and it vanished a day later, I told myself we imagined it. When we climbed the steps of the castle tower and found the crate with . . . you know . . . and you told me Nanna Ellen had been in that room a short time earlier, I spent years convincing myself none of these things actually happened. But I cannot lie anymore, not to myself anyway. I cannot go to my grave without knowing what she did to you, what became of her. There is this burning need in me to find answers to all these things, and I fear I cannot move forward with my life until I do. I’m sure you feel the same as me.”
I shook my head. “I rid myself of all this uncertainty as a child.”
Matilda tilted her head. “Did you now?”
“I did.”
“Then why don’t you tell me what became of the ring? Just explain that, to my satisfaction, and we will pretend we did not meet today. Remember the ring, sweet brother? The one we found clenched in the dead hand?”
My chest tightened as my breath caught.
“This man, O’Cuiv, and Nanna Ellen are somehow connected. Of this I am sure, but if you tell me you do not know where the ring is, all of this goes away. I’ll pretend I didn’t see you take it that night. You can go back to your life, and I’ll return to mine, neither of us the wiser,” Matilda said. “Come now, Bram. End this.”
I let out a deep sigh and reached for the silver chain around my neck. I tugged it out from beneath my shirt. The ring dangled from it. It had not left my neck in almost fourteen years.
Matilda flicked the ring with her finger. “Sometimes our deepest fears are the ones we keep closest to our hearts. You’ve never stopped believing, you only stopped admitting you believe.”
I tucked the ring back under my shirt and fell silent for a long while. Finally, I gestured at the papers on the table. “I do not know what to make of all this, but I am willing to admit I am intrigued. If this truly is Patrick O’Cuiv, if you somehow saw Ellen, if there is a chance we can find her and ask her how she healed me, ask her what she did to me, I need to . . . I want to understand.”
Matilda smiled and began stacking all the papers neatly. “That is the inquisitive brother I know and love.”
She reached for her sketchbook and turned to a page near the center. “Do you remember these?”
I pulled the pad closer, my heart thudding. “The maps . . .”
“Yes, the maps.” She flipped the page, one after the other. “All seven of them.”
“I had forgotten these.”
She tilted her head. “Did you? Somehow, I doubt that.”
“The detail is astounding, how you drew so well as a child . . . such a talent will always amaze me.”
She turned the sketchbook back around and tapped at the map, the one of Austria. “You know what amazes me? These marks. The marks that appear on each of these maps. I know exactly what they are, what they represent.”
“What?”
“Cemeteries. Every one of them. And not just any cemetery, but the oldest of cemeteries. Each older than the last.” She looked back down the map. “This is the Zentralfriedhof Simmering in Vienna. I was confused at first because most publications state the cemetery was founded only a few years ago, in 1863, but that isn’t true. It officially became a cemetery that year, but the deceased have been buried at that location for nearly two hundred years prior.” She turned the page. Highgate—London was written at the bottom. “This one here, Highgate. It, too, was officially founded recently. In 1839, the Church of England consecrated fifteen acres as burial grounds. They also set aside two acres for dissenters. Those grounds are the ones I found most interesting, because, like the cemetery in Vienna, the earliest records for this plot date back to the sixteen hundreds. Bodies buried, but not in consecrated ground.”
I watched as Matilda turned