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Henry had worked hard to make the place look welcoming—a pretty rose-patterned oilcloth had been set over the table, a jug of peach tea waiting for the thirsty travelers.

He’d swept and tidied and set up a makeshift bedroom for Dorothy where there used to be a closet.

A few timber posts and an old curtain had done a reasonable job.

“Go ahead, Dorothy. Take a look around,” Emily said, although there really wasn’t much to look at.

The temporary shelter Henry had rebuilt after the tornado had become their permanent home.

They’d added to it over the years, but it was still not much more than a single room with carefully positioned items of furniture to create areas they called the kitchen, living room, and bedroom.

The bed even folded against the wall during the day to make better use of the space.

Emily still grieved for the house they’d lost, but she’d grown fond of this new home in the way someone might love a careworn old dress or a favorite childhood toy.

She knew every knot in every board, every shadow cast by the moonlight, every crack and creak as the timber flexed when the temperature soared and dipped.

It was part of her story now, inseparable from the person she’d become.

And yet it was suddenly different.

Smaller.

Apologetic, almost.

Dorothy walked around, carefully inspecting her new surroundings.

She opened the doors on the old cooking stove, lifted teacups and plates from the dresser that stood against the south wall.

She reached onto her tiptoes to look out of the windows.

She took a turn in each of the rocking chairs that Henry had fixed and remade after the tornado, and which, once again, stood either side of a small fireplace on the west wall.

Emily watched as small footsteps passed over the concealed tornado cellar and traversed the path of rag rugs that covered the linoleum floor.

She found herself mesmerized as inquisitive little fingers pointed at the framed samplers and family photographs that hung from nails on the walls.

“Who’s that?” “And who’s that?” “What’s that for?

” “Where’s the bathroom?” Question after question.

It was strange to hear a child’s voice in this childless home. Unsettling.

“And this is where you’ll sleep,” Henry said as he pulled back the curtain to Dorothy’s makeshift bedroom. A little doll made of straw had been placed on her pillow.

“That’s for you, Dorothy,” Henry said. “Made it with my own hands.”

Dorothy picked up the little doll and admired her. “What is she made of?”

“Straw. She’s known as a Brigid doll. Something your aunt Emily taught me, an old custom from Ireland. We make the dolls from the last sheaf from the harvest and burn them the following spring to bring good luck to the new season’s crops.”

“Burn them?” Dorothy clutched the doll tight to her chest.

Emily stared at Henry. “Uncle Henry won’t burn your doll, Dorothy. Will you?”

Henry shook his head. “Gosh! Of course not!” He glanced at Emily and mouthed a Sorry .

Their first mistake.

Dorothy introduced the straw doll to her toy lion and tin man and stood them all up on the windowsill, so that they were facing out. “That’s Kansas,” she whispered. “This is our home now.”

When Dorothy was hungry, they sat at the hand-carved pine chairs at the small table and ate corn cakes and drank peach tea. Three chairs. Three plates. Three glasses. For someone so small, Dorothy seemed to take up the room of ten men.

Emily could hardly eat, her stomach a tangle of knots.

She ate quietly while Henry told Dorothy all about the county fair she could look forward to that summer, and the carnival stalls and sideshow performers who would arrive with their incredible illusions and magic.

He captured her imagination with stories about the barnstormers who performed daring shows over the farmers’ fields and offered dollar rides in their planes.

“Like Miss Earhart?” Dorothy asked, her wide-eyed excitement hard to resist.

“A bit like Miss Earhart, yes!”

Henry carried none of the awkward hesitancy Emily had felt in Chicago. She observed him carefully, hoping to absorb some of his easy manner with the child.

When they’d eaten, Henry asked Dorothy if she would like to meet the animals.

“Lions first, or bears?”

Dorothy’s mouth fell open. “Lions and bears?”

“Henry!” Emily scolded him for teasing. “There aren’t any lions or bears, Dorothy. Your uncle Henry is being silly.”

Henry winked at Dorothy. “We’ll start with the tigers, then.”

Dorothy laughed. She was beginning to understand her uncle’s sense of humor. “You’re funny, Uncle Henry.”

