The Calling

'I can’t think of anyone in the village who didn’t have a theory about her.'

So begins the would-be writer Kat's account of an old woman who for many years has lived alone in a dilapidated farmhouse on the outskirts of the village, and who appears to have shunned all social contact. Following what she takes to be a chance encounter with this woman, Kat finds herself increasingly fascinated by her, and that fascination is only compounded when the woman bequeaths some of her notebooks to Kat.

As she reads those notebooks, Kat discovers not only that the old woman was a painter whose friends and lovers included some of the most influential artists of the era, but that she had convinced herself that Kat was her daughter. For reasons that have everything to do with the darkness in her own past, Kat doesn't simply dismiss this belief as a delusion.