* * *

  IT HAPPENED A WEEK after Mia had decided she wanted to be alive. She often went to visit the cemetery and had sat there a few times, rereading The Scarlet Letter, wishing she could tell her mother about the book. We should have gone off to live in the forest. We should have never bowed to Joel’s vision of what life should be like.

  In the dining hall, there was vegetable stew and biscuits and a salad made with the last of their lettuce and kale for dinner. It seemed like another uneventful Thursday, until Mia noticed the girls were all looking at her as she went to get a dinner tray. Evangeline was standing by the door watching her as well, her mouth set in a harsh line. Mia went on to pick up her silverware, but she had begun to feel a chill. What did they know that she did not? Before Mia could get her food, Tim Hardy and another man came up to her.

  “He’s waiting,” Tim said, and that only meant one thing. Mia had broken the rules. There was no one to protect her. Ivy couldn’t dissuade him now, and Mia would have to pay for her actions. She was no one special anymore.

  Mia’s thoughts were racing as the two men took her out to the cow field. There were torches burning, and on the grass she spied a pile of her books. She hadn’t realized she had so many that she hadn’t yet returned to the library. By now, everyone had followed them out of the dining hall. Joel was waiting, wearing a white shirt and black trousers, a badge in his hand. A for acts of wickedness. He came to hang the badge around Mia’s neck. The moon was already rising over the field, a thin, pale sliver of light.

  “Is this how you repay my kindness?” Joel asked in his dark, quiet voice. It was the voice he used right before he punished someone, soft and dangerous. “With such shameful behavior?”

  Mia stared at him with an unwavering gaze, even though she was terrified, her knees shaking. “What kindness?” she said, for she felt she had never known any.

  The bonfire had been lit, the flames rising high, the night flickering with heat. They had used old wood, chopped from apple trees taken down in the wet gusts of a storm, good for burning. The books were flung into the blaze one by one as Mia watched, half dazed, her hands and feet feeling numb. Joel insisted that the children do it, and each boy and girl who came up to the fire was solemn as they tossed books into the pyre. Pages fluttered like doves aflame, the burned bits of paper soaring into the dark, silent night. In the morning, Mia would be branded with an iron in the shape of an A. She would carry it with her all her life.

  “Think about that,” Joel said, as she was led to the sheep barn and locked inside. She sat down in the dark and she thought about it. She listened to the hissing sound as the bonfire burned out, and she decided the time had come. Hidden beneath the hay was the hammer she’d taken from the men working in the field. Just in case I ever need it, she had thought then. That was how she broke the lock, and she had never in her life felt more alive.

  * * *

  THERE WAS STILL A sliver of the yellow moon in the sky on the morning Mia left. It was pitch dark, but she could see through the gloom; she was used to going out to the barn to do her chores before dawn, when the mist was rising. When she crossed the field, the dogs didn’t bark; they were all used to Mia, who always tried to save some of her supper for them. One, a collie named Jester, followed her through the tall grass. He was a good dog, friendlier than the others, and she might have cried at the thought of leaving him behind if she’d been a different sort of person, but she wasn’t. She was someone who knew that the only girls who survived were the ones who saved themselves.

  “Hush,” Mia told the collie when they reached the fence. “Go home.”

  She clapped her hands, and the echo startled the dog, who took off into the dark. When she walked on, there was nothing to weigh her down. She was camouflaged by the night, and she felt protected by the vast empty landscape. She didn’t even own enough to pack a suitcase, but she had her backpack and she’d taken the painting and the book with her. She scrambled over the fence, then took off down the road, staying in the shadows in case anyone should drive by. There were the huge oak trees, and the gate to the cow pasture that always swung open and stuck. The crickets were calling so fast the echo made Mia’s pulse race. As she walked to town, she did her best to forget everything about her past.

  * * *

  WHEN SHE REACHED THE back door of the library, Mia used the key Sarah Mott had given her. She didn’t dare to turn on any lights but instead made her way to the desk in the dark. There was moonlight streaming through the window when she grasped the phone. She had memorized the number the librarian had given her.

