“Where’s that? Where you were?”

She wasn’t hesitating now. “England. In the southwest. A place called Glastonbury.”

“That’s…where you live?”

“With your uncle, yes. That’s where we live.”

“Why? Why did you go away?”

She sighed. “Oh, Ned. That’s such a long answer. Can I just say, for a bit, that I feel easier there than anywhere else? I have…a complicated connection to it? That isn’t a good answer, but the good one would take all night.”

“Fine, but why did you cut yourself off from…from us?”

It had happened years before he was born, before there’d been any “us,” but she’d know what he meant.

She had clasped her hands loosely, was gazing up at him. It was weird, but even in moonlight he could see how much she looked like his mom. That gesture was his mother’s, even, when she was listening, making herself be patient.

“I didn’t, really. Cut myself off. We always kept track of you three through my mother, your gran. I told you, families are tricky. Meghan felt, rightly I suppose, that I’d done something totally unexpected in getting married so quickly to someone she didn’t even know, moving to England right away. She felt I’d abandoned her. She was…very angry. Didn’t want phone calls, or letters, or emails later. Hung up on me, didn’t write back. She was only seventeen when I left, remember?”

“How can I remember?” he said.

He saw her smile. “Now that sounds like Meghan.”

He made a face. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be, but you do know what I mean? Big sister marries a stranger, city hall, no proper ceremony, moves across the ocean, changes all her life plans? Without any warning. And there was…there was more to it.”

“Like?”

She sighed. “That gets us to the all-night part. Let’s say I was involved in something connected to what you felt yesterday. It runs in our family, Ned, on the maternal side, as far back as I’ve been able to trace, disappearing, showing up again. And in me it included some other things that turned out to be really important. And really, really difficult? That changed me. A lot, Ned. Made it impossible to be what I’d been before. Or stay where I’d been.”

It sounded, weirdly, as if she were asking his forgiveness.

He thought about how he’d felt by the mountain earlier today, and in the cloister before. The impossibility of explaining, making sense of it. “I might be able to understand some of that,” he said.

“Thank you, dear.” She looked up at him. “I thought you’d be feeling afraid, and confused, so I came to let you know you aren’t alone. Not the first. In this.”

She stopped. It seemed she was crying again. She shook her head. “I’m sorry. I swore I wouldn’t cry. Your uncle said I didn’t have a hope. I actually bet him.”

“You lose, I guess. Where is he? My uncle.”

She wiped at her eyes with a Kleenex. “I don’t know if I should tell you,” she said.

Ned shook his head. “Too many secrets. Gets screwy.”

She stared up at him. “You’re probably right. Between us, Ned?”

He nodded.

“Dave is north of Darfur.”

It took him a moment. “The Sudan? But that’s…my mom is…”

“Your mother’s there, yes. Your uncle’s watching over her.”

His mouth had dropped open, comically, like in a cartoon. “Does she…does my mom know that?”

His aunt laughed aloud. A burst of amusement that made her seem much younger. “Does Meghan know? Are you crazy? Ned, she’d…she’d spit, she’d be so angry!”

He honestly couldn’t imagine his mother spitting. Maybe as a ten-year-old…but he couldn’t picture her as ten, either. Or seventeen, feeling abandoned by her sister.

He said, really carefully, “Let me get this. My uncle is there secretly? To keep an eye on my mom?”

Aunt Kim nodded. “I told you, we’ve been keeping track of all of you. But she’s the one I worry about.”

“Why her?”

She was silent.

“Too many secrets,” he repeated.

“This is your mother, dear. It isn’t fair, this conversation we’re having.”

“So it isn’t fair. Tell me. Why?”

Gravely, his aunt said, “Because I think Meghan does some of what she does—the war zones, choosing the worst places—as a response to what I told her I’d done, just before I went away. I made a mistake, telling her.”

Ned said nothing. He couldn’t begin to think of what to say. He felt shaky.

She saw that, went on talking, quietly. “She’d thought…I would be an ambitious doctor, try to do good in a big way. I’d talked like that to her when she was young. Big sister, kid sister, sharing my future. Then I…had that experience, and everything changed. I went off to some village in England to spend my life doing country medicine. Childbirth and checkups. Runny noses, flu shots. Everything scaled way down. After the one very big thing she never understood, or accepted.”

“That’s…what you do?”

She smiled. “Runny noses? Yes, it is. I also have a garden,” she added.

Ned rubbed at the back of his head. “And you think…?”

“I think Meghan’s been showing me, and herself, what she believes I should have been like. What I rejected. Along with rejecting her. And she’s proving she can do it better.”

Ned was silent. After pushing to hear this, he wasn’t sure he’d been right, if this was something he really wanted to know.

“Ned, listen. People do wonderful things for complicated reasons. It happens all the time. Your mother is a hero where she goes. People are in awe of her. Maybe you don’t know that—she probably doesn’t tell. But your uncle knows, he’s been there, he’s seen it.”

“He’s done this before?”

“Only when we knew she was going somewhere very bad.” She hesitated. “Three times, before this one.”

“How? How did you know where she was going?”

He thought he saw her make a wry face in the darkness. “Dave’s talented at quite a few things. Computers are one of them. He could explain it better than I can.”

Ned thought, then he stared. “Jesus! My uncle hacked Doctors Without Borders? Their server?”

Aunt Kim sighed. “I’ve never liked that word. Hacked is so illegal-sounding.”

“Well, it is illegal!”

“I suppose,” she said, sounding cross. “I’ve told him I don’t approve. He says he needs to know what she’s doing with enough time to get there himself.”

Ned shook his head stubbornly. “Great. So he just drops his own life and goes there too. And…and what was Uncle Dave going to do if Mom was attacked or kidnapped by insurgents? In Iraq or Rwanda, or wherever? The crazy places.”

The anger he lived with, the fear, dull as an ache, hard as a callus in the heart.

His aunt said, quietly, “Don’t ask that until you’ve met him. Ned, you won’t ever know anyone more capable of dealing with such places. Believe me.”

He looked at her. “And he does this because…?”

“He does it for me. Because I feel responsible.”

There was something different in her voice now. Ned looked down at her, where she was sitting on the rock, hands still clasped.

“Wow,” he said finally, shaking his head again. “That is controlling. I thought my mom was bad. Is it another family thing? Last I checked she was forty-something years old. And you still feel responsible for her?”

Her laughter again, rueful this time. “If I plead guilty to being a worrier, will you let me off with a reprimand? And please—Ned, you mustn’t tell her!”

“She’ll spit?”

“She’ll want to murder me with a machete.”

“My mother? Are you—?”

“Shh! Hold on!”

Her tone had changed completely; there was a command in it, startlingly. Ned froze, listening. Then he, too, heard a sound.

“Shit,” whispered his aunt. “I wasn’t paying attention.”

“You swore,” Ned pointed out, a reflex; it was what he did when his mother’s language slipped.

“Hell, yes!” said his aunt, which wasn’t his mother’s reply. “We may be in trouble. Damn! My mistake, a bad one. But why would they attack us? What have you been doing here, Ned?”