“I—I have to—” She made a helpless gesture at the avid faces, turned, and lurched out of the room, half-running for the stairs.

She was pulling at her bodice as she reached the landing, and all but ripped it off as she stumbled into the bedroom and pushed the door closed behind her.

She had to get out of the stays, she couldn’t breathe … She tore the straps off her shoulders and squirmed out of the half-fastened corset, gasping for air. Threw off her skirt and petticoat and leaned against the wall, heart still galloping. Air.

Sweating and trembling, she flung open the door and started up the stairs to the open air of the unfinished attic.

ROGER SAW BRIANNA go white, then turn and stumble out of the kitchen, knocking into the propped-open door so it swung heavily shut behind her.

He made his way through the crowd as fast as he could, but she was gone when he pushed out into the hall. Maybe she’d just needed air—God knew, he did; the night-chilled breeze rushing in from the yard was a huge relief.

“Bree!” he called from the doorstep, but there was no answer—only the shuffle and murmur of visitors making their way up the slope by the flickering of a pine torch.

The surgery, then—she must have gone to look at the children …

He found her, finally, in the house. High up in the open air, clinging to one of the uprights of the timbers framing the unfinished attic, a white shadow against the night sky.

She must have heard him, though he tried to tread lightly; only a single layer of boards served (for the moment) as both the ceiling of the second floor and the floor of the attic. She didn’t move, though, save for the flow of her hair and her shift, both rippling in the unsettled air. There was a late thunderstorm in the neighborhood; he could see a mass of steely cloud boiling up behind the distant mountain, shot with constant vivid cracks of lightning. The smell of ozone was strong on the wind.

“You look like the figurehead of a ship,” he said, coming close behind her. He put his arms gently round her, covering her from the chill. “Ye feel like one, too—you’re so cold, ye’re hard as wood.”

She made a sound that he took as an indication that she was glad to see him and acknowledged his feeble joke but either was too cold to talk or didn’t know what to say.

“Nobody knows what to say when something like this happens,” he said, and his lips brushed a cold white ear.

“You do. You did.”