Some friends remain. Aunty Rogers tells Mother that, while John was on the run, she’d kept a hamper of food for him on the front porch. A reporter found Ann Hall to ask, if John showed up wanting her help, would she give it? “I’d give him anything he needed. I’d give him anything I have,” she’d said, and closed the door.

When as a child Asia had learned of her father’s bigamy, she’d protested the unfairness of it reflecting on his children. “It’s not as if we did anything wrong,” she’d said. She tries to hold that same conviction now, but it’s more difficult. In their hearts, each Booth must be asking: What did I do to cause this? What did I not do to stop it?

Asia’s guilt is more specific. Should she have read his letters? Should she have told Edwin about them and the nighttime visitors? Yet who could ever have suspected this?

Finally unable to bear it longer, Asia moves to England. But no one leaves unhappiness behind so easily. She never grants Sleeper his divorce, though he ceases to pay the marriage any mind, behaving in all ways as a single man. He treats Asia with the disrespect he feels her family name deserves. She loses another child at two and a half months. “I am, like my mother, getting hardened to sorrow,” she says.

For a year or so, she enjoys being away from America. She feels she can breathe again. But her husband is a philanderer, her mother is an ocean away, and her favorite brother is the dead one. She can’t make new friends—her heart’s a poor soil for it—and she finds the English people impossibly self-satisfied. Everything they do is the best way to do it, she writes Jean, now married without Asia’s permission, but still her steadfast friend. No one can tell them anything. This is particularly hard on Asia, who likes telling people things.

She busies herself by finishing the book she’d long planned about her father. She writes a second about Edwin. These focus primarily on their theatrical achievements.

But then she writes a third book, without telling Sleeper or anyone else. Her secret book about John is much more personal. She doesn’t try to publish it. She knows she can’t. It remains unseen and unread until fifty years after her death when G. P. Putnam finally brings it out. Although she decries her brother’s great crime in principle, on the page, she makes him the hero he thought he was.

She blames Lincoln for having gone to the theater that night.

With Richmond so recently fallen, the surrender so raw, the suffering so great, surely he should have been in church instead. To go out for a vulgar entertainment suggests a callous indifference Asia cannot excuse. The theater! The devil’s den. It desecrates his death.