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the hallway. Marie’s room was on the opposite side of the priory, and I had to search in semidarkness, but I finally found the passport in one of her desk drawers. Tucking it in my bag, I headed down to the kitchen and back out onto the snowy lawn.
    It took me a moment to get my bearings. I stood for a second in the glare of the lights and watched my breath rise up and vanish. More than anything, I wanted to go back to the Tanes’ and crawl into bed next to Heloise. I wanted Magda reading the morning prayer while the older sisters slept and the younger of us struggled to keep our eyes open. And the feel of Heloise’s arm touching mine at the breadboard, the smells of flour and proofing yeast. I wanted to take back what had happened, as the snow had already reclaimed the last traces of the sisters’ passages across the yard: heel prints in the mud, grain scattered on the way to feed the chickens. If they had not found me that day, I told myself, they would still be alive.
    Conscious of my footsteps in the new snow, I crossed the lawn toward the chapel. I drew a pack of wooden matches from a niche in the stone church wall, lit one of the votives, and said a quick prayer. Keep us safe, Lord. And keep them safe, Heloise and the thirty-four souls who had given me harbor for so long. Then, following what little remained of my own faint trail, I headed for the woods and the road beyond.

FOUR
    What can you really expect from a place? A homecoming welcome, banners in the streets, flags in the windows? Or the shuttered indifference of a town that’s forgotten you, that maybe never knew you? After twenty-seven hours on trains and another thirteen waiting for connections, I probably expected too much from Algeciras.
    It was after midnight when I finished the last leg of my journey and stepped onto the platform with Sister Theresa’s rucksack, almost two days since I’d left the convent. I’d hitched a ride into Lyon and taken the train to Perpignan and on to Barcelona, Madrid, Seville, and finally, this port town on the far southern tip of Spain.
    Aside from room and board, the sisters had paid me a small wage for my work at the priory. In the year I’d been with them I’d managed to save a few thousand euros. I’d cleaned out my bank account before leaving Lyon, and I figured if I lived on the cheap I could stretch what I had for a month or maybe two. I could always get a job cooking once the money ran out.
    The train from Bobadilla was crowded with young tourists, dreadlocked backpackers on their way to Morocco. I followed the crush of bodies out of the station and down toward the waterfront and the cheap hostels. If I was going to do something with my hair, I told myself, I needed a room of my own and a private bath.
    I found what I was looking for in a little one-star hotel just two blocks from the ferry terminal. Twenty euros bought me a view of the crumbling apartment building next door, a window that opened partway to let in the piss-and-flotsam stink of the port, a bed, a sink, a toilet, and a bathtub with a faint gray ring.
    Kicking my shoes off, I set the rucksack on the bed next to the pillow and lay down on top of the covers. I’d slept some on the trip, but not enough. I stretched out on my back and closed my eyes, my body rocking and swaying to the ghost motion of the train.
    *   *   *
    I woke early, my sleep still tuned to the Benedictine schedule. It was raining, a dull and persistent drizzle. The sky and the rooftops of Algeciras were all various shades of the same dull gray, a monochrome broken here and there by the tousled green of palms. I got up, put on some fresh clothes, washed my face, and, taking the rucksack with me, went out, hoping beyond hope to find whatever it was I had come for, a person or place like a spark on dry tinder, that one thing that would make everything else fall into place.
    I stopped for coffee, then wended my way to the train