He learns that there is to be no escape. One March, an illness keeps Edwin home. Already he’s become an interloper in his own family, awkward with them and they awkward in return. Johnny is mostly absent at this time, and so is Joe, both at school at the Bel Air Academy. Joe boards there. Johnny rides back and forth daily, leaving early and arriving home again late. It’s hoped that this tutelage will keep him from getting into the kind of scrape no one gets out of. Johnny never intends to worry his mother, but he can’t seem to help himself.

Mother, Rosalie, and Asia remain at home. Edwin sees how pretty Asia is, how tired Mother looks, how strange Rose has been allowed to become. He sees them all with outsider eyes.

Being ill fixes everything by giving everyone a role to play, and Edwin luxuriates in his sisters fussing about him, in clean sheets, damp cloths, hushed voices. Asia runs up and down the stairs with cups of tea made from mint she picked herself. Rosalie reads Jane Eyre aloud, sunlight streaming through the windows, casting a silhouette of tree branches onto the scarred wood floor. One passage hits Rosalie and Edwin very differently:

I remembered that the real world was wide, and that a varied field of hopes and fears, of sensations and excitements, awaited those who had courage to go forth into its expanse, to seek real knowledge of life amidst its perils.

The sun is gone and Rosalie fallen quiet. Edwin realizes that he slept through the last bit and he opens his mouth to tell Rosalie she needs to read that again, but Rosalie speaks first. In her usual whispering voice, she says, “I begin to wonder if I’ll ever marry.”

Edwin closes his mouth. Surely this issue has been settled for quite some time, ever since the lion tamer, if not before. Rosalie is twenty-six years old (or maybe twenty-seven, Edwin has lost track). Is it really possible she doesn’t know she’ll never marry? She’s told the Cole sisters the story of Jacob Driesbach and her forbidden love, and they were so moved that they each knitted a muffler for Rosalie to give him when they are finally together, one blue, one red. Rosalie keeps these in a trunk, wrapped in linen and scented with dried rosemary. They’re a secret from Mother and Father, but no one keeps a secret from Asia.

Edwin used to feel that Mother was too indulgent with Rosalie, that she should have been forced to stand up straight, forced from the house and out into the world. His time with Father has made him reassess. Maybe Mother is the one keeping Rosalie at home. Maybe, with nothing but love in her heart, his darling mother has eaten Rosalie alive. This seems to be something parents sometimes do.