  It was late and Sarah was asleep when the phone rang.

  “Can you come to the library?” Mia said. “I’m hiding behind the desk.”

  Sarah threw on her clothes and walked over. She lived in the cottage behind the town founder’s house, where there was a garden that grew only red flowers and red vegetables, tomatoes and peppers and chard. The lights in the library were off, so Sarah walked to the desk in the dark. When she saw Mia sitting there, her legs pulled up to her chest, her backpack beside her, Sarah Mott sat down beside her. The library felt hushed and safe, but now they found themselves whispering.

  “Are you all right?” Mrs. Mott asked.

  Mia’s brilliant hair had been cut choppily at chin length, but she still looked as if she had walked out of another time and place in her gray overalls. Usually, Mia avoided eye contact, but on this day she seemed different. Her pulse was fast. It had been ever since she’d walked away from the Last Look River. If she was wrong, if she couldn’t trust Mrs. Mott and the librarian told Joel where she was, Mia didn’t want to think about what would happen. But Mrs. Mott was listening, and it might well be Mia’s last chance. “I need to get out of Blackwell. They punish people for reading at the farm. They burned my books.”

  No one else from the community had ever visited the library. Sarah now thought of the other children she’d seen at the farm stand in their ill-fitting clothes. The women who shopped at the grocery for staples like flour and cornmeal with their hair braided and coiled into knots, and the men loitering outside the hardware store, grim and untalkative. Every time she saw anyone from the Community, Mrs. Mott saw trouble before her. She saw trouble right now set within the fear in Mia’s eyes.

  “What do they intend to do?” she asked.

  “They intend to ruin my life.”

  Sarah looked at the girl closely, her dark eyes, her grim expression.

  “What would you like me to do? Call over to the police?”

  Mia looked even more panicky. “No. Please. Don’t do that. They might send me back. Do you think you could find me someplace to live?” By now her voice was breaking. “I don’t care where I go as long as it’s far from Blackwell. Do you think you can help me?”

  Sarah Mott knew what the consequences might be for helping a minor run away, she might even be charged with kidnapping. All the same, she was matter-of-fact, the sort of person who rarely used superlatives. “I’d bet my life on it,” she said.

  They stopped at a gas station on the Mass Pike so that Mia could use the restroom. Sarah had thought to bring her a change of clothes, jeans, a slate-blue shirt, and a pale yellow sweater. Once she’d slipped them on, Mia tossed her old clothes into the trash can. When she saw her reflection in the car window, she thought that she looked like someone brand new, with her chin-length hair and her store-bought clothing. There she was, a stranger. So much the better. That was the way it should be.

  Mrs. Mott was waiting behind the wheel, drinking a coffee in a to-go cup. “All set?” she asked. It wasn’t yet 5:00 a.m.

  “Definitely,” Mia answered. She had already decided. She would never be back.

  * * *

  THE FRIEND MRS. MOTT had alerted about Mia’s situation was Constance Allen. She and Sarah had been involved since college and lived together in the summer and on holidays, waiting for the time when Sarah could retire and move in permanently. “I would trust her with my life,” Sarah told Mia as they drove east toward Concord.

  Sarah and Constance had been in love ever since they met, even though Sarah had been married once; that had been a mistake. Her love for Constance, however, was something she would never regret. As they headed east, Sarah thought of the first time they’d seen each other, outside the library at Simmons. Constance was an elegant blonde from a wealthy family in Glen Cove, Long Island, while Sarah hailed from a working-class family in New Hampshire, just outside of Nashua. They had nothing in common, and Sarah already had her group of friends, fun-loving, smart girls, but none of them interested her the way that Constance did.

  One bright afternoon, Constance came up to her in the dining hall. “You keep staring at me,” she said. “Is there something you wish to say?”

