“Can’t you just wait to grow up before you leave?” her father told Isabel the last time the ferry captain caught her stowing away and brought her back. “Time goes faster than you think.” “Not fast enough,” Isabel answered, but as it turned out, her father was right. Suddenly, here she was in her thirties, with no family and no one to love, and she’d begun, only rarely and at odd hours, to think she’d made a terrible mistake.
