Neither of us, I’d say, quite so much as Mrs. Armand, who, through the very act of failing to exist, had begun to make her presence known.

Family photographs had appeared in the home, but none depicting her. Talk of her had been even scarcer. And Mr. Armand chose not to wear the ring I had twice now witnessed him pull from a lockbox to examine before replacing it.

Stephanie’s interlude with the piano that morning had stayed with me despite all my efforts to dismiss it. Now Mr. Armand’s intermittent glances at the piano had confirmed the thing I had come to assume.

That Mrs. Armand was not absent. Not so much as she was gone.

Also, that the pain here was still fresh.

Though I did not celebrate its existence, I could admit that there were fewer poisons more potent than loss.

My curiosity quenched, I left Mr. Armand to his pains and swept toward the grand staircase, which, like this side of the house itself, could now be called “grand” only in its ruin.

Had Charlie been present, she might have heard me approach the second floor. As it was, both girls were at school.

Clearing the remainder of the steps, I moved down the hall—and passed through the open doorway of Stephanie’s room.

Until now, my sense of propriety—ingrained into me by my own mother from nearly the moment of birth—had prevented me from trespassing into Stephanie’s quarters. Now, though, reason and purpose, not to mention the increasing deficit of time, demanded I ignore my breeding in favor of doing all I could to investigate this small chink I may have located in Stephanie’s impenetrable armor.

Avoiding my cloaked and masked reflection in the mirror of Stephanie’s dresser, I searched for my in.

“Spartan” was the word that came to mind when I took in the extent of her possessions, most of which remained sealed in columns of stacked brown boxes.

There was one item, however, that caught my attention.

A simple porcelain angel, her wings tucked, knelt on Stephanie’s nightstand, her faceless countenance downcast as she harkened to the music of her silent lyre. The size of a swallow, the angel sat close to the pillow where Stephanie laid her head at night.

Its presence there intrigued me.

Stephanie had neither seen me nor sensed me in any capacity since her arrival. