“Are they still rescuing people from the lifeboats?” Annabelle asked, forcing herself to be hopeful. At least she knew her mother was alive, although who knew in what condition. But surely, the others had survived too.

“They picked the last ones up at eight-thirty this morning,” the clerk said with somber eyes. He had already heard tales of bodies floating in the water, people screaming to be rescued before they died, but it wasn’t up to him to tell the story, and he didn’t have the courage to tell these people that lives had been lost by the hundreds, and maybe more. The list of survivors so far was just over six hundred, and the Carpathia had radioed that they had picked up over seven hundred, but they didn’t have all the names yet. If that was all, it meant over a thousand passengers and crew members had been lost. The clerk didn’t want to believe it either. “We should have the rest of the names in the next few hours,” he said sympathetically, as a man with a red face threatened to hit him if he didn’t hand over the list, which he did immediately. People were frantic, frightened, and spiraling out of control in their desperation for information and reassurance. The clerks were handing out and posting as many lists as they could. And finally, Annabelle and her father’s driver, Thomas, went back to the car, to wait for more news. He offered to take her home, but she insisted she wanted to stay, and check the lists as they updated them over the next few hours. There was nowhere else she wanted to be.

She sat in the car in silence, some of the time with her eyes closed, thinking about her parents and her brother, willing them to have survived, while being grateful for her mother’s name on the list so far. She didn’t eat or drink all day, and every hour they went back to check. At five o’clock, they were told that the lists of survivors were complete, with the exception of a few young children who could not yet be identified by name. But everyone else that had been picked up by the Carpathia was on the list.