“Who hurt you once, / so far beyond repair / that you would greet each overture / with curling lip?”

Myrna whispered the words as she watched Ruth and Rosa, heads bowed into the snow. Making for home.

“We all have our albatrosses,” she said.

“Or ducks,” said Clara, and knelt by her friend’s chair. “Are you all right?”

Myrna nodded.

“Would you like to be alone?”

“Just for a few minutes.”

Clara stood, kissed Myrna on the top of her head, and left.

But Armand Gamache did not leave. Instead he waited for the connecting door to close, then he sat in the chair vacated by Ruth and stared at Myrna.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

Myrna lifted the tuque and put it on. The knitted hat perched on Myrna’s head like a light blue light bulb. Then she handed it to him. After examining it, Gamache lowered the hat to his knee.

“This wasn’t made for you, was it?”

“No. And it’s not new,” she said.

Gamache could see the wool was worn, slightly pilled. And he saw something else. A tiny tag had been sewn into the inside of the tuque. Putting on his reading glasses, he brought the hat to his face so that the rough wool almost rubbed his nose.

It was difficult to read the tag, the printing was so small and the letters smudged.

He took off his glasses and handed the tuque back to Myrna. “What do you think it says?”

She examined it, squinting. “MA,” she finally said.

The Chief nodded, unconsciously fiddling with his glasses.

“MA,” he repeated, and looked out the window. His gaze was unfocused. Trying to see what wasn’t there.

An idea, a thought. A purpose.

Why had someone sewn MA into the tuque?

It was, he knew, the same as the tag they’d found in the other tuques in Constance’s home. Constance’s had had a pattern of reindeer, and MC on the tag. Marie-Constance.

Marguerite’s had MM inside. Marie-Marguerite.

Josephine’s tuque had MJ.

He looked down at the tuque in his hand. MA.

“Maybe it belonged to their mother,” said Myrna. “That must be it. She made one for each of the girls, and one for herself.”

“But it’s so small,” said the Chief.

“People were smaller back then,” said Myrna, and Gamache nodded.

It was true. Especially women. The Québécoise tended to be petite even today. He looked at the hat again. Would it fit a grown woman?

Maybe.

And it might make sense for Constance to keep this, the only memento of her mother. There wasn’t a single photograph of their parents in the Quints’ home. But they had something much more precious. Hats their mother had made.

One for each of them, and one for herself.

And what had she put inside? Not her initials. Of course not. She stopped being Marie-Harriette when her girls had been born, and became Mama. Ma.

Maybe this was the key to Constance after all. And maybe, in giving it to Myrna, Constance was signaling her willingness to finally let go. Of the past. Of the rancor.

Gamache wondered if Constance and her sisters ever knew that their parents hadn’t sold them to the state, but that the girls had, in effect, been expropriated.

Did Constance finally realize that her mother had loved her? Was that the albatross she’d been lugging around all her life? Not some terrible wrong, but the horror that came from realizing, too late, she hadn’t been wronged? That she’d been loved all along?

Who hurt you once, / so far beyond repair?

Maybe the answer, for the Quints and for Ruth, was simple.

They’d done it to themselves.

Ruth in writing the poem and taking on an unnecessary burden of guilt, and the Quints in believing a lie and not recognizing their parents’ love.

He looked at the tuque again, rotated it, examining the pattern. Then he lowered it.

“How could this be a key to her home?” he asked. “Does the angel pattern mean anything to you?”

Myrna looked out the window, at the village green and the skaters, and she shook her head.

“Maybe it means nothing,” said the Chief. “Why reindeer or pine trees or snowflakes? The patterns Madame Ouellet knitted into the other hats are just cheerful symbols of winter and Christmas.”

Myrna nodded, kneading the hat and watching the happy children on the frozen pond. “Constance told me she and her sisters loved hockey. They’d get up a team and play the other village kids. Apparently it was Brother André’s favorite sport.”