Finally, in 1953, as Una, Martin and the girls hang lanterns in the window the way Li taught Una and Una taught Robin, word comes from Kitty's contact that they have got Li on a boat at last. Iris waltzes Robin around the too-narrow front-room to the tune of Straighten Up and Fly Right while Kiki swoops and dives around and between them. She does her most ear-splitting and off-key rendition of Polly Wolly Doodle and Robin and Iris ape her. Una says nothing because Li is alive and soon will be in Kingsport. Almost, it feels too good to be true. But when Una pinches herself, the telegram remains unchanged, it's bold typed letters as immovable and unblinking as ever.

Standing on the dock and watching for Cornflower Blue to come in, Una remembers her homecoming in all its agonizing detail. The too-bright white of Raffles, the sheen of the floors, the slippery-slick banisters Robin and Puck slid down. The interminable questions of Ernest Henderson with his pianist's fingers. She hears the click of the RAPWI woman's heels and the tap of her pen on that clipboard, and wonders, as she wondered waiting for Iris, if she will know Li on arrival. Once, they were close the way the waves kiss the sand. They forgot, sometimes where one left off and the other began. But that was in 1942, and eleven years is a long time.

It is not so long that Li looses the old, inbuilt, water-fluidity of movement. Una spots her immediately by it. A touch stiffer, perhaps, as Una is herself, but still willow-flexible as she sifts her way through the moiling egress of fellow travellers. Li's eyes are still placid as koi pons. One of the great revelations of the Occupation, for Una, was how much could bubble and boil behind that look like a koi pond. At the time it was easy to guess the cause of it, but – could she still?

'Li,' Una says, anyway, reckless, and raises her hat in salutation. She calls out in the imperfect Chinese that Emily still laughs over. It turns heads and it garners that waterlily smile of old. That this, most of all, remains constant cuts to the quick of Una's soul. This is the way she always remembered Li. Now she doesn't have to.

Willowy arms, strong as much as they are slender, embrace Una.

'Oh, thank God,' says Li. 'I used to lie awake and pray to Kuan Yin that you were alive. We heard such awful things, and I left you alone…'

Words tumble into the soundless weeping of reunion. Li weeps mute relief, and maybe horror, and it's contagious. As Li's tears press skin-warm and damp into Una's shoulder, Una finds herself crying too, for the elapsed time, the ghosts of what was, the memory of Elise English and Nellie and all those other women Li never met. For gratitude Li never met them, because Li in camp is unthinkable, but regret, too, because she would have loved these women as Una does. Una thinks, as they rock and weep on the edge of the dock, the sea a vast variegated blue before them, that probably Li has her own stock of similar things that she holds close and is privately grateful Una is a stranger too, even while wishing she wasn't.

'Iris is here,' says Una. 'She's still all Carl when it comes to animals. She studies them these days. Exotics especially.'

Li hugs Una closer and cries harder. Una releases her fractionally to fish in her dress pocket for a handkerchief. Li takes it, grateful, but not without squinting at the embossed initials familiar in their workmanship, which is obviously Una's, though the conglomeration of letters is alien. Li raises an eyebrow, and for a moment the old world creeps in, and they are two women laughing and teasing over the vegetable preparations.

'Whose is this?'

'Minor detail,' says Una. 'In the scheme of things.'

Li wipes her eyes, blows her nose and gives Una the sort of look that says she will circle back to this minor detail when opportunity presents. She says, 'You found our Firecracker. I'm so glad. I only hoped…'

'I suppose you asked Kuan Yin for that, too?' says Una. Once, it might have been a joke. It isn't now.

'Every night,' says Li. 'If I'd had my fish I might have prayed through them the way you did.'

'Still do,' says Una, even as she fusses with their spiky, silver tails. 'And you'd given it to Firecracker by then. You might have warned, me, Li. The sight of it about gave me a heart attack.'

The waterlily smile twists fractionally, so that there's a touch of ruefulness to it. 'You didn't see it on her that first time. It was ridiculously adult for such a young girl. But I was terrified someday she would need the money from it, or the luck, and – '

'And God forgive me, I wasn't there,' says Una. 'I should never have sent you off alone.'

'No,' says Li. 'Someone had to stay. For Carl. But it should never have been you. They might have let me slip through the cracks, if I'd stayed.'

