The minute Mother says this, Rosalie sees how inevitable the move is. And yet it hadn’t occurred to her. Her eyes had suddenly filled so she’d left the kitchen as inconspicuously as she could and come upstairs to be alone and cry. But somewhere on the stairs, the tears had vanished without falling, her eyes parched and stinging instead.

She’s never loved Baltimore, but this is where her life is. She has friends—the Cole sisters, Nelly Morgan, Kate Greene—and she gets together with them every couple of weeks to gossip and sew shirts and aprons for charity. Maybe she doesn’t really care for Nelly, but she likes the Cole sisters.

She’s lived with Asia, they’ve shared a bedroom, for the whole of Asia’s life, but always under Mother’s roof. In Philadelphia, Rosalie will be a permanent guest in Asia’s house, an intruder on the young couple. Efforts will be made to make her feel welcome and Asia will make sure that she sees those efforts. Rosalie will feel a constant pressure to be both out of the way and useful. She will never feel that the house is hers.

Rosalie knows better than to imagine she’ll be given a room of her own. She’ll be sharing with Mother now, the widow and the spinster. She can see how it all will go.

But she can also see that nothing else makes sense. Unhappy as she is, she can’t come up with a single argument in favor of the expense of remaining in Baltimore.

A timid knock on the door, and Mother enters. Water has dripped down the front of her chemise, soaked into the shelf of cloth over her heavy breasts. Her graying hair is wrapped in a large white rag. “I guess we took you by surprise,” she says. “I didn’t mean to. I thought it was obvious.”

“It is,” Rosalie says. “I don’t know why I was surprised.”

“Philadelphia is a wonderful town. Sleeper says he’d much rather live there than here. So much to do!”

“I’m sure I’ll get used to it.” Rosalie can’t say out loud, not to anyone, but certainly not to Mother, how much she dreads the daily witness of Asia ruling her little kingdom. It puts her in mind of those novels in which the younger married sister leapfrogs in status over the older unmarried one.

Sleeper’s visits have been hard enough. You can’t enter a room without seeing the two spring apart, Asia’s face flushed, hair in disarray. But probably once Asia is married that will stop. Mother and Father had a baby every two years like clockwork, and yet there had been no canoodling for Rosalie to interrupt.