It is nothing but a legend, they say. La nuit de samhain: the end of summer, the beginning of the dark months. It is the night in which the ancestors and the living gather, in which time and space are superimposed and for twelve nameless hours the past, the present and the future become indistinguishable. The other world emerges from the mists to return our dead to us for one night. We bid them to question the gods, demons and fairies in the hereafter about our fates.

Yet when the human meets the elements, and the heroes the haters, each should stick to his own in the light, for very few souls survive the battle between the merging worlds. Anyone who loses his way on dark roads or by the watery gates to the other world will encounter spirits that only druids or priestesses can defeat. Anyone who ventures outside is sucked into the realm of the dead and must spend a year with them. If they do return, nobody will be able to see them anymore.

Marianne nevertheless walked through this night to the sea to meet her dead. She had left the feast in honor of the deceased on her own. It was not only the dead that were celebrated at this festival, for she and Geneviève had turned it into a festival of women too, just as the forgotten Celtic and Breton myths had once required: women’s love dissolved all borders, stretching beyond the reach of death and time.

The women of this world and the other were thanked with an offering of burning sheaves of grain, which were covered and extinguished after a minute’s silence. This was the sign that the summer was over, and a new cycle began when the next sheaves were set alight. At each table there was an extra place setting and a chair was left empty for those who were bidden to come from the other world. All lights were put out for a minute so that the dead could climb unseen into their boats and set out for this world, guided by candles in the windows.

It was the duty of every reveler to justify his or her forbidden acts or forgive others theirs, and it behoved everyone to draw up a list of the things they would like to have experienced by samhain the following year. This life list was also Marianne’s idea.

The only person she had told that he didn’t need to wait up for her during this night of blurring worlds was Yann.

Yann. There had been nights with him and nights without him. There had been days filled with music and days of mourning when they carried Sidonie’s ashes to the stones and buried them there. There had been hours of wonder when Simon went on a tour of Normandy’s Calvados distilleries with Grete and they came back as a couple; and when Paul and Rozenn said “I do” for a second time, and Marianne had heard for the first time at the registry office that Paul’s place of birth was Frankfurt. He was a German, and yet could not have been less of one. When he joined the Foreign Legion, he’d cast off everything he no longer wanted to be—the son of an SS officer. That was the secret that had overshadowed his entire life. Marianne continued not to speak a single word of German with him, for he willed it so, and her respect for someone’s will had grown since she had possessed one of her own.

There had been minutes of joy when Jean-Rémy and Laurine made enquiries about baby names, and seconds of gratitude when Marianne looked out from her room at the peach-colored reflections of the sun and the sky in the Aven.

There were also those recurring Mondays at Kerdruc harbor when Marianne sat together with friends who loved her, chatting about God, goddesses, the world, and dreams both big and small.

—

Now she was sitting by the sea on this night of all nights. She had set up a folding stool beside her in case one of the dead wanted to sit down.

With her eyes closed, she played a song for the dead, for women and for the sea. It had no title, and her fingers decided freely on the tune. “Sa-un,” she whispered, pronouncing the Breton name for this timeless time. Sa-un, the waves whispered back. Are you ready for your journey into the ephemeral?

Marianne thought she heard steps and laughter. She thought she could feel gusts of wind as the dead ran over the sand, leaving footprints in it.

Are you happy? asked her father. He was sitting next to her with folded hands, gazing out at the black Atlantic.

“Yes.”

My resilient girl.

“I love you,” said Marianne. “I miss you.”

He had your eyes, said her grandmother, moving over the waves toward her. I loved your grandfather, and after him, no one else. It is a rare form of happiness when a man makes your life so rich that you need no one else after him.

“Was he a magician?”

Any man who loves a woman as she deserves to be loved is a magician.

Marianne opened her eyes. Her fingers stopped playing. The beach was empty, no footprints in the sand, and yet they were all there: the dead, the night and the sea. The sea offered her a song of bravery and love. It came from a long way away, as if someone somewhere in the world had sung it many years ago, for those on the shore who didn’t dare to take the plunge.