She packed the way she would have packed a field kit: what could not be replaced first, and what could be replaced afterwards, if at all.

The blue notebook went in first, wrapped in a clean handkerchief, at the bottom of the canvas bag she had carried to the hospital for six years. Then the roll of tools, the tweezers and the little brass ruler and the pocket magnifier no bigger than a coin. Then two changes of clothes, a toothbrush, the gray cardigan, a pair of flat shoes. She did it standing at the foot of the bed in the green room, with the white blind half drawn and the long gold light of the evening lying across the carpet, and she did not hurry. She had learned a long time ago that if you hurried while you were frightened, you left behind the thing you needed most.

She did not take the shaving brush. It stood in the washstand where it had stood for eight months, beside a comb with three teeth missing, and she looked at them for a long moment and then looked away.

She took the old bottle from the high shelf.

It was the plain one, a small blown vial with a cork stopper and a paper label gone yellow at the edges. A girl's careful capitals. SALT. She held it in her palm and felt the weight of it, which was nothing, a pinch of gray crystals and a great deal of air. Beside it stood the new one, the slim bottle with the salt from Carrow in it, and she touched the cork of that one with one finger and left it where it was. It belonged to the house. The old one belonged to a shelf in a narrow room on Tern Street, and she meant, with a stubbornness she could not have defended, to put it back.

The brass key went on the writing desk. It was the key to a study, on a ring, and she laid it down squared to the edge of the blotter, the way one sets down a thing one has been lent. She stood over it with her hand flat on the leather. Her left hand. It looked strange to her. The skin at the base of the third finger was a shade paler than the rest, a thin bright band, faintly dented, as though a small animal had been sleeping there and had just got up and gone.

She turned the hand over and closed it.

It was a quarter to ten when she went down. She went by the back stair, which was dark and narrow and smelled of lamp oil, and she did not meet anyone. The house was very quiet. It was the quiet of a place where everyone is listening and no one has decided to be heard. Somewhere above her a board creaked, and stopped. Somewhere below, in the long white kitchen, a single lamp was burning.

She had meant to go straight through. She had planned it, on the stairs, with the clear thin logic of a woman walking out of a burning building: past the range, through the yard door, into the car. She stopped on the threshold of the arch instead, with her bag on her shoulder, and saw that she was not going to be allowed.

Mrs. Venn was sitting at the end of the long pine table with her hands folded in front of her.

She had put on her black dress. It was the one she wore on Sundays and at christenings, and she had pinned her gray hair up under a lace cap, and the whole broad weathered face above it was set in an expression of such stern and perfect composure that Sienna's throat closed. On the table in front of her, squared against the edge of the board, stood a wicker hamper with the lid tied down. It was the summer one. It had been to a hunting lodge in the hills and to a cove under a cliff, and it had come back each time with a cloth round the handle and a smell of cedar.

"Sit down, child," said Mrs. Venn.

"I can't."

"Then stand, and be quick, and I'll say it standing." She rose. She was a short woman, and she had to look up, and she did it without the least appearance of effort. "I'm not going to ask where you're going. I'm not going to ask what he did, because I know what he did, because I have known that boy for thirty-three years and he has never in his life done a thing he did not afterwards want to take back. And I am not going to tell you to stay."

"Mrs. Venn..."

"There's bread, and a cold chicken, and a jar of the apricot, and a flask of soup that'll keep till the morning." She laid her palm on the hamper lid. "It's for the car. You'll not have eaten. You never do when you're upset, you go all over white and test the tea." Her voice did not shake. "And there's this."

She put her hand into the pocket of her apron and drew something out and laid it in Sienna's palm.

It was a pear.

It was a single green-gold pear, small and hard and ripe, wrapped in a twist of tissue. A square of card was tucked into the paper. The handwriting on it was square and firm, and it said what it had said once before, on a night of snow, in a lodge with a leaking roof.

For emergencies. V.

Sienna looked at it. She could not see it very well. The lamp had begun to swim.

"I don't know," she said, "if this is one."

"It is if you say it is," said Mrs. Venn.

She did not embrace her. She stood very straight in her best black with her hands folded again at her waist, and she looked up into Sienna's face, and then she bent her head, once, in a short stiff dignified nod, like a woman at the end of a long service. It was the most extraordinary thing that anyone had ever done for her. It said, I have seen you in this house, and I have fed you, and you are free to go.

Sienna took the hamper. She went out through the yard door into the warm dark, and did not look back, and heard it close.

Marco was standing by the car.

It was the long black one, with its engine off and its lamps out, drawn up against the wall of the stable yard under a fig tree. He had taken off his coat in the heat. He stood in his shirtsleeves, with his hat in both hands, as large and still as a post in a harbor, and when she came across the cobbles he did not move. He did not say that he was sorry. He did not say anything at all until she was three paces from him, and then he turned the hat over once in his hands and spoke, very low.

