“You again, you troublesome woman.”

“Daddy, what are you doing?” Nettie said. “You promised me that you didn’t hurt Wil.”

“Natalie, I didn’t. Not that he’s of any consequence. He was nothing but a disgrace to his noble people.”

“Daddy!” Nettie said, and stood up. “Wil was wonderful. He loved me.” She stepped forward until she was beside me. “I loved him, too. I wanted to be his thrall.”

“You’re too good for the likes of him,” Matthews said to Nettie, but his eyes didn’t waver from mine. “You deserve a respectable master, like Mr. Grant here.”

I said, “Wilcox was trying to make a positive difference in this world!”

“We don’t need a ‘positive difference,’ you disgusting half-thing,” Matthews sneered, “with your graphs and charts, your timelines and your American ideas about equality and progress! You would have destroyed our whole world.”

“Then you should have come for me, not Wil.”

“That I would have, but I couldn’t very well kill Lord Ducharme’s favorite whore, could I?” Matthews set his feet and adjusted his grip on the knife. “But now that that’s done with, he won’t care if you have an accident, or disappear.”

Time slowed in the moment that Matthews lunged for me. I waited so that I could move away from the knife and grab his wrist.

But Nettie jumped in front of me, and the sharp blade slid into her flesh.

We were silent as we took in the horror of what had happened. Matthews’s face froze. AG stood and then stumbled back to the couch.

Nettie looked down at the knife in her chest and the blood leaking out over the handle, and then at her father.

I held my hand in front of Matthews and said, “Don’t pull it out—you’ll cause more bleeding. We’ll call nine-one-one!”

Nettie’s knees buckled. I caught her before she fell, and I remembered catching Ford as he fell. Her eyes were fixed on her father’s and she said, “I love you, Daddy.”

He screamed “Nettie!” and grabbed her hand.

Wilcox came running into the house then and saw the dying girl. “Nettie!”

He reached for her and I handed her into his thin arms. “Nettie,” he said. “I love you.”

She smiled as she looked at him and then I saw the light fade in her eyes, as it had faded in Ford’s, in Daisy’s, and in Average Joe’s. I knew she was dead before I checked for a pulse, but I was saying, “No, Nettie, no!”

Matthews wailed, “My beautiful girl! My beautiful baby!” He fell to his knees and began keening, a sound that tore through me, the sound of a father’s anguish, while AG sat and stared in shock.

I said, “It’s not her time,” and then I ran outside, down the street to the truck. I flung open the passenger door and grabbed the woven shroud. I was already back in the house when Wil, still weak, staggered with the girl’s body.