It’s dark outside, an elsewhere hour between midnight and dawn. I lie awake, frozen, waiting for a sound not yet audible. My eyes are open before I hear the wheels of the carriage at the bottom of the drive.

And now the dog is barking, and there’s faint light through my window. The hired man has emerged from his room above the stable, lantern swinging from his hand. I hear Uncle Henry’s lumbering tread, Aunt Clara’s petulant “Henry? Who is it, Henry, at this hour?”

I know that the servants are awake, too, though I can’t hear them. They have been trained to move in silence.

What if the carriage brings news of Quinn and William? Or even my cousins themselves? That would be too much luck, perhaps, but I’m not sure that I’m strong enough for less. Another loss would be unendurable. And we are never given more than we can bear, are we?

When I sit up, I am pinpricked in fear.

The corridor is freezing cold, and the banister is spiky, garlanded in fresh pine. With both sons at war and her only nephew buried this year, Aunt Clara nonetheless insisted on bedecking Pritchett House for the Christmas holiday. Uncle Henry always defers to his wife’s fancies. She’s a spoiled child, blown up into a monster.

Downstairs the front doors are flung open. I join the household gathered on the porch all of us but the hired man, who stands below in the drive as the trap pulls up. The moment feels eternal. I twist at my ring, a diamond set between two red garnets, more costly than the sum of everything I own. When Will slid it onto my finger, he’d promised that I’d get accustomed to it. Not true, not yet.