of his life it was unlikely that he would have so radical a change in his character. A single untruth seared his tongue, and he began to avoid his family. A secret life is one that can only be shared by two, especially when love was involved, for that is what this seemed to be. He could not stop thinking of Mia. Whether she was an angel or a witch or simply a woman didn’t matter, for she was all he thought of. He ignored his desk and had stopped writing. The real world called to him, perhaps for the first time since he was a boy and came alive in the Maine woods, connected to nature and to the secret life he had back then as well. A lone wanderer, someone who was more attached to trees and leaves and stars than he was to other human beings, a watcher in the window who had become a watcher in the woods.

  * * *

  HE BEGAN TO PILFER food from the kitchen to bring to Mia, and though he meant to keep his actions secret, he was no better a thief than he was a liar. In time his sisters noticed. Loaves of bread and cheese and leftover supper all disappeared.

  “Perhaps he’s feeding the poor down at the harbor,” Louisa guessed.

  “Perhaps,” Elizabeth said, but she believed something else was at play. She knew her brother better than anyone, and she understood what it meant when he stopped writing. The cause was either a gloom that couldn’t be lifted or a woman.

  “Have you had a good day?” Elizabeth asked him when he returned that afternoon. His hair was wet, and he’d pushed it back; there was mud on his boots. She wondered where he’d been traipsing during the hours when he’d been gone. She noticed there was a smile on his face for no reason whatsoever. The weather was humid and he wasn’t writing, and ordinarily these were factors that would make him miserable.

  “Excellent,” Nathaniel answered, which was not at all like him, for how does a writer have a good day when he hasn’t written a word? And how does a man who has always believed himself to be cursed take the stairs two at a time so that he might sit upon the roof and study the stars?

  * * *

  WHEN MIA BROUGHT NATHANIEL to the cottage, he was surprised he’d never stumbled upon it before. “I think I overheard my sisters speak of such a place, but I’ve never seen it for myself. It has some history that no one speaks of.”

  Mia showed him the cradle and the flowers that grew by the gate, red roses that were about to bloom, and as she did he took note of all that she needed, blankets and some clothing, for she wore only the one black dress. They spent the day together climbing the hills all around Salem. He brought her to the harbor, where they watched the ships, and at the end of the day they swam in the pond, this time with neither of them speaking, as if the spell they were under was too strong for words. There were falling stars above them, and his hair was so long Mia held it back in one hand as she leaned in to kiss him. He was slow to kiss her back, for he didn’t wish to ruin her in any way, or offend her, but then he did and he could hardly stop. He walked her to the cottage, and when they went to bed, they didn’t leave, but instead they stayed there until morning. He never wanted to leave, but he went home and then later he returned with a basket in which there was a quilt and two dresses of Louisa’s along with a loaf of bread and some cheese.

  “Are you a runaway?” he asked. Nathaniel didn’t imagine a criminal history, rather a husband or father who had treated her badly, for she had no belongings other than the book he had spied tucked under the mattress of the narrow iron bed, the one she said would change her life.

  “Not exactly,” Mia said. “Though I was once.”

  “So you wish to remain a mystery?” Nathaniel grinned. He had the oddest feeling that he was the person he had been before he was nine and had his injury and felt separated from the rest of the world.

  “Isn’t everyone a mystery?”

  “Will you answer every question with a question?”

  “Will you?” Mia asked, hoping to distract him, for she knew he wished to know her background and her history.

  On the following day, Nathaniel arrived with a bunch of cut lilacs, and when he handed the blooms to Mia, she set them in a glass jar.

  Nathaniel again noticed the book beneath the mattress. “Will you ever let me read it?” he asked.

  “You don’t need to read it. You’ll write it.”

  She kissed him then. Every kiss was more than he expected. He had not known a lady to behave this way, but then again, Mia’s character was so different than that of any woman he’d known; she appeared to have no idea of what the rules were, at least not here in Salem, where nearly everything that brought joy was considered a sin, as if their Puritan ancestors were still watching over them.

  “I know we can’t do as we please,” he said to Mia, embarrassed by his own longings.

  “How do you know that?” Mia asked. She stood and unbuttoned her borrowed dress. It was light wool, too heavy for the season, a deep rose color. He’d said his sister Louisa had bought the fabric in Boston.

  “Mia,” Nathaniel said, thinking of those women in the taverns, many of whom had unwanted children or who had harmed themselves trying to stop a pregnancy. “We can’t be careless.”

  “We can be whatever we want to be,” Mia assured him. “We can be invisible,” she said.

  * * *

  BUT THEY WEREN’T, FOR on the fifth day Elizabeth took the path through the woods. Her mistrust had begun when the food from the pantry began to disappear, and then Louisa complained that some of her garments were missing, and then there was the look on their brother’s face, delight and wonder when he went out in the mornings, ignoring his work, whistling a sparrow’s tune as he walked down their street.