"Miss Hale. He told me to take you wherever you wish."

"I know."

"He said that nobody was to follow you unless you asked. He said it twice." Marco's broad face was without expression. "He said you were to have the car, and the keys in it, and no one in the front seat. I am to tell you that you have only to say, and Pavel will drive, or no one will."

"Marco."

"Yes, miss."

"I'd like to go to Tern Street." She drew a breath. "And I'd like you to drive. I am not being sensible about him. I know that. But I'm not a fool." A cracked breath that was almost a laugh. "Dario knows I've seen what he wanted me to see. He'll want to know where I go. I would rather not make it simple."

Something crossed the big stoic face, and was gone. "I'd have done it with or without the asking, miss," said Marco. "I should be glad to be asked."

He opened the door. She got in. She set the hamper beside her on the seat, and Pavel's thin shy face rose, with a start, from the front, where he had been folded into the passenger corner with his paperback, and went the color of a plum. "Mrs. Bellandi," he said, in a small voice. She said good evening. Marco got behind the wheel, and started the engine, and for a moment sat still with his hands at ten and two and his eyes on the gate.

"He is in the study," he said, without turning round.

She did not speak.

"He has not moved from the floor, miss. I looked in at nine. I did not speak to him." His voice was very even. "I thought you would wish to know. And I thought you would wish me not to say it. I find that I cannot tell which."

The night came in at the open window, warm and thick and smelling of dust and cut grass. A long way off, over the cypresses, a pale moon was coming up.

"Thank you," said Sienna.

It was all she could say. He nodded, and put the car in gear, and they went out through the gate and down the long hill with the lamps still unlit.

She watched the city come up out of the dark.

It was a hot night, and the whole of Marenna Bay was out of doors. Lamps burned in the windows of the cafes on Saint Brendan's Quay, and men sat at tin tables in their shirtsleeves with glasses of beer, and a barrel organ was playing somewhere near the fish market, a slow cracked waltz. Women leaned on window sills. Children were running in and out of a fountain. It was all so exactly what it had been on the last night of any week of her life that she could not at first understand why it hurt.

She looked at her hand.

It lay in her lap, on the lid of the hamper, in the passing gold of the street lamps. She watched the light go over it and off, over it and off. The pale band was very plain at the base of the finger. She thought: it was only a ring. It was a plain gold ring such as could be bought in any jeweler's window, and it had never once, in nine months, been taken off, not in the bath, not in the lab, not on a roof in the starlight with a man's heart under her cheek. She had forgotten that it was there. And now that it was gone, the whole of her left side seemed to be listening for it, as the tongue goes to the place where a tooth was.

She thought of a library in April, and of a man kneeling on the carpet with his head against her knees. I should like to be chosen in the daylight.

He had said it. He had said it in a doorway, with the snow coming down, and she had stood in the lamplight with her whole heart in her mouth. She had chosen him in a boathouse. She had chosen him on a roof. She had chosen him in a green room with a bolt on the inside, over and over, every night for eight months, without being asked, and every time it had been the plainest and most certain thing she had ever done.

And she had taken off the ring.

She pressed her bare hand against her mouth.

She did not cry. She sat with her fingers over her lips and the pale light of the lamps going over her, and she looked at the thing that she was afraid of, steadily, as she had learned to look at a result she did not want. It was not that she wanted to go back. It would have been so much easier if it had been that. It was something much more frightening, and she turned it over for the whole length of the quay and the bridge and the long dark climb through the old town, and each time it came up the same.

She did not hate him.

She had tried. She had sat on the floor of a study with a torn page in her lap and been so angry that the room rang. She had said it to herself in the car, in the kitchen, on the stair: he lied, he watched, he kept me. They were all true. They lay in her like stones. And under them, intact, unchanged, as warm as it had ever been, there lay the whole of what she felt for him. It had not so much as flickered. It had simply gone on, in the dark, without her leave, as a heart goes on.

It was the loneliest thing she had ever found out about herself.

Tern Street had not changed, because Tern Street never did.

It lay at the top of the hill in the last of the heat, a row of narrow crooked houses with their shutters closed and a single lamp buzzing on the corner. A cat sat on a step. A smell of fish and old rope and hot brick hung in the air. At the end of the row, a little askew, with a faded sign over the ground-floor window that said HALE MARINE SUPPLY, EST. 1961, stood the house, and in the window of the second floor, behind a blind, a light was burning.

Marco stopped the car.

"I'll be at the corner," he said. "Pavel's cousin keeps the other end of the street. There is no one else. I shall not come in." A pause. "If you want anything, miss, you have only to put the lamp in the shop window."

"I don't think I shall."

"I should still be here."

