Chapter 10

The legal part took a year and a half. I'll compress it, because it doesn't matter as much as people think it does.

Rosalind was convicted. She is serving twenty-six years in a state facility four hours from the coast, and she has declined every interview request, and every Christmas she sends her brother a ham, which he does not eat.

Preston pleaded guilty to conspiracy and to theft of the gemstone. Eight years. The carousel went into receivership, and the court sold it, and the buyer was a preservation trust set up by Augustin Rourke with one condition written into the deed: the Queen's horse is restored by the conservator of her choice.

I know what you want to ask, so I'll answer it.

I did not move into the house on the bluff.

We visited. Sophie was nine by then and she spent the whole first afternoon on the terrace steps, where her grandfather - she calls him Grandpa Augie, which he pretends to hate - told her the story of a little girl who fell chasing a dog and got four stitches and a sticker.

I kept my name. Legally, the court entered an order twelve months ago changing it, so my documents now read Mara Celia Velasco Rourke. On paper I'm both women's. That's fine by me. I'm the only person alive who was ever in both of those lives, and I'm not going to pretend one of them didn't happen.

Augustin set up a fund for Sophie. I said yes to that, and no to the rest, and then I said yes to one more thing, which was a house - not in the bluff gate community, but six blocks back from the water, where you can hear the foghorn at night. It has a garage for my bench and a room with north light. He paid for the roof. He had to feel useful or he was going to sit around watching his heart monitor until it gave out.

Elena's grave is in Bakersfield. I drove up there in September with Sophie and Augustin in the back seat complaining about the radio the whole way.

I stood in front of that flat little stone for twenty minutes and I said nothing, and then I said, out loud, "You should have told me."

And then I said, "But I understand why you didn't."

And then I stood there a while longer and finally I said, "Thank you," which is the hardest word I've ever said, and I didn't feel better afterward and I didn't expect to.

We drove home.

The carousel reopened on the first Saturday in June, with the same band organ and the same lights and a whole new set of faces on the horses.

At six that morning, before anyone else was on the pier, I sat down at my workbench under the north window with the Queen's horse's bridle on a felt pad in front of me - the headstall unstrung, the gesso built back up, the brass fitting polished and re-seated, and one sapphire eye, recovered from the police evidence room, held in my fingers.

Augustin sat across from me with a lamp angled over my hands. He didn't say anything. He just held the light.

I set the eye into its socket and pressed until it seated with a soft click.

Then I opened the restoration log and wrote the date, the piece, the treatment, and at the bottom I signed it the way I have signed every entry for nine years.

Except this time I wrote my initials the other way around.

C. R.

Sophie came in running, yellow raincoat, braids already coming loose, and climbed onto the horse I'd just finished. Augustin turned the motor on. The lights along the brass poles came up one row at a time, all the way around, and the Queen's horse went by with two bright blue eyes, and my daughter went by on top of it, laughing, holding the red cord around her neck in one small fist.