“Would you rather be there with them or here with me?” Hollis demanded to know.

His question had taken her by surprise as she was choosing a pair of earrings from her jewelry case, and she answered too slowly-she must have, because he grabbed her, something he’d never done before.

“Stop it,” she said to him. He’d always been jealous of her friendship with the Coopers, but she’d never paid much attention, until now. He was twisting her wrist; as soon as she shook free, she backed away. “Leave me alone,” she said.

March had never spoken to him this way, and her irritation came as a shock to both of them. It was just that he wanted so much from her; she never had a minute to think.

“Are you making a choice?” Hollis said to her then.

“No,” March had spat back, not considering how easily hurt he could be. “You are.”

It is always a mistake to tell someone, Don’t you dare walk out that door, and a far worse mistake to actually cross the threshold and walk out on someone you love. Ever since that day, March has wondered what she could have done differently: Stayed home from the Coopers’? Thrown her arms around him? Admitted that all day long she’d been planning her future with him? Halfway through dinner, she sensed how wrong she’d been; she left and ran all the way home, but it was already too late.

After he’d gone, she waited upstairs at her window, day after day, week after week. There were no letters, not even a postcard, and by the time March graduated from high school, she no longer bothered to walk down the drive to check the mailbox. Still, each spring the doves who nested in the chestnut tree in the yard returned, and March took that as a sign of Hollis’s loyalty and his love. The girls she’d gone to school with went off to college, or took jobs in the village, or married boys they loved, but March stayed by her window, and before she knew it the pane of glass had become her universe, the empty road her fate.