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"And if you say no and people die?" That's one of the older ones, from the back.

"Then they die and I have to live with it." I hold her eyes. "I closed a door on a woman last night without checking who was standing in it. I'm going to have to live with that for the rest of my life. So don't come in here and tell me I don't understand what that means."

Nobody says anything for a while. The candles pull straight and settle.

"Third." I look at Evelyn only now. "Her name was Mercy Bell. She's family. I want it written in whatever record you keep, what she was and what you let happen to her, and I want you to say her name out loud in front of me before you walk out of my shop."

Evelyn takes her gloves off. I've never seen her hands.

"Mercy Bell," she says.

It comes out rough at the edge, the way a word does when it's been sitting in someone's mouth for a long time without air.

"I've known her name since I was nineteen," Evelyn says. "That's the first time I've said it in a room with other people in it."

Well. Sid, from the top of the jewelry case, tail curled over his feet.

That took them a hundred and forty years and a girl with a shop.

They leave the bakery box. It's pumpkin bread, and I don't want to think about who in this town makes pumpkin bread.

Gage drives without saying anything, which is normal, except it isn't.

I can feel it through the line I tied off. There's a room in him with the door open and nothing in it, and he keeps walking past it and checking the way you keep touching a tooth.

"You could ask me to stop," I say.

"You're not doing anything."

"I'm going to ask your mother to let a stranger cut something out of her before lunch."

He turns off the road onto gravel. "She'll like you."

"That's not a yes."

"No." His jaw does the thing. "It's not."

The house at the end of the gravel is small and white and in perfect repair. New steps. New rail. A cord of firewood stacked so square it looks machined, and a mailbox on a post so straight it hurts my feelings.

Della Corbett is sixty-three years old and about the size of a coat rack, and she opens the door before we get to the top step.

"You're the mailbox girl," she says.

Behind me, Gage makes a sound like a man being shot in a library.

"I'm the mailbox girl," I say and chuckle.

"He came out here in April and told me about a woman who put her finger in his chest in his own yard." She steps back to let us in. "Then he didn't mention her again for six months, which is how I knew you had to be special."

The kitchen smells like coffee. There's a chair by the window with a cushion worn into the shape of her, and a cup on the sill beside it, full, cold, with a skin on the top.

I can see it now.

A hundred and forty years of Mercy looking at knots came into me last night like water into a cellar, and now I can walk into a kitchen and see the wiring.

It comes out from under Della's collarbone. One line, gone gray and dry as an old root, and it runs out the window over the sink and just ends, out there in the yard, at nothing.

It's tied on one end. His end. Pulled into a knot that only closes tighter when the other end pulls back.