  There was, but Sarah had been unable to say it, or, perhaps, she hadn’t truly understood all she wanted to say to Constance until after she had been married and moved to Western Massachusetts. Constance had been one of the bridesmaids at Sarah’s wedding, and the night before the ceremony she had suddenly taken Sarah’s hand. “You’ve talked about Josh so often, but you have never once said you loved him.”

  Sarah had laughed. What was her friend suggesting? That Sarah walk away? The tent was set up in Josh’s parents’ backyard and the caterers from the Jack Straw Tavern would soon be arriving, and Josh’s friends had thrown a bachelor party the night before that had lasted till dawn. But all at once Sarah knew what she had wanted to say all those years ago in the dining hall at school, that she didn’t think she could survive if Constance wasn’t in her life. It took her several years of a doomed marriage until she could drive out to Concord one Sunday. When Constance had opened the door in the early morning light, surprised and still in her nightgown, Sarah had said, “I’m finally here,” and that was all it took for everything to be settled between them.

  * * *

  THROUGHOUT THE DRIVE MIA had been terrified that they were being followed and that Joel would somehow find her and bring her back. He was the sort of man who didn’t let things go. Don’t test him, Ivy always said. Don’t pick a fight with him unless you’re willing to lose.

  Mia looked out the rear window of the car even when there was no one else on the road.

  “You’ll be safe here,” Mrs. Mott assured her when they arrived at Constance’s house. The street jogged along the Concord River. In the fields there were dozens of bluebird houses, little wooden boxes painted by children at the local school.

  When Mia got out of the car she inhaled deeply. The air was fresh and gleamed with green light. It was noon, and the day was bright. Constance Allen opened the door of her little white house and waved. There were purple asters growing along the brick walkway on tall, thin stems. Constance was forty-five; and although she seemed ancient to the children who came to story time at the library, today, in her wrap sweater and jeans, she looked young.

  “What are you waiting for?” she called cheerfully, and because it made no sense to be standing on the sidewalk like strangers, they went inside, and Mia began her new life.

  * * *

  MISS ALLEN INFORMED HER friends and co-workers that an orphaned niece had come to stay. Tragedies happened, and when they did Miss Allen was a good person to have on your side. Mia was promptly enrolled at the public high school under the name Maria Allen. A birth certificate was drawn up by a friend of Constance’s carpenter, who knew a place where it was possible to obtain false documents. Mia was a good student, always handing in work for extra credit. She loved the classes, but she stayed to herself, ill at ease with other people her age. She adored her room in Miss Allen’s house, however, which was lined with bookshelves and had a huge window overlooking a willow tree. Beyond that was the Concord River, and in the morning geese on their way south would call and the peepers would sing their last songs of the year.

  Miss Allen gave Mia time to settle in, and on weekends Mia would spend afternoons at the library, reading, while Miss Allen was at work. She visited the houses of the great writers who had lived in Concord, Emerson and the Alcotts and Thoreau, but most often she went to the Old Manse, where Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife, Sophia Peabody, had lived after their marriage, paying a hundred dollars a year for rent. Mia had read up on their history and knew that Sophia had been a painter who’d spent most of her life bedridden until meeting Hawthorne. She had given up painting at the age of thirty-four, and soon after becoming a mother for the first time she had written in the window glass with her diamond ring as she gazed out at a world of snow and ice. The trees were all glass chandeliers.

  Mia had spent hours standing in the grassy yard of the Old Manse, hidden behind the lilac bushes, reading the words both the bride and groom had etched into the glass with the diamond ring, a declaration of true love. She knew the message by heart and could recite it as if it were an incantation.

  Man’s accidents are God’s purposes.

  Sophia A Hawthorne 1843

  Nath’l Hawthorne

  This is his study

  1843

  The smallest twig

  leans clear against the sky

  Composed by my wife,

  and written with her dia-

  mond.

