I thought the fuss would die down after a few days, but it kept up all that summer long. William Graham, who’d been friends with Lan and me ever since we moved to Mill City, said it was because the newspaper reporters liked writing about a pretty young girl. I told him I was eighteen and nothing like as pretty as Susan Parker.

William turned beet red, because everybody knew he’d been sweet on Susan before he went East to school, but he stuck to his guns. Then Lan said that the newspapers would call any eighteen-year-old heroine pretty, even if she was sway-backed and had buckteeth. I whacked him with the flyswatter.

By that time, Lan had mostly gotten over his mad, which was a big relief. Or at least it was until the week before Lan went off to study at Simon Magus College in Philadelphia, when he cornered me in the kitchen garden and started asking me all kinds of questions.

“You’re going to graduate from the upper school this year,” he told me. “Where are you going after that?”

I looked at him. The last few years at boarding school, Lan had sprouted up a good bit taller than me, and he’d grown sideburns and started slicking his brown hair back like an Easterner. He hardly looked like the brother I remembered … except for the gleam in his brown eyes. I knew that gleam, and it always meant trouble for somebody.

“I’m staying right here with Mama and Papa,” I said warily. “Just like Nan and Allie did. And the other girls, before we moved to Mill City.”

Lan rolled his eyes. “That’s what I thought. You haven’t even considered any other possibilities.”