Mira stood at the front door for a long time before she got in the car.
Lena watched her from the gravel — watched the specific stillness of someone standing at a threshold they had crossed once before, a hundred and twenty years ago, in the opposite direction, and was now considering crossing again.
"You don't have to come," Lena said.
"I know," Mira said.
She looked at the lane. At the morning. At the direction of the moors, north, where the field's reach extended and where, forty miles along it, a building she had not seen in a hundred and twenty years was still standing, still occupied, by the man who had taken her from it once.
"I want to," she said. "Not because I think I need to. Because I think I'd regret it more, if I didn't, than anything I might feel by going."
She got in
