Henrietta was eager to ask Izzy about all he’d seen and done and felt. Instead, she felt herself pushed first quietly and then forcibly aside. In August, during a string of days so hot that the leaves on the trees turned upside down and the bees clustered around the spring, Mr. Deverell sent her away when Aurie went into labor. A few days later she returned, sure the family would need her help with the baby, whose name was Annette, and with Izzy, who telegraphed that he was on his way back. But three days after Mr. Deverell lifted his brother from the wagon (she saw only the side of Izzy’s dirty face and matted hair), two days after she heard Izzy shouting from his bedroom, Mr. Deverell met her at the kitchen door and announced that they didn’t need her anymore. Aurie, sitting at the table with Annette at her breast, refused to meet her eyes. Mr. Deverell paid her through the end of that week, and that was that. The family closed in on itself so completely that by the time she started school, it was as if she’d never worked for them. Bernard, whom she’d known almost as intimately as she knew her sister, went back to being someone else’s boy.

Had she done something wrong? No one ever told her, and Izzy, who began showing up around town before Thanksgiving, was always in the company of other soldiers and offered no more than a pleasant nod when she said hello. She wasn’t sure he recognized her as his brother’s scribe until once, daringly, she tried greeting him with a bright “Hello to you!” He turned from his companion—Darius, perhaps; a big hat, pulled low, hid most of his face—and said only, “Henrietta. Yes, I know.”

And then Aurie had another child, and then another. Mr. Deverell hired a man to help in the pottery but Aurie didn’t hire anyone, and when Henrietta passed her on the street or saw her, surrounded by her brood, sitting on a bench near the bandstand, they talked like friendly neighbors: not like two people who had once, no matter how briefly, shared household secrets. For a while Henrietta spent too much time trying to piece together the family’s new life, weaving bits of gossip she heard in town around glimpses of Izzy and the men who returned after the regiment mustered out, but eventually she forced herself to stop and she could almost feel her curiosity turning, like a stream blocked by a fallen tree, into other channels.