Rosalie has long known this moment was coming, but now that it has arrived, it’s worse than she thought, as if June has reached down her throat and strangled her from the inside. She and June are not even close, only he’s all she has, the only sibling who doesn’t require her care. “Henry had no choice in his leaving,” she says. “They none of them had a choice.” She won’t beg for herself. “What about Edwin?” Edwin adores June.

“I’ll be nothing if I stay. Edwin has you.”

But why should this job fall to Rosalie? Maybe she, too, would rather not be nothing. “Take me with you.”

She sees how June is startled. He comes and puts his arms around her, tries to stop her seeing that he doesn’t want her, but he’s too slow and she does see. “Could you even come?” he asks. “Recollect how hard it was for me just to get you here.”

She realizes with an absolute clarity that if she doesn’t leave her mother now, she will never leave her mother. “I could,” she says. “I will.” She means it. Hie thee home to me, she thinks and marvels that she just might be the one to leave. She’s almost the same age Mother was when she ran away with Father. If Mother made it all the way to America, surely Rosalie can make it as far as Philadelphia.

Passing the graveyard on her way back to the cabin, she encounters opposition. The ghosts hiss and tangle her hair. We won’t let you, they say. We’ll tell Mother.

It does give her pause, the idea of leaving Mother at the mercy of her dead children. She puts this thought aside.

You won’t go anywhere, they call after her. Mother will stop you mother mother mother mother, they repeat so often the word becomes nonsense, babble.

Rosalie spends the rest of the day with excitement and terror and guilt and anger building in her breast like a scream. Late that night, Mother comes and beckons her from her bed, down the stairs so they can talk without waking Asia. “June is going,” Mother says in the voice of her dead children, her hand wrapped on Rosalie’s wrist so tightly it will leave fingerprints. “Stop him.”

So June has not told Mother that Rosalie is going, too. Clearly he never thought she would.

Rosalie will always believe that she would have gone if only June had said so. She herself can’t say it to her mother’s anguished eyes. And what would she have done all day in Philadelphia anyway? How would she have earned her way? It was never a feasible plan. It was no plan at all. She’ll feel the thought of it, that moment of possibility becoming impossible, as it leaves her body and drifts away. What remains is cold and hard.