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“Mother?” Leonora whispered.

The woman took a step back into the trees and Leonora instinctively moved too.

“Leonora, wait...” Lady Byron tried to call out to her.

Her arm slipped free of Lady Byron’s. She did not remember deciding to run. Her bonnet came loose and fell somewhere behind her, and the ribbons dragged at her throat until she tore them away. She heard Lady Byron call her name once, sharp and frightened, and then there was only the thud of her own feet on the path and the cloak ahead, brown against the green, moving fast.

The woman was quick. She slipped through a gap in the hedge, and Leonora followed it through, branches snagging her sleeves. A narrow lane ran behind the trees, empty and shadowed. The cloak was twenty paces ahead and stumbling now, one hand pressed to her side as though she could not breathe.

“Stop!” Leonora’s voice cracked. “Please, stop... please!”

The woman faltered. Leonora closed the distance in three strides, caught her sleeve, and held on. For a moment neither of them moved. The wool was rough under her fingers. She could feel the woman shaking.

“I know this face,” Leonora breathed. “I know that I know you. It seems you are following me as well because I have seen you before.”

Slowly, the woman turned around.

Up close, she was thinner than Leonora had imagined, with gray beginning at her temples and lines at her eyes that the years had put there without permission. Tears ran freely down her face. She did not wipe them away. She only looked at Leonora as though she were looking at something she had given up all right to see.

“My daughter,” she mumbled, causing Leonora to clap a hand over her own mouth, because the scream rising in her throat had no business being heard in a lane behind a public park.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

For a long while Leonora could not find a single word. Her mouth shaped one and nothing came of it. Every question she had saved over the years, sorted and polished like stones kept in a pocket, had gone out of her head at once. What remained was the sound of wind in the hedge and her mother’s face, which was not at all the face she had carried.

That face had been round and quick to laugh. This one was thinner and worn in a way no amount of sleep would mend. Only the eyes were the same. The years had not managed to touch them.

Her fingers were still knotted in the sleeve. She looked down at them as though they belonged to someone else, then let go, and the wool slid free. Neither of them moved.

“It is really… you?” Leonora said. It was not what she had meant to say, but she couldn’t think. “You… are…real?”

Rose took in a deep breath and took a step back, scanning the area.

“You ran,” Leonora continued. “I called, and you ran.”

“I know.” Her mother pressed a hand to her ribs, still fighting for breath. “I am sorry. I told myself I would go to you if I ever saw you again. But I had not worked up the courage.” She gave a brittle laugh. “Today you looked straight at me, and I found I still had not, and I ran like a girl. I am sorry.”

Her mother’s hand rose a few inches toward her, hovered, and fell again to her side.

“I do not know what to do with my hands,” Rose said.

“Nor do I.” Leonora took a step back too, trying to make sense of everything.

She stood there with her arms hanging, and could not think of a single thing a daughter was supposed to do. In a thousand imagined versions of this, they had fallen into each other’s arms. No one had warned her there would be a stranger’s caution in her mother’s face, and her own, and a space between them that neither knew how to cross.

Footsteps pounded down the lane. They were quick and uneven and entirely unlike the stride Leonora had known all her life. Both of them turned.

Lady Byron stood in the gap of the hedge with her bonnet knocked sideways and her chest heaving. In one fist she held Leonora’s own bonnet by its ribbons, rescued from the path. She looked at Leonora. Then she looked at the woman in the cloak, and the color went out of her face as if a hand had wiped it away.

“Rose.”

“Amanda.” Her mother’s voice cracked on the name.

“But you are dead.” Lady Byron’s eyes widened.

“I know.”

“No, you don’t understand. We were told you were dead.” Lady Byron stopped. Her mouth closed hard on whatever came next, and her chin rose, the way it did when she refused to be seen undone. “You have a great deal to explain.”