By then, the sun had shifted, and we were on the cold side of the field again. He held out his arm to me, and I took it, and he walked me back toward the road, toward my mother’s house.

“You are not at the hospital,” I said. “Why?”

“It’s too nice a day to be indoors.” And then glanced at me. “Good, you don’t believe me. I told your mother I wished to work on some notes back at the house, and when I was on the way there, I was lucky enough to see you and the little girl in the field. A happy coincidence.”

“My mother lets you come and go.”

“I’m not a servant here,” he said, sounding offended, which seemed strange to me.

“She never did with me,” I said. “I could only leave the clinic for errands. She said if I got too used to wandering off on my own, it would break my concentration. She knew it took me so long to work it up.”

“So you were a servant then. The little scullery maid, forced to become a doctor.”

“It was not so bad,” I said. “If you were a girl given to that work.”

We walked on a bit longer in silence. Then I took a breath. “Has my mother told you how she taught herself anatomy? When she was a girl my age, there was a cholera outbreak downtown. She followed the gravediggers for a day, until she found a baby’s body, asked for it, and took it to her father’s barn to dissect. She did it because they wouldn’t let her work with the cadavers.”

I am not sure why I told him this, this secret my mother kept. It was a story she did not even trust to Lenore, and only told me when my dedication waned, when she suspected I would not work hard enough, to shock me into diligence. It had worked, but I had told no one since.

Now I looked over at Emmanuel Chase. I had told him, too, to shock him, to see if it could shake that look off his face. But he was saying nothing, only looking back at me, as if what I had said was perfectly normal, as if he’d expected no less from me or from her. So I took an even deeper breath, and told him my greatest secret.

“I am not so passionate as my mother,” I said. “I could not do something like that.”

He nodded, and then he let his hand brush against mine and took it in his. We kept going like that, hand in hand, not speaking, only looking at the road laid out before us until we could see the turn for my mother’s house. Then he squeezed my hand once and tossed it away from him. I thought, in this new language we were building together, that maybe it meant he believed I was passionate after all.