The mirror arrived in a wooden crate, wrapped in oilcloth and baled with twine. Arthur Harlowe stood in the doorway of our London flat, rain hammering against the windowpanes, and said, "Will you do this for me?"

He placed the mirror on my table. It was an odd thing—two glass surfaces set in a single frame of dark oak. One side was ordinary mirror, silvered and bright. The other was polished steel, dark as a winter river. A thin copper wire ran from the frame's edge, coiled neatly beside it like a sleeping snake.

"It's a two-way visual," Arthur said. "My sister Margaret—"

He didn't finish. He didn't need to. Margaret Harlowe was nineteen years old and she was twelve hundred feet below the surface of a Welsh coal mine, and the mine had collapsed three days ago.

"Through the steel side," Arthur explained, "she can see whatever the other side faces. I've rigged a wire to a relay station at the pithead. If you hold the mirror toward the sky, or toward a flower, or anything at all, she can see it through the wire connection." He paused. "She asked for the flowers, Miss Vane. That's all she asked for."

I said yes because Arthur Harlowe's eyes were red as coals and because I could not bear the thought of a nineteen-year-old girl in the dark without a single sunflower to remember.

We drove out to the Thames on the second morning. The rain had stopped, and a thin November sun broke through the clouds in the manner of November suns—that is, briefly and without warmth. Arthur had driven me to his brother's cottage near Richmond, and from there we walked along the riverbank together.

"Keep the mirror toward the water," Arthur instructed through the wire. "She can see the light on the surface."

I held the mirror steady. The steel reflected the Thames—grey, restless, catching the weak sunlight in scattered diamonds. I could feel Margaret Harlowe seeing it through the other end. Not seeing it the way I saw it, at least not in the same way. When you look at water, you see water. When she was looking at it, I knew, it was something else entirely.

We walked to a patch of wildflowers growing in the embankment's edge. A few stubborn sunflowers, their heads bowed against the approaching winter. A cluster of late chrysanthemums, purple and defiant. Some white daisies, the last of the season.

"Tell her about the sunflowers," Arthur said.

I knelt and held the mirror toward them. The sunflowers filled the steel's dark surface. I pressed my hand against one of the petals—it was warm, surprisingly soft—and said into the wire, "They're sunflowers, Margaret. They turn to follow the sun. My grandmother used to have a garden full of them."

I waited. Three seconds passed. Then the wire buzzed faintly—the only feedback the system provided. A vibration in the copper, a tremor in the frame. She was breathing on the other end.

"Miss Vane?" Her voice came through a speaking tube connected to the wire junction. Thin, distant, like a radio signal from another country. "Are those real sunflowers?"

"They're real."

"They're yellow."

"Yes."

"They're the color of the sun." Her voice cracked on the last word, and I set the mirror down carefully and walked to the river's edge and gripped the rail and stared at the water until my eyes stopped stinging.

We went every day for five days. The river, the park, a field of wheat near Twickenham that had been left to grow wild after the harvest. She saw it all. She saw everything. A sparrow bathing in a puddle. An old man feeding pigeons on a bench. A child's red balloon caught in a tree branch. She asked me to look at each one for at least ten minutes. "Just ten minutes," she would say. "Please just ten minutes."

On the sixth day, the mining engineers came to the cottage. They spoke to Arthur in the kitchen. I could hear their voices through the open door—technical words, measured tones, the quiet grammar of men who have come to deliver something no one wants to hear.

"Miss Vane?" Arthur's voice when he came out. "I'm sorry. The ventilation shaft has collapsed. We can't reach her."

I went to the mirror. I set it on the table and turned it toward the window, toward the grey sky, toward the ordinary November world. I left it there.

The speaking tube stayed silent for six hours. Then, faintly, through the wire: "Tell me about the flowers."

That was all. That was everything.

I never walk past a sunflower again without stopping. I stand there in the street, in the park, anywhere they grow, and I see a nineteen-year-old girl in the dark below the earth, looking up at the last sunflower of November, and I think of the wire that connected us and the way her voice broke on the word "sunflower," and I cannot move for a long time.

The flowers bloom again every spring. But Margaret Harlowe never saw another one.