Emily stiffened at the sound of the child’s laughter.

It felt so out of tune with this place of quiet struggle and serious conversation.

She’d thought the hard part would be leaving Chicago, extracting Dorothy from the life she’d known.

But now that they were back in Kansas, she understood that leaving had been the easy bit.

This was where the hard work started, every unfamiliar moment a stark reminder of how different life would now be.

She watched from the window as Henry and Dorothy walked to the barn together. A little while later, the sound came again: a loud shriek of laughter.

Emily felt dizzy. She placed one hand to her chest and gripped the edge of the sink as she leaned over, retching until her body purged itself of the grief and guilt and regret she’d held in since learning of Annie’s accident.

She wiped her mouth with her sleeve and leaned against the sink to steady her breathing as the screen door squeaked and Dorothy wandered inside, arms full of apples.

“Uncle Henry said I could help you make a pie.”

Emily shook off her thoughts. “Of course. That’s a nice idea.”

She peeled and cored the apples, working methodically, but her mind was elsewhere as she passed the apples to Dorothy to cut into chunks for the pie.

“Will you show me the blossom, Auntie Em?”

“Hmm?” Emily was miles away.

“The blossom inside the apples. You showed me how to remove the peel all in one piece, and the shape of apple blossom inside.”

She had paid attention after all.

Emily’s heart raced as she cut a thin slice of apple. “There it is, see. A perfect apple blossom in every slice.”

Dorothy walked to the window and held the translucent slice of apple up to the light, but Emily didn’t see Dorothy there.

She saw Annie beside the old oak table, the wind rattling the windows, turf smoke in the air, a broadside ballad on her mammy’s lips, and now on hers as she picked up the refrain and the haunting melody filled the little prairie house just as it had once filled the stone cottage in Connemara.

She closed her eyes a moment and prayed.

Show me how to do this, Mammy. Please help me.

“What’s next?” Dorothy asked as she returned to the table. “What do we do next for the pie, Auntie Em?”

Emily reached for the child’s hand. What did they do next? How would she ever bear this? She felt the long hours and days stretching ahead, the months and years full of questions and uncertainty.

“We roll out the pastry,” she said, anchoring herself back to the practical tasks that she knew and trusted.

“Quick firm movements. We don’t want to overwork the pastry or it will become tough.

” She took Dorothy’s hands and showed her.

“Roll and turn. Roll and turn. See, look how the circle starts to come.”

This was how she would bear it, with the help of the prairie and all that it demanded of anyone who lived there.

They would sweep the floors and wash the windows.

Lift the rugs and beat and air them. They would pump water from the well, strip the beds and hang the washed sheets on the line.

They would make the bread, collect the eggs, tend to the vegetable garden, ride the tractor, turn the plow, reap the rewards of another harvest.

One task after another.

One faltering step at a time.

Courage when everything seemed hopeless.

That evening, when Dorothy was asleep, Emily opened the journal she’d written in since she’d first arrived in Kansas eight years earlier. She read the inscription inside: To my dear Emily, Mammy used to say there is no place like your own home. I hope you will always be happy in yours. Annie x .

Emily turned the pages then, reliving the memories of her life here, captured in her private thoughts and reflections.

April 5th 1924. First day in Kansas. What an extraordinary place! Every color is more vibrant, every sound clearer, every flower more beautiful and fragrant. Heaven, if you believe in such a thing…

July 18th 1924. Bumper harvest. The grain is pouring from the threshers. Henry can hardly keep up as he records the yields in his ledger…

December 3rd 1925. Snow! I might love the prairie even more in the wintertime. There’s a peacefulness here when the winds don’t howl. We are as cozy as hibernating bears…

January 1st 1926. I stitched new curtains for the windows, blue and white gingham with a lace trim.

August 25th, 1929. I think I am pregnant.

Her heart ached as she recalled the joy and optimism she’d once known.

She felt so entirely removed from that version of herself now.

She didn’t read the entries that had come after the tornado and the crash, afraid to acknowledge how suddenly everything had changed.