She got out. She stood on the pavement with her bag on her shoulder and the hamper in her arms, and looked up at the house she had been born in. The paint was peeling. The gutter hung crooked. It was the ugliest house on the street, and the light in the window was yellow and small, and she thought: he is up. He is always up. He sits at the table with a book open and does not read it.

She did not knock. She had her own key. She let herself in at the shop door, and the old bell tinkled over her head, and the dark smell of varnish and lamp oil came out to meet her like a hand.

"Sienna?"

He was on the stair.

He had come down in his nightshirt, a long gray flannel thing with a darned cuff, and a pair of carpet slippers. He had a candle in a saucer. His glasses were on the end of his nose and his hair stood up on one side, and he stood on the fourth step with the little flame shaking in his big scarred hand and looked at her over the rail with the wondering, stricken, unbelieving look of a man who has been waiting for a thing for so long that he has stopped being able to recognize it.

"Dad," said Sienna. "I'm home."

He came down the stair. He did it slowly, one step at a time, and set the candle on the counter, and he did not ask her a single question. She saw his eyes go to the bag on her shoulder and the hamper in her arms. She saw them go to her left hand, and rest on it, and she saw the shock go across his big kind face and be, with a mighty and visible effort, put away.

"The kettle's still warm," said Edmund Hale.

It was the thing that undid her.

She put down the hamper. She put her arms round his neck and her face against the wool of his nightshirt, which smelled of old soap and varnish and sleep, and she cried for the first time that day. She did it without noise, in great slow shuddering waves, and he stood in the dark shop with his arms round her and one large hand moving up and down her back, as it had moved when she was eleven years old and had come in out of the rain.

"There," he said. "There, there. There now. I've got you."

He made her tea. He did it in the little back kitchen, with the oilcloth and the lamp and the clock on the shelf that had said ten past four since she was nine, in the cup with the chipped handle, three sugars and a splash of milk. She took a strip from her pocket and dipped it. She did it without thinking, from habit, and she saw him watch her do it, and she saw his face. It had a particular look. It was not hurt, quite. It was the look of a man at the foot of a very high wall who has just understood how much of it his own child has been carrying.

"It's only habit," said Sienna.

"I know."

"I can stop."

"I should not want you to stop," said Edmund. "I'd only like you not to need it." He sat down across from her, on the other side of the oilcloth, and put his hands round his own cup. "That man was in the shop again. On Tuesday. The one with the oranges."

"I know. You told me."

"I didn't tell you all. He asked after the boat." He frowned at his tea. "The one I made. He said it was a pretty thing, and he hoped it had a good home." A pause. "I did not like the way he said it."

"Dad."

"I'm not asking." He lifted his head. "I said I wouldn't, and I won't. You'll tell me when you want to. Or you won't, and that's your own to do. I only want you to know that this house has never once, in all the years it's been mine, shut its door on you." His mouth trembled. "It's a poor sort of house. But it's got a bolt."

"I know it has," said Sienna.

She slept in her old room.

It was up the narrow stair at the back, a small slant-roofed cell with a bed under the eaves and a window that looked out on a slice of the harbor between the rooftops. The wallpaper was the same. A pattern of small blue anchors, faded unevenly where the sun had touched it. The shelf above the desk still held a row of battered textbooks and, at the far end, a gap. It was a small gap, no wider than a bottle, and a faint pale ring lay in the dust where a thing had stood and been taken away.

She took the old vial from her bag. She stood on tiptoe and put it back in the ring.

It fitted exactly. She had known that it would. She looked at it standing there in the lamplight, with its yellowed label and its cork, and she thought of a man who had sent a patient, civil, enormous person to this house a fortnight before a wedding to take it away. She thought of the man's face when the old bottle was put into his hand. He had set it on the highest shelf of a room that he had made for her in March, and he had not been able to look at it since.

It was a theft. It was also, and had been from the first, the tenderest thing that anyone had ever done for her.

Both. She stood in the middle of her old room with her hands hanging at her sides and held both of them, as she had held two stones in her palm in a study, and found that she could carry them. It was the strangest discovery. She had thought that if she ever came to the end of her strength, the two of them would cancel, and leave her with a single clear plain thing to do. They did not cancel. They sat side by side, and went on being true.

She got into the narrow bed, in her clothes, under the faded quilt, and lay on her back looking at the slope of the ceiling. A gull cried somewhere over the water. The old house creaked and settled round her. She did not think she would sleep.

At midnight she sat up, and took the blue notebook out of her bag, and opened it on her knee.

She turned back through the pages, past a pier at sunset and a bridal suite and a sideboard bare, past the long column of small hard figures down the margin of a page. M.B. 70. M.B. 65. M.B. 60. M.B. 65. She read it down to the foot, where a number stood alone with a line through it, and she took up her pen.