Now Una protests. 'Girls,' she says, 'need mothers. Iris needed you.'

'I suppose,' says Li as they walk, 'she told you about the boat.'

'And the torpedoes, and the nuns. It's funny, but I don't think it horrified her in the telling the way hearing it horrified me.'

'No,' says Li. 'I don't think it did at the time, either. It was awful, but she – well, as you say, she was a child. They have absolute faith in their adults. The idea that I couldn't save her never occurred to her.'

It's like that first, awful walk through the Glen all over again. Heads turn, strangers mutter, but it's nothing new to either woman. Una remembers this, even from Singapore. There was a reason their joint ventures to Mr. Razdan's ever-so-British tea rooms had an irregular regularity to them. A reason too why it was only ever his tea room Li and Una frequented. Sometimes the robins and sparrows chatter, and that is better. Less condemnatory. Chickadees warble and nuthatches harmonize with them.

'Iris is at school,' says Una. 'An exam. They wouldn't postpone it.'

'That's good,' says Li. 'That gives me time to ask impossible questions. Like what happened to Puck and if you ever found Carl.'

Truth sticks like a lozenge in Una's throat. It would be so nice, she thinks, unworthily, to just this once say that Puck is alive and Carl strolling through the botanic gardens looking for his newest addition to their varied menagerie. As it is, Una's throat works soundlessly for what seems an eternity but is probably only a matter of seconds. Then, clumsily, Una explains that Puck died, that she buried one of the red tea bowls with butterfly stamp with him, and that Carl is proving more elusive than bottled moonbeams. She does not say that he might be dead. That if Carl did, as they once guessed, go to Changi, then he may long since be dead from any number of horrifying conditions, all of which flutter around Una's brain like unbidden moths. Their names are Beriberi, Malaria, Cholera, Dysentery...

Li smiles, as her daughter smiled so recently, at the hose name on the gate. 'Your ghost-poem,' she says.

'Do you know,' says Una, 'that is almost exactly what our Firecracker said when she saw it? It wasn't a conscious habit.'

Li's waterlily smile blooms again and the awful moths of illness retreat from the forefront of Una's mind. Li touches a work-battered hand to the white poppy at Una's breast and says, 'I never needed a calendar to know your anniversaries. That was before you wore it all the time, naturally.'

'Before a lot of things,' says Una.

She opens the door and Kiki flies at them, shrieking gleefully, Murrrderrr! Normally she would be at the bookshop until Robin's class let out, but Martin is away, and the bookshop temporarily closed while Una waits on Li. This means nothing to Kiki, who is thoroughly nonplussed at being cooped up at Inisfree, sans explanation, and even more nonplussed by Li, apparently an interloper, her tolerance for parotlets indeterminate.

Murrderrr! shrieks Kiki. Polly wolly doodle! Van Amburgh is the man, who goes to all the shows...

'Oh, stop, Kiki,' says Una and bats the green-yellow crop away from her ears. 'Li lives here, too.' Kiki hops moodily about Una's shoulder for a bit, before flying off to sulk on top of the rolltop desk between the porcelain macaws.

'Poor Polly,' she says morosely, 'Poor Polly, poor Kiki…'

The room rings with Li's silver-fluted laughter. When Una looks, Li is bent double, a hand to her ribs.

'Oh,' she says between breathes, 'I thought monkeys were your limit. Firecracker's idea?'

'Isobel Blythe's,' says Una. 'I'll explain later. What can I do now? What do you want? Need?'

Li wants a bath, so Una runs one, and hovers to ask, 'Can I help?'

Li's waterlily smile again. 'I've forgotten what it's like to be alone,' she says. 'Please stay.'

You, too? Thinks Una, but she's not surprised. Not really. When Kitty said re-education, Una had handily translated it to camp, because that was what the Japanese were forever telling her they were doing for the fourth-class British women, never mind the odd jumble of nationalities knocking around Una's particular camp. Re-educating them. When Kitty mentioned Shanghai, Una knew she guessed right. Una sits on the lip of the tub and hands Li soap that smells of orchids. It makes Li's eyes water, and Una thinks that it is more because of the memory – orchids and coconut oil at bath time – than because of the strength of the scent. Una sits and washes Li's hair. It's still long, the way Una remembers it, and she runs her fingers through it, working the grit and the mats out until it is seal-sleek and glossy as it ever was. Finishing, Una shifts, and cautiously, her fingers trace the map of Li's back. Faith, Una remembers, hissed horror at a similar sight. Una doesn't. Her thumb traces particularly dense scar tissue and reads the map that says Fence wire and punishment hut and rope and more fences…

Maybe, Una thinks, as Li's head half-turns and their eyes meet, understanding is worse. Li's hand comes up out of the water, prune-wrinkled, and as she folds it over Una's other hand, the ringed one still on the lip of the bath, she says, 'You aren't horrified?'

