SHE’S SO YOUNG. THAT WAS HIS FIRST THOUGHT. Younger, he realized, than he as they stood studying each other over her grave. She had a calm and quiet beauty, a kind of simplicity he thought would have kept her beautiful into old age. But she hadn’t lived to see thirty.

And even now, a grown man, he felt something inside him ache with that loss.

“Why are you here?” he asked her, and her smile bloomed again.

“Don’t you want me to be?”

“You never came before.”

“Maybe you never looked before.” She shook her dark hair back, breathed deep. “It’s such a pretty day, all this May sunshine. And here you are, looking so lost, so angry. So sad. Don’t you believe there’s a better place, Gage? That death is the beginning of the next?”

“It was the end of before, for me.” That, he supposed, was the black and white of it. “When you died, so did the better.”

“Poor little boy. Do you hate me for leaving you?”

“You didn’t leave me. You died.”

“It amounts to the same.” There was sorrow in her eyes, or perhaps it was pity. “I wasn’t there for you, and did worse than leave you alone. I left you with him. I let him plant death inside me. So you were alone, and helpless, with a man who beat you and cursed you.”

“Why did you marry him?”

“Women are weak, you must have learned that by now. If I hadn’t been weak I would have left him, taken you and left him and this place.” She turned, just a bit, so she looked back toward the Hollow. There was something else in her eyes now-he caught a glint of it-something brighter than pity. “I should have protected you and myself. We would have had a life together, away from here. But I can protect you now.”