Emmanuel Chase stayed the night, since he did not wish to travel back to the clinic so late. I lay in my room, feeling the heat creep back up my bones, imagining that I heard him crawling up the stairs to scratch at my door and beg for … what, I was not sure. I knew what happened in the marriage bed. I had known since a young age—Mama had not been shy about that. I thought of what would happen the next night and kicked the sheets off—they suddenly felt too heavy.

In the last week, our time together in the parlor had become something else. It was no longer a telling of what would happen once we got to that country I still could not quite imagine. Our time had become a kind of war between ourselves—or rather, a war of both of us against desire. I did not think a man could make the sounds that Emmanuel Chase made, as he reached first to grab my shoulders, then my arms, then my forearms, then my hands, where they rested in my lap—too daring, that. Then back to my shoulders and then my neck, which he pulled close to his, forcing me to bend my head toward his, as he desperately moved his mouth. I would watch him do all this and realize, with amazement, that I was doing the same to him, holding with the same urgency to his neck, mirroring the movement of his lips with my own.

And then we would hear a step above us, or Lenore or Mama drop a scalpel, or the sound of a canister rolling across the floor, and we would separate—those last few days, I’d heard him gasp as we did so—and pull apart, and sit in the velvet again, to quiet our breathing.

So I lay awake and waited to hear his fingernails draw across my door. But all night long, there was nothing.

At dawn, I rose. I could not stand lying there anymore. I crept down to the parlor and knelt on the floor, running my thumb up and down the seams of the wedding gown. Madame Elizabeth had stitched them with such care I wasn’t even sure where they were. I discovered one stray tuft of a thread, and I almost pulled it loose.

That’s how Madame Elizabeth found me when she came down an hour later. “You waste time in fancies,” she said. “You only have so many hours in your wedding day.” And she had helped me stand, directed me to the bowl of water she’d set out for my bath.

When I put on the final dress, the armpits and the neck immediately darkened, sweat leaking into tight cotton.

I was standing in the parlor, my arms above my head, as Madame Elizabeth dabbed underneath them with bicarbonate of soda, oohing and aahing about her progress, when Lenore rushed in.