She’d pressed Claude, the desk guard from Whyburn House, as hard as she’d dared for information about the mystery man who’d come looking for her, but Claude’s initial certainty seemed to disintegrate under questioning. He wasn’t truly sure his name was Daniel; it might have been Greg. He wasn’t sure if his eyes were green. They might have been brown. “I’d know him if I saw him,” he said apologetically.

It turned out, though, that it was easier to locate a young woman without a name who was long dead, based on a psychic, a hypnotist, and the contents of her mind, than a person she had actually known and kissed in high school. Hythe was an actual town in England, and of the handful of manor houses in its vicinity, only one had been used as a hospital during the war. She’d thought at first it was the Second World War, but the family who owned it had not been living there in the years leading up to it. It seemed that much more remote to extend her search back to the First War, but that’s what she did.

And that’s how she came upon the Honorable Constance Rowe. There was also a Lucinda Rowe, her older sister by four years, but as soon as Lucy saw the name Constance, she knew. Madame Esme had said the name, she was almost certain. Constance was the younger mistress of Hastonbury Hall, daughter of the lord, granddaughter of a viscount. The house was used as a hospital in both wars.

The English obviously loved their great houses, because there was a lot of information to be found on them, including the fact that Hastonbury was extant, though largely uninhabited this century. Lucy spent hours sitting in front of her computer looking at pictures of the house. She stared at the front gate, and she closed her eyes and she knew how the road curved beyond the reach of the photo. It was eerie how she knew the shadow cast by a giant stand of trees to the left and the way the meadow sloped down to the river on the right. How did she know? Maybe she didn’t. Maybe she was wrong about them. Maybe it was just her imagination.

She felt as though she were living in The Matrix. She’d loved the movie. She and Marnie had watched it five times, but that didn’t mean she wanted it to be real.

Every new picture she saw offered unnerving corroboration. She recognized the contours of the library from the arched mullioned windows along the façade, and then she found a picture of the interior to show it. She could point to the dining hall, the music room, the kitchen, from the pictures of the outside of the house. And then she discovered a floor plan with all of them marked, just as she remembered. She could clearly picture the way the staircase rose from the center hall. Eerie as it all was, it was kind of a fantasy to imagine herself belonging to such a world.

Lucy wondered what her father would say to this. He took pride in being a Southerner for seven generations. Forget the reincarnation, the psychic, the hypnotist, and all of that. What would he think of her having been a Brit so recently? It was probably worse than being a Yankee.

The more Lucy discovered about the short, tragic life of Constance Rowe, the less of a fantasy it seemed. In fact, as the days passed, she began to mourn her. Her mother, famous for her gardens and her reckless nature, had died in an automobile accident when Constance was a child (they’d had one of the earliest cars, and her mother had a passion for driving it) and her older brother had died in the war. She had fallen in love with a soldier in her care (for that part Lucy had not yet found corroboration) who died of war wounds and broke her heart. She became a nurse and traveled with a delegation of medics and missionaries to what was then the Belgian Congo. She died of malaria near Leopoldville at the age of twenty-three.

Lucy, manning her blender by day, found herself living inside a strange sorrow. She didn’t mourn for herself—it didn’t feel like that exactly—but the sadness of Constance covered her like a shroud.

Now her thoughts started to stray in yet another direction. She was sick to her very bones of blending smoothies. She felt as though she would cry if she had to cut one more blade of wheatgrass, but she needed to take on more hours. She needed enough to pay for a plane ticket and a cheap hotel and a rental car, and the pound wasn’t in her favor. She needed to make enough money to get herself to England before the summer was over.

Constance was a real person. The house was a real place. Perhaps the letters she’d talked about were also real and waiting for Lucy to find them. Perhaps all the information she needed to find them was in her head.

There was a satisfaction in being right and a terror in finding so much evidence that the world didn’t work the way you or most other people thought it did.