  Inscribed by my

  husband at sunset

  April 3d 1843

  On the gold light     S A H

  Sunlight splashed against the windows as Mia observed the study where Hawthorne had worked, and she could spy the green divan where he’d rested while imagining his stories. She had searched out his grave in the old cemetery, up on Authors Ridge, the burying place of Concord’s great writers, where people often left tokens of respect, flowers and pencils and pens all set down to honor Hawthorne’s memory. Once or twice, she’d seen a crumpled note left for the author, who had been gone for more than a hundred and fifty years. She understood that when a book spoke to you, you wanted to speak back. For all this time, she had been holding one-sided conversations with the author, although sometimes she imagined the words he said in return.

  She dreamed of Hawthorne, and when she walked through the cemetery, she imagined that he walked beside her. She supposed she had fallen in love with him, he took up so much space inside her head. She was so focused on her vision of Hawthorne she didn’t notice when funerals streamed by, with mourners doing their best to step around her. Once she fell asleep beside his grave, and when she woke with grass threaded through her hair, she could not shake off her dream that the author had come to her, and that they belonged to one another. She felt closer to him than she did to anyone else, and often took out the book she had stolen from the library to read the inscription. Other girls her age were dating, having mad crushes on boys at school, crying in the corridors when they were dumped, starting all over again with someone new, but Mia had no interest in any of that nonsense. What she wanted was impossible, but she was convinced there was magic in the world and if she waited long enough, if she really wished for it, he would be hers. Love in the real world must exist, otherwise why would it be written about so often? But what it was, and how it felt, was a mystery to her; it could not be what she had witnessed growing up, hiding with her mother in the forest just so they could speak freely.

  * * *

  AFTER MIA HAD LEFT the farm, Joel Davis stormed into the police station to report that his daughter was an underage runaway. After a search of the town and the woods, the police informed him there was nothing more they could do. It was evident that they believed whoever ran away from the Community likely had good cause, and after so many antagonistic years, they didn’t feel obliged to go out of their way to help Davis.

  One morning, when Sarah was replacing books on the shelves, she looked up and there he was in the reading room. She kept working even when Joel Davis approached the desk. She told herself she had nothing to fear and there was no reason for her hands to shake as they did.

  “Are you the one who gave her all those books?” Joel asked. He had a hard look on his face and he hadn’t bothered to kick the mud off his boots. He’d walked in as if he owned the place. “I’ll bet you did. I’ll bet you like to have people think just like you and fill their minds with trash.”

  “Are you a member of this library?” Sarah said.

  “It’s open to the public, and that’s me. I’m the public.” There was no debate over that. “If you know where my daughter is, and you fail to tell me, you’ll likely wind up in jail.”

  There was still a tremor in Sarah’s hands, but she narrowed her eyes. She’d be damned if she would back down. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “But you don’t deny giving her those books, do you?” When Sarah didn’t answer, Joel nodded. “That’s what I thought. I can always spot a liar.” He put down a leaf on the desk. “Give her this and she’ll know who she belongs to. Her mother didn’t leave me, and she’s not going to either.”

  He walked out without another word and Sarah immediately called to tell Constance. She didn’t think she should visit Concord for a while, just in case Joel Davis got it into his head to follow her. Once she’d heard that Davis had confronted Sarah, Constance felt she owed it to Mia to tell her what had happened.

  “What exactly did he say?” Mia wanted to know.

  “All nonsense. And he left some sort of leaf.”

  An apple tree leaf to remind her of her mother, to let her know she had a father and he had rights to her. Although she appeared calm, that night Mia slept fitfully. She had never spoken about her life at the Community, but Sarah had explained to Constance that Mia had run off after the tragic death of her mother. Constance’s own mother had died young, and she knew what it was like to feel alone when you were much too young to experience that sort of abandonment. She heard Mia get out of bed sometime past midnight, and when Constance came out of her room she found Mia in the parlor, staring into the dark yard, keeping watch. Constance would never understand if Mia told her that Joel knew what you were thinking. He could spot a liar and a thief. He knew what you would do before you yourself did.