Without asking if he wanted company, she sat down in the wicker chair by the sofa and smiled at him. She was barefoot, wearing her brown dress with the white polka dots, over it her old cardigan. But she’d put lipstick on, and he could smell her perfume, a stronger version of the grassy scent he’d made out earlier, in the fabric of her dress. “Your hair’s sticking straight up,” she said, and Henry felt for it and tried to press it down. She laughed. “Don’t bother, it’s no use.”

It was dawning on him that she was there. That she had come to see him. “How’s your day been?” he asked.

The question seemed to amuse her. “Dull,” she said. She asked how Effie was feeling, and he told her, in too much detail, about the course of her fever, what she’d been able to eat—and then he cut himself short, and concluded that she would be fine. “That’s good to hear,” Alma said.

“Are you out wandering?”

“I was heading over to that house, actually,” she said. “The big one we visited the other night?”

“The Bishops’ house,” he said. The image of her in her ruby-red flapper’s wig came vividly to mind.

“I need to pick out a dress. For tomorrow. Plus, there’s so much more to explore. Do you want to come?”

For a moment he didn’t understand that she’d asked him a question. And when he did, it startled him. “With you? Right now?”

“No, next week,” she said. “Yes, right now. You could help me find a dress.”

He looked toward the front door, which she’d left open. “What are Max and Clara doing?”

“Who cares?”

He was alert now. He didn’t know what to say.

“It’s all right if you don’t want to,” she said. She drew the cardigan tightly around herself and looked at her long toes, which, when she stretched her legs out, could just grip the glass top of the coffee table.

“No—I want to,” he said.

“Okay, good,” she said.

“But,” he said, and gestured toward the ceiling.

“She needs her sleep,” she said. “The best thing you can do for her? Leave her alone. You might as well come out.”

She smiled mischievously at him, and he returned it. He was shivering. The room, with the door and all the windows still open, was chilly. What would happen if he went with her? She would model dresses for him in one of the upstairs rooms of the big Victorian house, in the middle of a labyrinth, where no one could see them or hear them. She would ask him to zip her up, and his knuckles would brush the smooth skin between her shoulder blades. But he couldn’t do it. If Effie awoke, and found him gone … “I can’t,” he said. “I’d feel guilty leaving her.”