There was once a boy who was in love with a girl, Our Mother begins, in answer to our question. It was in a township just like this. There were houses up and down narrow streets. There were spruce forests. There were stray cats in the alleyways. Some men were fishermen and some men were pirates and mothers raised sons and daughters, and the rain always fell. Their telephone poles leaned just like ours. Their clouds were gray, their seagulls and bats silhouetted against it all. And there was this boy, this charming, lovely boy, and he found this girl in a house up the street, and she radiated light. She shone. This boy swooned. He'd never known a girl who glowed. He'd never felt what it was he was feeling in his heart. He'd never been magnetized to anything so strongly before. But he'd only seen her through the windows, hadn't even talked with her. They hadn't exchanged a word, until one day, the boy decided to profess his love. He thought if he didn't, his insides would explode. So he rode his bicycle up to her house and he knocked on her door. He stood waiting. He heard her hand on the handle. He saw her figure in the door's panes of glass. She opened the door, and she smiled, and it lit the boy as he'd never been lit before. She smiled too, and the only thing between them then was the door's threshold, a small plank of wood separating a boy from a girl. The boy was scared. He didn't know if he was ready. This boy in this township just like ours, with the rain and the houses nestled together and the spruce trees and the wet streets, he was so young. He was only a boy. He wasn't ready to fall in love, to say those words out loud, to let them burst from his mouth. But this boy, like so many boys in townships like ours, they mistake lust for bravery, want for courage, and they say what they shouldn't. They reveal dreams better kept in their heads. They expose their hearts to the world before the world is ready, before they are ready. This boy, he stood on the threshold of that girl's house, and he said he loved her. He said his he'd fallen in love with her. He said he'd never love anyone else and he'd never have any other heart but the heart for her. And he swore to her, as the rain fell, that he'd never abandon her. That was the day the girl became a ghost, because she knew he'd sail anyway. There is such a difference between truth and belief. He said he loved her, and her heart went see-through. He said he'd never leave her, and it broke her heart, and she spent the rest of her life trying to cover her grief in dresses, trying to make a new skin to live in, trying to stop a world from falling like rain around her.

We didn't know what to say.

And her name, Our Mother said, is already in your hearts.

Mallory, we said out loud, unable to resist the name in our mouths. Mallory.