Ava O’Brien looked out the window of her compact sewing room in the back of the family’s small house. The summer afternoon fog was thinning and maybe, just maybe, she would see the sun before it set. She was hand stitching the collar onto a new dress for her middle child, while waiting for her firstborn to join her. Earlier that morning, the two had made a two o’clock date. For several days, Bethie had been asking for a new story, from long ago, “from Fernie, Mommy.” Although Maggie and even younger Joe were usually part of her audience, Ava realized that Bethie may be ready for more of a lesson. About her mother’s life, yes, but also about life in general.

When the twenty-four-year-old Paulo Mendes was first moved from the sports department to the hard news department at the O Sol newspaper, he did not expect that his first assignment would be to interview three illiterate shepherd children or that the subject of their discussion would be the alleged apparition of the Virgin Mary. On June 13, 1917, the three youngsters – Lucia dos Santos, aged ten, Francisco Marto, aged nine, and Jacinta Marto, aged seven – had reportedly seen a lovely lady dressed in white, resplendent as the sun, appear in the sky above the hollow of Cova da Iria to give them a message.