The party had ended at midnight, as parties always do, leaving behind the kind of silence that is louder than the music was. I sat alone in the ballroom of the Berkeley estate, surrounded by the debris of other people's joy—crushed champagne glasses, discarded flower petals, the ghost of laughter that lingers in a room like the smell of perfume.

Charles was asleep upstairs, four years old and heavy with sleep, his small body sinking into the mattress of his four-poster bed. Dorothy was in the guest room, two years old and curled into a ball like a cat. I had seen to both of them myself, after the last guest had left and the housekeeper had gone to bed and the staff had begun the long work of cleaning up what I had paid for and then abandoned.

The doorbell rang at half past three.

I did not want to answer it. I was tired in a way that sleep does not fix, the kind of tiredness that comes from being alone in a house this size with two children and a husband who died in a war that nobody outside this country understood. But the doorbell kept ringing, persistent and polite, and I went to answer it.

It was Ruth Cavendish, standing on the threshold in her nightgown, her dark hair wild, her father's arm around her shoulders like a rope.

"Mr. Cavendish had to leave," she said. "There was an emergency on the Street. But Ruth wanted to—"

"Come in," I said. "The children are asleep. You can stay the night."

She shook her head. "I just wanted to say goodbye. I'm leaving tomorrow. Father says we're going to France."

France. The word hung in the air like smoke. I had been there six months ago, walking through the ruins of a village that had been erased, looking for a friend who had not come back. I had not found him. I had found nothing, in fact, except the evidence that everything I had believed in before the war was a lie.

"Goodbye," I said. "Tell your father I said he should come see us before he goes. We could have dinner. Charles would like to meet someone his own age."

Ruth smiled, and the smile was beautiful and sad and I thought, too late, that I had seen that smile before—in a photograph my friend had sent me from the trenches, of a girl who stood in a garden that no longer existed.

She went. I locked the door. I climbed the stairs. I checked on the children. I went to bed.

I did not sleep.

At dawn, I woke and went to check on Charles. He was asleep, his mouth open, his breathing soft and regular. I went to check on Dorothy. She was asleep, her hand tucked under her chin. I went back to the bedroom and dressed and made coffee and sat in the kitchen and drank it alone and thought about France and my friend and the village that had been erased.

Then I heard the noise.

Not a shout. Not a cry. The sound of children playing, distant and muffled, coming from somewhere in the house. I set down my cup and walked into the corridor and listened. The sound was coming from the garden wing—the ballroom, the conservatory, the terrace that opened onto the rose garden.

I went to the ballroom. It was empty. The debris of last night's party lay undisturbed on the floor.

I went to the conservatory. The glass was fogged, the air thick and humid, the tropical plants sweating in the morning light. The children were not there.

I went to the terrace. The rose garden stretched before me, red and white and yellow, the flowers heavy with dew. Charles was sitting on the edge of the fountain, his legs dangling over the dry basin. Dorothy was standing beside him, holding something in her hand—a flower, I thought, or a piece of paper.

Where was Ruth?

I had not seen her. I had not seen her since she left the door.

"Where is the girl?" I asked.

Charles looked up. "What girl?"

"The girl who was here. Ruth. She stayed for dinner, and then—"

"She went home," Dorothy said. Her voice was small and flat, the voice of a child who has been told something and is repeating it without understanding.

"She went home?" I said. "Are you sure?"

Charles shrugged. "She was here. Then she wasn't."

I went back to the house and searched. The conservatory, the ballroom, the rose garden, the greenhouse, the path that led to the gate. Nothing. No Ruth. No sign of Ruth. Just the roses and the dew and the morning light.

I called Mr. Cavendish. He answered on the first ring.

"Mr. Cavendish, Ruth is not—"

"She left," he said. His voice was tired. "I brought her home last night. She's in her room. She's fine."

I hung up the phone and sat in the kitchen and waited for the day to begin and thought about how easy it had been to believe something that was not true.

The roses bloomed that summer. They bloomed every summer, year after year, red and white and yellow, and I watched them bloom from the kitchen window and thought about how beautiful the world is and how little it matters.

Charles grew up. Dorothy grew up. I grew older. And somewhere in Long Island, in a house that I had never seen, Ruth Cavendish grew up too, and married a man who worked on the Street, and had children of her own, and sometimes, in the middle of the night, she would wake and remember a ballroom full of crushed champagne glasses and a garden full of roses and the sound of children playing in a house that was too big for three people.

And she would cry, for no reason she could explain, and go back to sleep and wake up the next morning and live her life the way people live their lives when they have been given a second chance they do not fully understand.