Be careful of who you trust, Ivy had told her once in the woods. If you want to be smart, something I never was, only trust yourself.

  “If you don’t agree to the bargain, I’ll take care of that man of yours. I’ll break his neck if I have to. I just want what’s mine. You listened to me once upon a time, back when I was your father.”

  Mia felt that chill again, as she had the night she was locked in the barn. It had been summer, but she had been freezing, preoccupied with what would happen if she didn’t get away, the public shaming, the brand marking her flesh. “You were never my father,” she told him.

  “Say what you will. I raised you.”

  “Give me one more day,” Mia boldly asked. “Then I’ll do as you say.”

  “Lovestruck.” Joel nodded. He was still a handsome man if you didn’t look too closely, if you didn’t see what was underneath. “Just like your mother.”

  Mia did her best to ignore the comment, though she felt herself grow flushed. She remembered the rules about talking back. Children are not to speak unless spoken to. They must be quiet and polite and never unruly.

  “Fine,” Joel said. “Because of your mother, I’ll wait until tomorrow.”

  They agreed that they would meet at daybreak at the farm.

  “Today is yours,” Joel said. “But when the morning comes, don’t make me wait. You’ll regret it if you do, and so will that man of yours.”

  * * *

  NATHANIEL WAS SITTING IN a rough wooden chair outside the inn, waiting. He had paced until he’d left a trail in the grass, before realizing it would do no good to worry and fret; he would have to have faith. He was relieved when at last he saw her emerge from the woods, her red hair loose. She had a singular way of walking, different from most women of this time, as if she were free as a bird, and could fly away if she wished. She came to him and sat in his lap, arms looped around his neck.

  “This is still the place where I spent my childhood. I vowed to never come back, until I heard that you were here.”

  “I’m glad you changed your mind,” Nathaniel said.

  Mia could have cried had she allowed herself to do so. “You changed my mind. Now I want us to have a perfect day,” she told him. She really couldn’t ask for more. “Can we do that?”

  “We can indeed. We’ve already begun.”

  They hiked into the woods, where the wild asters were blooming, and the grass was nearly waist high. As they neared the river, Mia heard branches breaking; for a moment she feared it was Joel, out to double-cross her, then they saw two fishermen who waved and wished them good luck, shouting that the trout were running in such great numbers the river itself had turned blue. The orchards of apple trees for which the town would later be famous had sprung from the seedlings Johnny Appleseed had left behind, but there were pine and fir and oak and wild pear laden with fruit, with heaps dropping onto the ground. It was the time of year when bears began to go mad for all the local bounty, devouring the blueberries, and wild walnuts, and the ripening pears, eating all they could before summer’s end.

  Farther downstream, the deep pools reflected the clouds in the sky. Water ran two ways in this river, down from the mountain. Mia had skated here when she was a girl, fashioning skates of sticks tied to her shoes. It was not a childhood anyone would have chosen, but it was hers all the same. Once, Ivy had followed her to the river. What do you think you’re doing? Ivy had said, concerned that Mia would get caught breaking the rules.

  Having fun, Mia said. Ever hear of it?

  Ivy grinned, then she tied sticks to her boots as well. Once she was out on the ice, Ivy fell again and again, until Mia came to offer her arm. They skated round on the blue ice until their fingers were freezing through their cheap work gloves. It was more than fun. It was perfect, or almost.

  Don’t tell anyone we were here, Ivy had said when they trekked back through the snowy woods, walking lightly over the frost. But Joel had been waiting up for his wife and he’d seen the snow dusted in her hair. The next evening, when Mia saw her mother in the dining hall, she noticed the dark mark on Ivy’s arm. Ivy caught her staring and hurriedly pulled down her sleeve, but Mia had seen it. A for self-absorbed, A for anarchy and for acts of wickedness, as if a cold blue night of fun had been a sin to be placed beside vanity and envy.

  When Mia and Nathaniel reached the bank of the river, they lay on their backs to gaze at the wisps of clouds racing through the sky. Mia rested her face against Nathaniel’s rough cheek.

  Oh, perfect day, the one day they would never forget. Mia ran her fingertips along Nathaniel’s features, memorizing him through touch.

  “I haven’t been honest with you,” she said. “I haven’t told you how I came to read your book and how it changed my life.”

  She told him that when she was fifteen and lived just over the hill, on a farm that overlooked Hightop Mountain, she had been so desperate that she had counted out black stones until there were seventy, all glimmering in the sunlight that filtered through the leaves. She knew that there had been drownings in the Last Look River, and she would simply be one more. She told Nathaniel that she had read that people who attempted to take their own lives and failed reported that they regretted their actions as soon as they stepped off the bridge or threw themselves into the sea, but she had been so lost she could not see how that was possible. Then she had found his book, and once she began to read, she understood there was a door that would lead her out of her situation, and that every book was a door, and that there were a thousand lives she might live.

  “Mia, I don’t know what I could possibly write that would affect you so,” Nathaniel said. It was a burden and a huge responsibility, and he didn’t know if he was capable of such an undertaking.

  Mia held her hand to his face. “You’ll write something beautiful and true, and I’ll read it and live.”