Henry believed they’d had their run of bad luck now—the tornado, losing the baby, losing their life savings—but Emily couldn’t shake the feeling that there was worse yet to come.

She added the date, and started a new entry.

February 8th, 1932. Home again. Her pen paused over the page.

She didn’t know what else to add, what to say about everything that had happened since her last entry, the night before she’d received the telegram about Annie’s accident.

Eventually, she wrote just three more words, which seemed to hold the weight of the world within them.

Dorothy is here.

—

She snatched restless scraps of sleep until she was awakened by a piercing scream. For a moment, she thought a coyote had gotten inside. She lay in the pitch dark, heart pounding. The scream came again.

Dorothy!

She rushed to the child, gently shaking her shoulder to pull her out of her nightmare as Cora had shown her to.

“It’s Auntie Em, dear. Wake up. It was just a dream. Just a bad dream.”

“A black wind,” Cora had said. “Such a curious child.”

Dorothy opened her eyes, her breaths coming quick and shallow, her face silvered by the moon that hung over the prairie. “Where am I? Where’s Mommy?”

“You’re in Kansas, dear. With Auntie Em and Uncle Henry. Remember? You’re safe here. It was just a dream.”

Dorothy sat up. Her cheeks were flushed and warm to the touch. She was desperately thirsty. “Water. I need water.”

Emily fetched a glass of water and sat with the child as she drank in big thirsty gulps. Gradually her breathing slowed and she calmed down.

“Will you tell me a story? Mommy always told me a story after a bad dream.”

A dull ache settled on Emily’s forehead, and her bones ached from the tension she’d carried around for the last week. She just wanted to sleep, but what she wanted was no longer a priority.

“Would you like the story of Tír na nóg?” she asked.

Dorothy nodded her head.

Emily straightened the bedspread and tucked it around the child’s narrow form. “Now, close your eyes and think nice thoughts and I’ll tell you all about the story of Oisín and Niamh and the Tuatha Dé Danann. The little people.”

Eventually, Dorothy slept. It was hard to believe that someone so small and peaceful could hold such power over them.

As Emily watched this borrowed child who’d arrived like a changeling left by the fairies, she allowed her thoughts to roam through the darkness, recalling the nights through her last pregnancy when she’d imagined sitting at her own child’s bedside, watching the rise and fall of the bedspread as they slept.

She thought, then, of the stories she might have read to them, and the imagined conversations with toy lions and tin men that she might have heard from across the room if life had taken her in a different direction.

“Perhaps that’s not our road to travel, Em,” Henry had said.

“Perhaps there’s something else we’re meant to do.

” They would care for Dorothy, protect her and love her as if she were their own, but the trace of the illusion would always be there.

Emily returned to her bed, but she couldn’t sleep, conscious of the child behind the curtain and distracted by the thoughts circling her mind.

Henry’s earlier remark about Dorothy’s lack of resemblance to John sat like a stone in her stomach.

She wondered how much Leonardo Stregone might know about Dorothy.

Had he ever met the child? Did he know about Annie and John’s accident and, if so, would he try to look for Dorothy now?

Could he be the one to force her to share the truth with Henry—and Dorothy—and what then for them all?

She thought back to all the forms she’d signed at the attorneys’.

She and Henry were Dorothy’s legal guardians, but would that matter if Leonardo could prove he was her father?

Could he drag Dorothy off to live a life of a traveling circus performer, forever moving from town to town?

And then there were Annie’s letters to Dorothy.

Had she revealed the truth about Dorothy’s father in the sixteenth-birthday letter?

Quietly, Emily crept from the bed and took the shoebox from the wardrobe.

She pulled out the bundle of letters and lifted one toward the light cast by the moon.

Dorothy—Sixteen. Emily’s fingers traced the familiar loops and swirls of Annie’s neat cursive writing before she turned the envelope over to trace the outline of the sealed edges.

The temptation to open it was overwhelming; the power it held, undeniable.

Behind her, Henry stirred. She returned the letters to the box, placed the box in the wardrobe, and crept back into bed.

Whatever secrets the letters held were not hers to know.

Yet.