For five weeks every fall, the sun goes down behind the ridge and the lake throws the last of the light back up at the east wall of a chapel that is scheduled to come down.

Mara Doyle restores stained glass. She has come back to Millbrook Hollow, Vermont to save eleven hundred pieces of 1878 window — the last work her mother left unfinished — and she has not set foot in the building in seven years.

Owen Faraday still keeps the chapel. He holds the only key to the room she needs, he is on the step at six every morning, and he has never once asked her why she left the night before her mother's funeral. Working beside him is not the problem.

The problem is what the restored glass starts putting on the far wall at sunset.

The town board meets on the eighth of December. Thirty-five days. And every panel she brings back whole takes one memory of her own in exchange — the glass chooses which, it always reaches for whatever carries the most of that room, and nothing written down survives it.

The chapel is being given back its past. Mara is the one paying for it.