Rosalie looks up at Asia. “We’ll be ready when the baby comes,” she says and then she looks at Asia again. “Are you feeling all right?”

Since Asia first learned she was pregnant, she’s had many moments of joy and anticipation. She’s always loved babies. Won’t it be wonderful to have one of her very own? She pictures herself kissing a round knee, singing a lullaby, sleeping in a chair with the baby breathing softly against her shoulder. But her dreams have turned strange—birds underwater and fish in the air—and she startles awake several times a night gasping for breath. Sometimes these bouts of panic spread into the daylight and then keep on spreading, like a shadow that eventually consumes the figure that cast it.

She looks now at Rosalie, whose crooked back probably means she could never carry a child and anyway she’s too old and anyway who on earth would the father be? Asia wishes she were Rosalie now, crooked back and sad future and all. She’s always had such a calling to the convent. Goddamn Edwin anyway for making her marry.

Asia drops into the rocking chair and starts to rock. The wooden floor creaks beneath her. Outside the sky is a pale, grim gray. “Are you all right?” Rosalie asks again and Asia stops rocking by putting her feet down hard.

“I’m afraid I’ll die,” she says and then, realizing that her voice was so soft, Rosalie can’t possibly have heard, she says it louder. “I’m afraid I’m going to die. Don’t tell Mother.”

Two months back, she’d made a study of the gravestones in Father’s cemetery. She’d been methodical, one section at a time. Of course, not every woman who dies in her twenties or thirties dies in childbirth. Her mind is full of angels with frozen wings.

“I don’t want to die,” she says. She’s weeping now, which she didn’t expect, and it makes her cross. She was right to think this shouldn’t be said aloud. Now it sits in the chair beside her, now it starts the chair rocking again, now it has her by the throat.

She certainly hadn’t planned on telling Rosalie, but, here, she’s done it and really whom else could she have told? Not the boys—it would be almost cruel how ill-equipped they’d be. Not Jean, because she still wants Jean to envy her married state and join her in it. She needs the company.

Not Mother, who is surely suffering these same fears, as any mother would. Mother made John promise not to go to war because she couldn’t bear to lose him. Why didn’t she make Asia promise not to marry? Why does the extraordinary courage of ordinary women go so unsung? Asia would go to war in a minute. She’d come home with medals.