There is no safe answer. Again the lozenge-blister of truth against the soft pallet. Tears well in Li's placid eyes.

'If you aren't horrified, you lived it too. I used to hope you would never know. Because if I knew and you knew then maybe Iris also…'

'No,' says Una, her throat working again. 'No, not Iris. I still comb her hair out at night, and no one hit her or scratched her or battered her. Whatever else she lived, it wasn't that.'

Una tries to conjure a smile, but it's hard with her throat still pinched and the memory of Iris's unmarked back shivering knife-slick through Una's blood and down her spine. She squeezes Li's hand and says as an afterthought, 'I used to hope the same thing. I'd think of you and hope to God that wherever you were, you had no idea what it was like. You or Iris.'

'I suppose it would have been greedy for every wish to come true,' says Li. She lifts Una's hand, still snug in hers, to study the gemmy blue of the ring there.

'It still suits you,' she says. 'But I remember I gave you two.'

'That's right,' says Una. 'This one to keep me safe, and your jade to bring me luck. But when Elise English came down with malaria that first time, I gave the jade to her, because she needed the luck more. We used to sleep with Robin between us, and there weren't mosquito nets, so it could have been me as easily as it was her that caught it. Robin was her girl, and…'

'Girls need their mothers,' says Li. Una nods, mute.

'At first,' says Una, the spasm of grief ebbing, 'we thought it worked. Elise wore that ring and she got over the malaria. I think, looking back, Nellie made a pet of her that first time, maybe because Robin was so little. So, Elise kept wearing your jade, even though it was superstition personified, and whenever the rest of us wanted a bit of luck, we'd touch the band, the way you and I used to touch Kuan Yin. And besides, you should have seen her eyes. More greens than an artist could muster and devastating with them. It suited her.'

'Then the malaria came back – it always comes back. Joan was with us by then, and she was a doctor. And we'd finally got more quinine. We dared hope, and Elise got through that, too. It came back again, and back, and the more it came back, the more confused Elise got. Cerebral malaria, Joan called it. Elise remembered the wrong things or thought she was elsewhere… That was when she made me promise to look after Robin – made me swear to do it – and then she died, still with your ring on her finger. I took Robin away from her, but I could hardly take that, too.'

'No,' says Li. 'Of course you couldn't. I'm sorry it couldn't do more.'

The hug she pulls Una into is watery and cool. It spatters Una's bodice with damp that blossoms like cherry trees and spreads lightning-quick across her dress. It spatters the white poppy too, but these days it is made of felt and hardier than the silk slip of a thing Una used to wear. Gently, Una shifts to twist the blue of Li's ring off her finger. It's heartbeat-close and spring-coiled around her knuckle after years of immobility and moves grudgingly. Reluctantly. Li's hands, in comparison, move jazz-sinuous and quick. They settle around and still Una's fingers.

'You still have your Robin to protect. You promised.'

Una smiles. She says, 'If it came to the point, I could probably find ways around that.'

That makes Li laugh, the sound of it warm against Una's neck. She smells of orchids from the soap and the steam of the cooling bath.

'You probably could,' says Li. 'I haven't forgot that I mean to ask you about that.'

But she doesn't. Not yet.

Una offers Li a towel, and then sits and helps dry and comb that long, thick hair. Afterwards, Una makes tea in the carmine tea bowls with their butterfly stencil, no two the same. She makes oolong, golden ad fermented, and they sit at either end of the faded navy sofa, legs slightly curled, to drink it. There should be guavas, Una thinks, but Kingsport doesn't do guavas. Instead, Una slices and salts apples, and they crunch at them companionably. When Kiki swoops at and steals slices, they laugh.

