My mother hisses and pulls back her hand from the floor. Don and Liz both hover over her worriedly, but she waves them away. “All these beautiful mirrors,” she laments, wiping blood on her fraying bathrobe.

“Someone must have broken in,” suggests Don.

“Just to break the mirrors?” Elizabeth scoffs.

“Maybe it was a ghost,” I say.

Elizabeth glowers at me. Don frowns, as if he is not sure whether my suggestion is sincere or not.

The rage is dying away; I want to call it back, but it’s no use. We can sustain such righteous anger for only so long. “Maybe it wasn’t Don,” Elizabeth concedes.

I want to slap her.

“Thank you,” he says, without any real gratitude. “I don’t like being falsely accused.”

“But maybe it was,” she adds pointedly. “Either way, it doesn’t matter right now. We just need to get this cleaned up. We can’t have broken glass all over the house.”

Not being fully absolved puts a pall on Donovan’s face, but he says nothing more. Silent with fury, he stalks away, eventually returning with a dustpan. Elizabeth stares at my mother until she gets to her feet, allowing Don to take over the cleaning, which he does, exuding such an air of frustration and brooding that we can all feel it from several feet away.

My mood sours. I haven’t gotten rid of the beast at all. I’ve only poked him with a stick.

17

It is day two of our incarceration, and Donovan is in the nursery.

Elizabeth has taken to the drawing room, separating herself from her husband by as many floors and walls as she can. My mother tut-tuts over her, propping pillows behind her back and rubbing her feet with lavender. When she gets up, she puts a hand on Elizabeth’s belly and murmurs, “We’ll see you soon.” I see the worry hiding in her eyes, even if Elizabeth doesn’t.

Snow whirls up around the windows, frosts the edges of the panes, and the wind rattles them, pounding to be let in. I’ve pulled some of the shutters, telling the wind to stay out, stay out there where you belong, we don’t want you in here, but the cold gets in all the same, from the cracks under the doors and invisible crevices that allow the outside world to leak inside, little by little. Where is it coming in? Don already fixed the hole in the laundry room window. We should be sealed shut, locked away from the cold.

To avoid going stir-crazy, I have gone all over the house to covertly admire my handiwork, pleased with all the cracked mirrors and their fractured reflections, and the ones that have shattered right out of their frames. It calms me to see them broken. Now nothing, truly, can get in.

From upstairs, the house echoes with the sounds of banging, hammering, building. The pieces of the crib Elizabeth and I built have been broken down and scattered across the floor as Donovan reassembles it to his liking, vigorously shaking the slats to be sure they are sturdy enough to withstand his assault.