Agnes allows the tears to drain unchecked down her cheeks. Her eyes are glassy and unfocused. She has arrived at an emotional stasis where the tears arrive with no sound, no hitched breath. They exist like two small indifferent rivers gouging valleys down her face.

“No,” she says at last. “You don’t make me anything.”

I pass the now empty, night-blanketed library and its silent sleeping books and feel myself like a ghost wandering the halls of this ancient manor. Are they the ghosts, truly, or am I?

Come morning, Elizabeth makes a proposal over coffee. Mother brewed only decaf, for her, and I imagine I will be made to feel interminably tired for a month to come, half dozing even in my waking hours. My notebook sits before me, filled with scrawlings of our family history—both what I have uncovered from old records and what I have seen here myself. Who is the boy? I am determined to identify him, add him to my collection of history.

Hands wrapped around the warm mug that steams into her face, Elizabeth says, “I need to get everything figured out for the birth, now that things have changed. Mom, will you come with me for my ultrasound appointment?” She punctuates the last sentence with a sip.

Mother looks at her with surprise. “Oh honey, I’m not sure you need me to go. Why don’t I just take care of things around here?”

I don’t know why Elizabeth deliberately prods us in our tender spots. It seems callous to continue poking a wound just because you can see it. She must have known what Mother’s response would be.

She purses her lips and places her mug on the table with barely contained resentment. “I can’t do this alone.” Then she sits very still.

“Why don’t you take Sam?”

Elizabeth laughs rudely. “You won’t even be there for the birth, will you?”

“Well,” says Agnes. “Have you considered home birth?”

“No doctors? No nurses? No epidural? No thanks. Besides”—she waves her hand dismissively—“that sounds so archaic.”

“You know we’re here for you, Lizzie.”

“Are you?” she snaps, untethering her anger from wherever it was fastened.

Elizabeth stands up so suddenly that her chair slides across the tile with a screech, and I am amazed that someone so pregnant can move so fast. “You won’t die if you set foot outside this house.” She shakes her head in disgust. “You’ve never come to visit me. Not once. You didn’t even come to my baby shower. How do I explain that to people? My own mother. I started telling my friends you were dead. Did you know that?”

“Keep your voice down, please,” Mother says tersely. “Is this a conversation you want to remember?”

Elizabeth tilts her head back and screams incoherently, just to spite her. Then she fixes Mother with a cold stare. “I don’t care.”

“That’s enough. Go to your room.”

“I’m thirty years old!” The shriek is so high-pitched it becomes nearly unintelligible. She clutches at the air as if looking for something to grab on to. Her hair dances frantically on her shaking head and her eyes glint madly. At last she gives a sound like an angry bull and storms from the room, her maternity shirt billowing around her like a curtain troubled by furious wind.