He was in my hand, his eyes were closed, he nodded his head back into the pillow, I thought that we still had this, at least, despite everything else, and I felt a little stab of pride.

But how do you list that triumph in a letter to your mother?

We rode on his father’s horse, across a wide, flat expanse of no-man’s-land that was full of puddles of water as large as very shallow lakes, that women and children and men walked and ran across and trod across on donkeys, going back and forth from their homes in the mountains to town.

I could feel the horse breathe beneath me. Every step up the mountain, he took in larger gulps of air. I could feel the ends of his lungs swell. The horse wheezed louder the higher we went. I felt my ears pop as we ascended.

A wife is like a horse. Laboring uphill with the weight of two people’s love on her back. My skirts were beginning to get damp with sweat. I thought of Madeline Grady, who had looked at me and said with confidence, “Grady reads for both of us.” Where did that surety come from? I should have watched her better, I thought.

It was one thing to fail as a student. I had told myself I simply did not have the aptitude to be a doctor. That I did not possess that piece of flint that existed in my mother’s soul, which was struck and made light when she had a patient before her. My anatomy was different. I was not built to alleviate the suffering of others.

But I was surely built to be a wife. Wasn’t every woman? Even Louisa and Experience were built for love. And I felt it for Emmanuel, sometimes so strongly it made me dizzy. I did not realize, though, that I could at the same time be so lonely.

I pressed my forehead into my husband’s back. “I wish the Graces were here.”

“Why? So they could make you laugh?”

“They would at least sing us love songs to cheer us, yes.”

“They do not sing love songs,” he said.

“But they do,” I said. “Every song the Graces sang was a love song.”

“No,” he said.

“They are. Love is freedom.”

His ribs shuddered beneath my arms. He was laughing. “You don’t know anything,” he said.

We got off the horse for the last bit. “Wouldn’t it be kinder to tie him to a tree and come back for him?” I said.

Emmanuel looked ahead, farther up the mountain, then back at me. “If you wish.”

We left the horse by a bush. I could hear him, even as we walked, behind me, eating leaves.