Sometimes, they talk of the lacunae of their lives, talking the way they cannot talk around the girls, because they are still, when it comes to a point, children, and the instinct to preserve them while waking and guard them while sleeping goes soul-deep. They trade stories of internments, and the rainbow-splinters that made it bearable. The quilting, the way Elise danced and Una an Bernice played on that half-feral piano. How Li and her companions built a ma-jong set from a broken door. Li painted the pieces and the adults taught the children to play.

Other times they are silent, nursing their tea and feeling the enough-weight of togetherness. It shimmers through the air like dust motes and settles on them seamless and gauzy.

Once, Li says, 'In Shanghai they took girls, and they called them flower names. Lily, Rose, Iris…' Tears blossom in the tracery of her eyes. Gingerly, Una blots them with a thumb. 'And we begged – the older women, you know? – to go instead. We'd have done anything. Some of them did. And I was glad we did, because when the young girls came back months later, they sobbed like nothing on earth. They couldn't stop. I thought they would choke of it, die. But it was just the one night. After that none of us talked about it again, not even when they took off more young girls. Not even when they got sick with things that weren't from contaminated water. I nursed them, and I listened to them, and I caught their too-early babies, and I prayed to your God and Kuan Yin and anyone I could think of that you and Iris didn't know that.'

'Oh Li,' says Una, and hugs her fiercely, there in the stillness of the Innisfree sitting room.

Later, hours later, Li sets her tea aside and looks at Una. Really looks. She tucks her knees under her chin and gazes with the intensity Una remembers her reserving for sketches.

'You cut your hair,' she says when a small eternity passes. She reaches fireside-cautious with one worn hand and touches a stray lock of Una's hair where it lies, not quite behind her ear.

'It was easier to manage that way,' Una says. 'Less to comb insects out of. It never quite grew back.'

'It suits you,' Li says and smiles her waterlily smile, slow-dawning and delicate.

Sometimes Kiki fractures the silence with cries of Murrrderrr or other nonsense. Li seizes upon these openings to demand the other part of afterward, the part that wasn't all camp life and horrors. Una curls tighter into the cushions and tells Li about Isobel Blythe, and how she brought them Kiki. About the letters from Singapore and tea that blisters the tongue in a bookshop that bristles with dust.

'Ah,' says Li, and pounces, gazelle-lithe on this titbit. 'This will be where the handkerchief comes from.'

'You're worse than Emily and Joan together ever were, do you know that?' says Una. But it comes out affection-laced, because she has missed this, not only Li but the companionship of her, the way they sat and laughed, cried and teased together. My sister gave it to me, Una said to Bernice that evening in camp, her fingers skimming the lapis-blue of her ring, and never has Una felt the veracity of it more keenly.

'But I'm right,' says Li, unruffled as ever. 'I always am. You wear your heart like your white poppies, pinned to you for anyone to see, though I don't think you mean to. It's why Emily and Joan can run away on scraps of nothing.'

'You've never met them,' says Una.

'I don't have to,' says Li. Her arm arcs outward and reach for the teapot. 'Anyway,' she says, pouring out, 'I'm glad. If I wasn't there, and those women weren't either, then I'm glad there was someone that understood you. You should always be understood. Loved. Robin too. She's a child and that's important.'

This – the effortless enfolding of Robin into their conversation – is why Una loves Li. As if she needed the reminder.

'I never stopped missing you,' Una says.

But she knows what Li means to say, because sometimes, in extremis, the soul blisters. Sometimes it becomes a gaping wound that bleeds unstaunched agonies. It's no way to live, because that way the heart snags on everything. Every time it does the blisters weep and the soul-wound gapes wider until the situation becomes untenable. Little, hysterical Addie taught Una that, dying not of illness but of unravelled nerve endings. And the only way to stop that is to reach out and grab for the first anchor to present itself. It was Bernice in camp, and yes, Una concedes, Martin Swallow afterwards, in Kingsport. It does not lessen the palpable relief of Li here, in Innisfree, her feet peeking out from under the spackled violet skirt with its blue-and-yellow peony trim Una gifts her.

