If you never got older, there would never come the day when your knowledge surpassed mine, when you learned to look at me with scorn. If you never got older, I would never disappoint you. Sometimes I prayed time would start traveling backward—not, as Edward would have it, two centuries back, so I could see the islands as they once were, but eight years back, when you were still my baby and learning to walk, and everything I did was marvelous to you, when all I had to do was say your name and your face would open in a smile. “Never leave me,” I’d whisper to you then, even as I knew that my job
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