But in Rosalie’s version, he’s changing his mind. After that pause, she makes him turn, thread his way back through the dress circle and out into the alley where his horse is waiting. For more than a year, Rosalie tells herself this bedtime story. She can only sleep if she believes as hard as she can that he’s on his way home. That he loved them enough to change his mind.

That pause is the last place she can find her brother. All she has to do now is begin again from there, begin the rest of her life at that pause, when John is still John, Rosalie still Rosalie, and the world has better things to do than notice either one.

x

In 1883, Rosalie will see Major Rathbone’s name again in the newspaper. He had been serving the Arthur presidency in Germany when he suddenly attacked his wife, Clara. She dies protecting the children from their father. He then stabs himself five times in the chest.

He will spend the remainder of his life in an asylum for the criminally insane. He was never the same, friends will say, after the assassination. One more entry in John’s account.

xi

Mother won’t admit it, but she can’t forgive Edwin for throwing John from his house. She believes that this was the moment, the turn. If John had only been supported by his family, loved and welcomed, how differently everything might have gone. After Asia leaves for England, Mother takes Rosalie to live with Joe, who is between wives and finishing his medical degree. Joe has a house in New York City and also a cottage in Long Branch, New Jersey. The women live sometimes in one and sometimes in the other until Mother’s death in 1885.

Joe remains as he’s always been, argumentative and aggrieved. One day in New Jersey, while Rosalie is answering a knock, a brick is thrown at her head, missing her by inches and denting the doorframe. At the same time, handfuls of smaller stones are thrown by unseen assailants against the windows of the house, spattering against the glass like hail. She staggers, she scuttles inside as fast as she’s able, her back by now so continuously painful that only drink makes life bearable. She calls the servants, locks the doors, and hides like Randall in the basement until Joe’s return. She believes the vengeance of the nation has come for her at last.

But Joe says no. This was all aimed at him and nothing to do with Lincoln. Joe’s in the middle of suing his neighbors. He’s building a twenty-foot fence around his property over the outraged objections of all who live near him. He’s never been popular and he’s not about to start now. It will take more than a brick thrown at his sister to stop him!