The ghosts were gone now, gone silent, the doorway between worlds shut fast no matter how she bangs upon it. She should have known that she’d miss them, her dear dead brother and sisters, the sticky web of their love. She’s lonely without them. She’s ordinary without them. They knew her at her best. The same cannot be said of Edwin, Asia, John, and Joe, who, she sometimes feels, have always been so focused on each other, they hardly know her at all.

Sometimes when she watches Asia and John interrupting each other to tell a story or laughing at a joke she doesn’t even understand, the way she misses Henry is a roaring in her ears, a bitterness rising in her throat. For just a moment she can see him again, beckoning her forward through the green light into a carpet of lilies. Hie thee home to me, she thinks, desperate with love for the ghost who never spoke, but who might, even now, be trying to find his way across the ocean. He’ll look for her at the farm. He won’t know to come here.

Rosalie climbs onto the chair. She’s a little drunk, truth be told. She’s found that a small glass of gin in the morning helps the ache in her back and if she stops with just the one, no one’s the wiser. Not even Mother, with all her years of honed observation.

Already Mother’s making noises about Edwin’s drinking. “I can’t blame him,” she’s said to Asia and also to Rosalie when she sees that the level in the gin bottle is down. “It’s in his blood. It’s the family curse.”

It hasn’t occurred to Mother that Rosalie is in the same family.

She’s drunk just enough now to feel exhilarated rather than frightened when the chair creaks beneath her. Just enough to give her the sense that if she did fall, she would float down like a leaf on a stream.

Through the window, Harriet Struthoff’s flowered hat goes by. This is a hat for the young woman Harriet Struthoff ceased to be some years ago. There are so many ways for a spinster to look ridiculous. Rosalie admires Miss Struthoff for not caring. She wishes that she, too, could wear a big and lovely hat now that Edwin is here to buy one for her. Instead he surprised her a few days ago with a writing box, mahogany and brass, linen paper inside for her letters. All very elegant and Rosalie does love it, that very thoughtful, that impeccably appropriate spinster’s gift.