A widowed mother showed up at a reclusive old woman’s gate with two children and nowhere to sleep—then told her, “You need someone to care for you as much as we need a home.”

Chapter 2

Elsie Hartley’s house had three rooms, and two of them were closed.

The first room was the kitchen, which was also the dining room and the living room and, being honest, the only room left in which she actually lived. It held a blackened wood stove, a mosquito-mesh table with four chairs — always four, even though for eighteen years only one of them had ever carried anyone — a pantry, an earthenware jug, and the rocking chair by the window, from which she could see the track.

The second was her bedroom: a brass bed, a wardrobe, a wooden crucifix above the headboard, and a photograph in a tin frame — a mustached man seated, a young woman standing at his shoulder, two children kneeling on the grass in front. Fifty-two years old, that photograph. Elsie never looked at it. She kept it where it was because removing it would have been worse than leaving it.

The third room was locked.

It had been the children’s room. Elsie had turned the key in that lock on the same afternoon she buried Bert, and she had not laid a hand on the door since. Inside were still the two beds; the little wooden toys Bert had carved by lamplight; Edie’s dress hanging from a nail. The key lived in a drawer in the pantry, under the folded tablecloths. In eighteen years Elsie had taken it out exactly four times — and all four times she had put it back without ever turning it in the lock.