She did not write a figure. She sat for a long time with the nib above the paper. Then, very slowly, in a hand that was almost steady, she wrote: N/A.

She stopped. She added, underneath, so small that it was nearly a whisper: It was never a number I could measure him with.

She closed the book, and lay down, and was asleep within a minute.

The next day was Saturday, and she went to the General because there was nowhere else on earth that she knew how to be.

She went by tram, in the gray early light, with Pavel's cousin three seats behind her and a plain paper bag on her knee that contained the last of Mrs. Venn's bread. The city was washed white and quiet. The heat had not yet come up. At ten to eight she let herself in at the staff door, and went down the long cold corridor with its flickering tube, and stood for a moment at the door of the little room under the stairs, with her hand flat against the paint.

It was the twenty-sixth of July.

She had known that it would be, in some far corner of her mind, ever since a man said Saturday in a doorway with his whole heart in his face. She looked at the clock on the wall. It was seven minutes to eight. He had said nine, with the doors shut, and a table cleared. He had said it began, there is a thing in a drawer in my study that I ought to have shown you in October.

She sat down at the bench, and she watched the clock.

It was a very long hour. She did nothing at all with it. She sat with her hands in her lap and her eyes on the second hand, and when it came round to nine she did not breathe. She did not know what she had expected. A sound. A change in the light. The sensation of a door shutting a long way off in a house on a hill, on a room with a table in it and nothing on the table but a chair.

Nothing happened. The clock ticked. A pipe knocked in the ceiling, and a trolley went by in the corridor.

"Hale."

Nell was standing in the doorway.

She wore the scrubs with the cartoon pears. Her braids were pinned up, and her lemon-yellow clipboard was hugged to her chest, and she looked at Sienna's face for exactly as long as it took to read it. She did not ask a single question. Her eyes dropped for a second to the left hand lying on the bench, and rose again, bright and wet and fierce. She came across the room, and put a mug down at Sienna's elbow with a small decided click, and went out again without a word.

It was black. It was hot. When Sienna lifted it, a faint gray gleam lay on the top of the tea, and she put out her finger and touched it, and tasted a grain of coarse salt.

She put her head down on her arms, on the cold steel of the bench, and shook.

It was a long time before she lifted it. When she did, the room was quiet, and the gray light had grown in the high window, and the mass spectrometer ticked its slow patient tick. She drew a breath. She wiped her face with the heel of her hand, and reached for her lamp, to turn it up.

There was an envelope under it.

It had not been there when she sat down. She was sure of that. She had set her hand on that very spot of the steel, and it had been bare. It lay square and flat and very white under the circle of light, with its flap sealed with a plain wafer of black wax. There was no stamp. There was no name on the face of it. A thick cream square, such as might have been cut from the same ream of paper as a note slid under a door on a Monday morning in a house on a hill.

She did not touch it for a long time.

Mr. Aldous had gone off at seven. She had seen his box empty as she came in. The lab door had been locked. She had the only key, and the spare was in the safe in Dr. Pryce's office, and a name had been signed on a seal of white tape in a hand that was not her own. She thought of a locker. She thought of a card drawn through a machine at twelve minutes past three. She sat still and let it come in, slowly, from the edges, a great gray sense of the walls of her own life being very patiently measured.

She slit the wax with the scalpel. She drew out a single sheet.

It was cream-colored and good, and folded once. She opened it. In the middle of the page, in black ink, in a long slanting upright script that she knew, as she knew her own mother's, from a card and an envelope and a hundred nights of looking, were two words.

Forgive me.

That was all. There was no greeting, and no name. She turned it over. The back was blank.

She bent over it with the magnifier from her pocket. It took her less than a minute, and she did not need it. The F was drawn with a small hesitation at the top of the stem. The pen had lifted between the o and the r. It was the same picture of a hand, so carefully done, by someone who had been so long about it that he had forgotten to be quick.

It was a forgery. She had known that before she saw it.

She sat looking at it, and the cold rose in her slowly from the soles of her feet. It was not the hand that frightened her. It was the words.

She had not heard them. She had been lying on a Persian rug with a veil under her head and a man's fingers on her throat, and she had been dying. The thing had been said, once, in a doorway, in the half dark, in a whisper so thin that it had no sex and no weight, to a man whose own heart was going out like a candle. He had told her about it on a winter night by a fire with the snow coming down. He had said, I have not told this to anyone. Not even Marco.

There were three persons living who knew those two words, and where they had been said, and by whom.

The first was the one who had said them.

The second was the man who had heard them, and had carried them for two years, alone, in the dark, and had put them into her hands.

The third was herself.

She laid the sheet down on the steel. She put both her palms flat on either side of it, and held very still, and heard, a long way off, the slow heavy beat of her own heart going on in the silent room, one stroke at a time, like a clock in an empty house.