In March, when I announced what I’d decided at the dinner table, my aunt did what she could to calm my parents. My mother said what she’d said for years, whenever Marion or I wanted to do something: “Who’s going to help me with the little girls?”

“I’m not a little girl anymore,” Elaine pointed out, reasonably. “I can take care of myself. I do take care of myself.”

“Well,” my mother said, waving one hand vaguely in the direction of the twins. “But them.”

As Alice and Agnes looked at each other, exchanging one of their secret messages and then pretending interest in the carrots, my father pointed out that my long convalescence had already been hard on my mother.

“I know,” I said. “If I could have done anything differently . . .”

“But you’ve been an excellent patient,” Aunt Henrietta said calmly. Not a word about how much time she herself had spent caring for my sisters.

“Still,” my father said.

It was cold that day, the wind leaking through the windows and the stove useless beyond the dining room. Aunt Henrietta pulled her skirt more closely around her legs and pointed out that I’d be done with school in just a few months. The best way for me to heal completely was to have some absorbing occupation.

“So she can break the rest of her bones?” my mother said. “So we can spend another half a year looking after her?”

“Hester,” my father said sharply. From the expressions passing over the faces of my sisters during this exchange, a wise person might have guessed that only one of us would ever marry.

I TOOK ADVANTAGE of everyone. Where I should have been grateful for all the help I’d already been given, all the hours devoted to me—I took more, I took everything I could. I didn’t have the money to enroll in the flying school, but when Adrien volunteered to teach me, I greedily accepted. What had Amundsen felt? I asked myself. Maybe this clarity, which had brought him so far. Although Adrien’s machine wasn’t ready yet, he had access to several because of his work. We started late in April, when the strangers streaming in for the new session made us inconspicuous.