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Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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London, SE1 9GF
First published in the UK by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
Copyright © Beatriz Williams
Cover design by Ellie Game @HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
Cover photographs © Ildiko Neer / Trevillion Images (woman); Shutterstock.com (landscape)
Beatriz Williams asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008219024
Ebook Edition © August 2018 ISBN: 9780008219031
Version: 2018-06-27
To my husband and children and to my in-laws, those cultural tour guides
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword: 1969
June
July
August
Afterword: 1931
Afterword: 1970
Author’s Note
About the Author
Also by Beatriz Williams
I RETURNED TO Winthrop Island on an unseasonably cold day in early May, one week after my tenth wedding anniversary. I missed the last ferry from New London—the schedule, not surprisingly, had changed in the eighteen years since I last climbed aboard—and hired an old tub of a fishing boat to carry me across from Stonington. I don’t think the fellow recognized me, but I can’t be sure. Fishermen are a stoic lot, you know. They don’t emote. I paid him twenty dollars cash, and in return he didn’t ask me any awkward questions, like my name and my business on the Island, though I wonder if it would have made any difference. What was he going to do, call the newspapers? Probably he’d never heard of me. Lots of people had never heard of me.
Because it was May, the sky was still light as we bumped across the few miles of Long Island Sound that separate the Island from Connecticut. I wore my sunglasses, which were black and extremely large, giving me the appearance of an exotic bug, and the spray soon coated the lenses with a film of salt. When I couldn’t properly see any longer, I took them off, and the strength of the draft on my face surprised me, and the smell. I’d forgotten about the scent of the Sound, which had its own particular tang, different from anywhere else in the world, the English Channel or the Mediterranean or the South Pacific—or maybe it didn’t, and that was all in my imagination. Still, it seemed to me as I stood near the bow of the fishing boat, leaning against the deckhouse, that the brine on that wind reached deep inside the wrinkles of my brain, penetrating the furthest regions of the hippocampus to lay its fingertip on certain tender memories therein. Bending over the stern of a lobster boat, hauling cages from a buoy line. Sitting next to a girl at the end of a midnight dock, sharing a bottle of cold champagne. Lying on a beach while the rain coursed upon me and a boy, kissing each other for the last time.
Ahead of me, the Island made a dark, flattened parabola, growing larger by the second until it dominated the horizon and the specks on its surface took on the character of houses. I saw the cluster of buildings around the harbor, the scattering of estates along the shore. I couldn’t see Greyfriars from here—perched as it was on the southeastern corner of the Island—but I knew it still existed, overlooking Fleet Rock and its famous lighthouse. I knew this because of the
