“Are you typically adrift?” I ask.
She sighs. “Some days it feels that way.”
“My name is Callie Randall.”
She shakes my hand but doesn’t offer her name. Josh and Ella have turned back toward us now, and she nods at them. When Ella waves, the woman waves back. “Is that your family?”
“He’s a friend,” I say, much too quickly. “A friend and his daughter.”
“Ah,” she replies. “It is good to have friends.”
Numbers shuffle in my head, the places where lines from stories usually reside, as I try to calculate her age. “Are you related to Luzia?”
Her gaze falls to the grave. “She was a dear friend to me.”
I hear pain from almost eighty years past, the loss still fresh today.
“She never should have died so young,” I say.
When I look for Sigmund, I see that he’s joined Josh and Ella at the other end of the cemetery. And I’m grateful for these extra moments.
“Do you tend both Luzia’s grave and the one for Kathrin Knopf?”
Another flicker in her eyes, something I can’t read. “Why do you ask?”
“We’ve been trying to contact a woman named Annika Stadler, Kathrin’s daughter.”
The woman hands me her trowel, and I clutch the metal handle, warmed by her glove. “Will you pull the weeds for me?”
And so I kneel and begin to extract the green intruders that have overtaken the white petals, the sunbaked dirt caking on my hands. I pull each weed slowly, and this act of purging feels more honoring than my offering of the peonies.
When I stand up, I hand the trowel back to her, and she nods her approval at my work. “Luzia would like knowing that you cared for her.”
The church bells ring out, echoing across the cemetery and lake, keeping time for the people on this hill who still care about such things.
“A legacy, it’s like a song, isn’t it?” I say when the church bells fade. “The musicians may change, but we can keep it alive.”
Her eyes fill with tears, and I apologize for upsetting her.
She waves away the apology. “Who is this person who still cares about Luzia?”
“Her name is Charlotte Trent,” I say. “She’s been like family to me.”
“How does she know Luzia?” The tremble in her voice returns with the question.
My gaze falls to the white-petaled grave. “I believe Luzia might have been her mother.”
Breath catches in the woman’s throat, and a pale film glazes her eyes before they close. When she teeters forward, I catch her, and she leans into me like a rag doll, limp and worn from years of play.
Sigmund, the anchor, has noticed as well. When I glance over my shoulder, he’s rushing toward me with Josh and Ella close behind.
“Mama,” he whispers softly, holding her in his arms. And another word, fainter yet. Meant for her ear alone.
He calls herAnnika.
CHAPTER 39
LAKE HALLSTATT, AUSTRIA
