“My father doesn’t belong to me. He’d say it was the other way around. You’d be much better off meeting my mother. She’s a decent human being, even if she’s a prisoner of her class.”

“We’re all prisoners of something, aren’t we?”

“Is that so, Miss Macallister? And what are you a prisoner of?”

“Nothing!”

“That sister of yours, maybe?”

Iris was snug inside Sasha’s arms. He wore a shirt of crumpled white linen that smelled of cigarettes and perspiration, warm human smells, and his hair was straight and loose and flopped over his forehead. His eyes were the color of summer.

She said, “My father killed himself in 1929, after the crash. He’d lost all our money, and his clients’ money, and most of my grandparents’ money. We were broke after that, but pretending not to be broke. Mama didn’t take it well. She always liked to spend money. Closets full of clothes. She would take all these sleeping pills, things her doctor prescribed her. If it wasn’t for Aunt Vivian marrying Charles Schuyler, we couldn’t have gone to college. There was just no money, none at all. No father and no mother, really. So I guess I’m a prisoner of that.”

Sasha frowned at her.

To break the silence, Iris said, “That’s why Ruth and I—we’re so different, but we share this thing. We’re both prisoners of it. It holds us together, always. Does that make sense?”

Sasha swooped her up in his arms and carried her into the bedroom. The window faced south and the room was very hot, but Iris didn’t notice the heat until much later, when they lay sweating on top of the sheets and she couldn’t seem to get her breath back. She rolled off the mattress, opened the window, and returned to the bed to tuck herself back under his arm. He’d lit a languid cigarette in the meantime. She tugged at the fine gold hairs on his chest and asked what he was a prisoner of.

“Isn’t it obvious?” he said. “You.”

IRIS SAID SHE COULDN’T possibly cook anything inside that primitive kitchen, so Sasha headed into town to fetch supplies. His skin was cold and damp after an improvised bath from a bucket of water pumped from the kitchen. They agreed to bathe in the stream at the corner of the garden from then on.