  * * *

  THEY LEFT THEIR CLOTHES scattered in the grass and went down to the low stony edge of the water. It was the sort of bright, sun-yellow day that felt as if it would last forever. For a few hours, they didn’t have to think about what the future would bring.

  Nathaniel was the first to step into the shallows. The trout splashed away in a blue blur as he threw himself into the depths with a shout. Mia laughed and applauded his daring. He was perfect. He was still hers for one more day.

  “Come in,” Nathaniel called. “Be brave!”

  She thought of the times she’d been bravest. When she went through the woods to watch the play on the town green on a summer night, when she asked her mother if she could visit the castle and she began to read, when she broke the lock on the barn door and ran down Route 17. You had to lose something to gain something. It was the reason why so many people stayed, long after they knew they should leave. Mia walked into the water. The last time of everything was painful, no matter how beautiful it might be. The last time I walked with you, slept beside you, loved you, spoke to you, told you the truth, the last time I looked at you. She would not tell him about their child, and he would not notice. They would see what they wished to see, only one another. The birds were quiet, and all the world seemed still as Mia plunged into the deepest pool. Nathaniel drew her near and she kissed him recklessly, as if the world was about to end, but it wasn’t. It was only the story that was over.

  * * *

  ON THEIR WALK BACK, Mia asked if they might visit Blackwell, the town she had known so well when she was young.

  “Are you certain you won’t feel sad as you’re reminded of your mother?” Nathaniel asked.

  “How can we ever be certain of how or what we’ll feel?”

  Mia kissed him for being thoughtful, keeping the reason for her request to herself. They walked down the lanes and across pastures that would become Route 17 when all the trees were cut down and tar was laid. Nathaniel put a hand on Mia’s arm to stop her before they left the forest. He nodded to a shaded glen. There was a fox, the sign of good luck. They held hands then, their fingers interlaced. Mia was thankful that she knew how to feel one thing and pretend that she was feeling something entirely different. She had learned that in the Community. She knew how to stop herself from crying.

  At last they reached the section of the woods where Mia and her mother had stood to watch the play about the drowned girl called the Apparition.

  “Shall we turn back?” Nathaniel asked, gauging the sadness in Mia’s mood.

  “Oh no. We’re almost there.”

  Soon enough they came upon the town center, the place where Joel said they should have left Mia when she was a newborn. Across from where they stood was the library with its brick façade and its turrets.

  Mia looked up at Nathaniel, eyes shining. “That’s where I found your book.”

  “By accident,” he said. “Perhaps any book would have done as well.”

  “No. It was meant to be. You were meant to be.”

  Mia suggested he go on to the library, for she wished to spend some time alone with her memories. She pointed to the far part of the green. “We set up the farmers’ market over there and sold apples and tomatoes. I haven’t eaten an apple since.”

  Nathaniel was stunned. “Then you’re missing out on something wonderful.”

  Mia laughed when she saw the concerned look on his face. “I’ve lived without them,” she assured him.

  “The Puritans believed that women should be subjugated because Eve ate of the apple, committing the original sin,” Nathaniel told her. “You should eat an apple every day to spite the idiots who thought so.”

  “I’d rather be kissed,” Mia said.

  Nathaniel was glad to oblige and so he did right there on Main Street, even though several passersby turned to gawk. They then agreed to meet in the center of the green. Mia wandered along Main Street until she was certain that Nathaniel had entered the library, then she headed for her destination. The sheriff’s office was exactly where the police station would be when Mia lived here, although it was smaller. It was cool when she went inside. Both the sheriff and his assistant looked up when she entered.

  “Can we help you?” the sheriff asked.

  “Thank you for asking,” Mia said. “Not right now.”

  The sheriff looked at her, curious. “Are you from around here?”

  “Once,” Mia said. That much was true. “But not anymore.”

  When the men turned away, Mia slipped an envelope onto the front desk for them to find later in the day, or perhaps not until tomorrow. That was when they would be needed, out near Hightop Mountain.

  * * *

  NATHANIEL WAS SITTING ON a bench beneath a huge elm tree that was already gone when Mia was a girl, stricken by Dutch elm disease. His arms were spread out and his face was lifted to the sun. He was so peaceful in that moment, not the haunted man he’d once been. He was here and nowhere else, delighted to open his eyes and see Mia standing before him.

  “I have a gift for you,” he told her. He took an apple from the pocket of his black coat. “Your first, but not your last.”

  Mia sat beside him, and he watched her take a bite, delighted by how tentative she was, as if she was accepting an offering from a serpent rather than from the man who loved her. My Eve, he thought, my darling who taught me what I needed to know. He wondered why the original Eve was not praised for the knowledge she’d brought to humankind, why she wasn’t honored instead of disregarded and disgraced.

  “How is it?” he asked Mia, who now offered him a bite of his own.

  “The best thing I’ve ever tasted,” she admitted. She could tell it was a Look-No-Further, the variety they had grown on the farm, in the orchard where her mother had been working, hauling a woven basket filled with apples through the wildflowers and the weeds, taking her last look at the beautiful world.

