“Fetch your book, Nell.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Come along, my girl. Read us one of your new stories.”

I flushed. “I have no new stories, Mother. Only my diary.”

Mother looked at me long and hard. “I do not believe that is possible.”

I looked down at my hands and said very slowly, “It is so.”

There was a silence in the room, long enough for my cheeks to stop their burning. I took up the carpet once more onto my lap and began to pick again at the edging with the darning needle. I could not bear to look at Susannah. And then, for an instant—before I understood what it was she had said—it appeared Mother had returned to us in her old, sensible voice.

“How many drops do you have me taking now?”

I looked up. Susannah was a statue beside me.

“How many is it?” Mother’s voice was soft and reasonable. We kept silent. In truth, I did not know. Susannah often adds a bit.

“There is a limit, girls.” Mother sat forward and spoke to us both. “And I may pass it, ’gain and again”—she giggled—“without any harm, as you can see!” She clapped her hands in the air, then rose to her feet and approached us with her ghastly, wasted face. Mother leaned down between the two of us, frightened in our chairs.

“But I must know of it,” she whispered. “I must know how high the bar is set before I leap across.”

And then she laughed.

4 December

Mother—

12 December

He is four days gone and still no letter. Stop it! Stop! Poor little brain: You would remember the day one way, while Heart stands fast in her own opinion. He loves you—well, so there it is. But you are a fool, Nell Grange, if you think Ludlow Thomas is made of greatness. He is not. He is all shine and curled sentences, proffered to you on silver plates of thought—but he is rich, so his heart is gilded; he is handsome, so he has felt no slight; and he is gifted with a tongue and a brain such as I have never seen, and yet must come from the south, from the city. Surely he is not alone in his ideas; surely he has merely read them and memorized them.

He cannot feel as I do.

Well, it is nought. Nought. The house quiets at last. We have finally settled Mother down to her rest.

14 December

Have heard nought from him. Mother grows increasingly distracted.

17 December

He has written. He says I become a place. I am a place, yes. For him, I am the wild woods calling. I am calling him.

18 December

Cousin Hayden came downstairs and found us in the front room, listless, the mending basket unturned between us. The poor man, for so he is, could not look at either one of us, just resolutely studied the mantel above our seated heads.