Still later, Una will bring out the photos of Iris and Isobel embarking on their final school dance. Of Iris and Robin hanging lanterns for the lately-flown New Year in Innisfree's front windows. Poised pictures of the evening Isobel danced at the Alexandra theatre in Toronto and candid ones of the summer in Struan when Jims Anderson taught Robin, the little Challows, Hattie and Bea – call her Rabbit –Meredith to play cricket. Iris was there by then, and the whole idyll felt like one of Carl's theorized adjacent worlds. One in which Iris had contemporaries and the world was all shimmering rainbows and sunbursts.

In this charmed, adjacent world, Jerry looked at Robin's still-heartstopping green eyes and said conversationally, 'Funny thing – I know you pulled that girl out of the snares of the enemy, but I would swear she got that look from you. As if you're looking through time and past it to yesterday before wrapping back around to tomorrow.'

He isn't the first person to say this, and when Una tells him so, Jerry pounces, cat-lithe and myna-swift on a question he already has the answer to. 'Oh?' he says. 'Who else has noticed?'

'No one you know,' says Una, and it's true inasmuch as these two people she cares for – one who put her and the girls on the train to Struan, the other waiting to fetch them off it – have so far eluded each other.

And Jerry knows it. He laughs and says, 'Anyone I should?'

The charm of this would-be-universe punctures only when one of North Ontario's many biting black flies lands on Robin. She swats at it, kills it, and freezes, knees stiffly together, arms rigid, the cricket bat in her hands forgot. Una watches her freeze, and realizes with sudden and terrifying clarity that killing the fly propels Robin back. As if it were one of the many per diem she had to kill for the Commandant. Robin stands there rigid, and Una sits on the Challow veranda equally frozen. She has her share of things that take her back to the heat and the smell and the massing overcrowded boil of camp but that Robin does is unthinkable. Una cannot think, cannot move to go to her. As she realizes this, her own inability an ungainly morass, Iris shouts 'Mind the wicket, little bird,' and Robin comes back to herself. Oh thank God. Someday, Una will show Li all these things, and more besides. But not yet. Una isn't brave enough for that yet, and neither, she can see, is Li.

Eventually, there will be family. Iris, first and foremost, and Robin no doubt with her, well-versed in the mythology of Trinity House. Jerry threatened another visit when Una sent him the news, and Faith and the others are clamouring too. Una tells Li this and feels Li's nerves sing in answer. The last pictures of Li and Iris to come to Kingsport were of a young woman with an armful of writhing girl-child. Now they have a soul-blistered woman with fractures and splinters in places Faith can't possibly get at, and maybe Una can't either. She's less Carl and the child she wrestled with in photos is nigh-grown. Easy to say all will be well. That they will love Li because Una does. Li asks Una to say it anyway.

'Your mantra,' she says, 'from the days when the sun turned red. Tell me again.'

Una sets down her teacup, and clasps Li's hands in tea-warmed ones. She makes a mental note to fend off unwanted visitors for as long as she can, and says with the same bone-deep belief of years ago, 'All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of thing will be well.'

At first, Iris can't stop looking at her mother. Una watches this, the way child and mother drink each other in like sweet, heady wine. Now and then they catch each other's eyes and coruscations of incredulity and joy streak lightening-fast across unbelieving faces.

'Come, Miss Bird,' Una murmurs. She has no idea where they'll go – the pictures maybe, the way she used to do with Iris, or up to Larkrise, or perhaps Martin's flat over the bookshop. He's away and the place needs checking in on, anyway.

Immediately two pairs of hands shoot out and grab at Una and Robin both.

'Not on your life,' says Li.

'Don't you dare, Auntie,' says Iris. 'You're ours, too. Trinity House was only Trinity House because of you.'

'Time was never supposed to make you wise, Firecracker,' says Li. And to Una, 'You see what you're in for with your bird?'

Robin grins. She scrambles up onto the sofa next to Li and says, 'I promised Mama I'd put off growing up as long as possible.' Green eyes like lodestones and a smile like moonlight follow this declaration. Both have the impossibly bright wattage of age almost-eleven.

'Good girl,' says Li and ensnares Robin in a hug. She shakes her head indulgently, and Una adds Li to the ever-growing list of people charmed by those variegated green eyes. Eyes to drown the unwary.

The radio burbles These Foolish Things caress-intimate. Robin hums along, timing askew.

Li smiles. She says, 'I've missed your music.'

Una smiles too. Once jazz meant overcoming adversity and love against all odds. These days it means home and family. It means wish-fulfilment.