  * * *

  THAT NIGHT, THEY LEFT the window open so they could listen to the crickets’ slow call as they lay in one another’s arms. They were grateful they could study one another. They did so as if memorizing every feature, knees and elbows, throat and ears, loved and beloved. Mia thought of all the years when she had been certain she would never be able to love anyone, and now here she was. Not only did she have a heart, but it was already breaking.

  “Shall I tell you your children’s names?” she asked Nathaniel.

  She wanted to give him a gift before she left, but when she offered it to him, Nathaniel knew she would not stay. It was a way of saying goodbye, to say what he would experience, and she would not. He nodded and held her close.

  “Una and Julian and Rose.”

  Nathaniel’s throat was tight, and he found he could not speak. They were, indeed, beautiful names.

  “They will be perfect,” Mia told him. “You will love them more than you love your own life.”

  “Will I?” he managed to say. Nathaniel knew what the endings of stories were like; he’d written them enough times to know that this was theirs.

  “You will adore them. You’ll write about them, and how fatherhood surprised you and changed you.”

  “I expect it surprises everyone.”

  “You’re not everyone.” His eyes were deep gray now, as dark as she’d ever seen them. As for her, she was still faded, a shadow of herself. Nathaniel could feel her slipping away; she was so light in his arms, she was a ghost of who she’d been and would be so until she returned home. She was glad she would leave before the end and that she wouldn’t have to watch him fall in love with someone else. “Your wife will be the right woman for you.”

  “That’s you,” Nathaniel insisted, convinced.

  “If you love once, you can love again,” Mia told him. “I know you will love her.” Nathaniel covered his ears so he couldn’t hear more, but Mia laughed and pulled his large, beautiful hands away so that he would listen. “I promise, you’ll be happy. I’ve seen your future.”

  “What about you?” he asked, unsure of what he wished the answer to be. He wanted to be missed; he wanted her for himself. Mia ran a hand through his hair. Elizabeth was right; if she told him the truth, he would never let her go. She would name their daughter after his sister, and she would bring her to visit libraries, just as Constance had brought her to do the same. Herein are a thousand different doors, and a thousand different lives. Turn the page and you open the door.

  “I’ll be happy, too.”

  By the time Nathaniel fell asleep, it was almost morning. The sky was still dark when Mia left the bed to dress. She spied Nathaniel’s notebook on the bureau. He’d made lists of words, a page of colors, another of trees, another with her name written a hundred times, as if she herself were an incantation. Magic was possible, especially once he began to write. She looked until she came upon a page with a single line. She had not known the weight until she felt the freedom. It was the line that had disappeared from the book. It was no longer invisible. It was all coming back. Mia knew that every story contained the same things. A beginning, a middle, and an end. What she hadn’t known was that the end came before you knew it, it came so fast that all you could do was breathe.

  She left Ivy’s letter on the desk. Her greatest treasure would be her greatest gift. He had the words but not the story, so she gave it to him. That was why she had recognized herself in The Scarlet Letter. The story would begin with a woman who was not allowed to control her own body or her own fate. It happened all the time. It happened above the burying hill in Salem, a place men knew nothing of, and it happened now in Mia’s time. In the story, there would be a man who didn’t have the courage to declare himself, and another man who didn’t care if he brought a woman to ruin, but there was also a love that couldn’t be broken, the love was never invisible, the heart of the story, the love of a mother for her child.

  * * *

  NATHANIEL KNEW SHE WAS gone before he opened his eyes. The bed was small, and because he was alone, he had taken up all the space. He wondered how she had ever fit there beside him. He wondered how it had been possible for him not to have heard her leave. Some things were meant to be, that was what his sister always told him, and some were not.

  The bedsheets held Mia’s scent, a grassy fragrance that made him long for her. There was the letter she’d left for him on the bureau. She’d written a single line on the envelope. I love you enough to let you go.

  He imagined the future that awaited him. A wife and three children. A life he was meant to have. Love once, and you can love again. Open your heart, open your eyes, be grateful for what you’ve had. Nothing was promised in this world, nothing lasted, yet what truly mattered always remained. What was eternal could not be captured, yet it flickered in the dark there beside you, the memory of all that had been.

  Nathaniel remembered staring out the window when he was nine. He felt much the same today as he had then, for he was part of the world and still he remained separate from it. That was what it meant to be a writer. He gazed out into the light rising above the treetops. He might have pursued Mia, but he knew it was impossible. He still had the apple core on his desk, with the marks of her small bites.

  It would be morning in a matter of moments. The world would fill with daylight, and he would be there to record it. He leaned against the metal bedposts and read the letter, and as soon as he did, he knew it was the story he’d been searching for. A young woman who had been turned away from those closest to her, who only wished to make her own decisions. He imagined the Community to be not unlike the Puritans, the society his own family had sprung from, who believed that it was God’s will for women to be subordinate, insisting that Eve’s sin was carried by every woman, a burden she would always have to bear, one that spoke of a woman’s moral weakness. Nathaniel thought of cruelty and of love; he thought of the choices women make and the choices forced upon them. It was Ivy’s letter he read, but it was more than that to him. It was the book he would write.