Myrra wrote with slow care, frequently checking her spelling in one of Marcus’s dictionaries. It was maddening, how long it took. And there was no backspace. Just an ugly scratch to black out the word if she got it wrong. Jake would want her simple, but just simple enough. Misspelled words and bad handwriting would send the wrong message.

Dear Jake. Start slow and familiar, not too mushy. Apologize for not writing sooner. Myrra decided to throw in as many sorrys as she could, to make him feel a little loftier. Tell him you miss him. Ask to see him. Don’t say why. Don’t say I love you, yet.

You have to tease these things out. Add spice to the sauce a little at a time, let it simmer. Patience. Do this right, and where might you be in a year? The first thing Myrra pictured was diamond earrings, long and dangling like exquisite icicles. Imogene had a pair like that. She’d worn them with her blue silk gown at the last state dinner. Myrra pictured a vast bed as wide as it was long with soft, mussed sheets. She pictured gold around her finger.

That was Imogene’s world she was seeing. Jake was a grocer’s son. Myrra would get a gold ring, but not the diamonds. At least not right away.

In fifty years, Myrra would be free. The work contract her great-grandmother had signed would finally be fulfilled, and she was meant to be satisfied with that. Hard to imagine how it would feel, really, to be free. In fact, most other contract workers in her generation considered themselves lucky; her mother and her mother’s mother had not lived with that luxury. It was a frequent topic of conversation among her compatriots; everyone had different plans for what they’d do with their futures once their contracts ended. Most were unimaginative. Women she’d worked with in the laundry talked about opening their own wash-and-fold service shops. Hahn, a boy she ran into now and then at the grocery store, was endlessly talking about the bar he’d open someday. He had it planned down to the prices of the drinks and the music on the stereo. Some who were employed as maids or handymen were planning on keeping the same positions with their host families; all they were looking forward to was a future where they got paid and had proper drinking money.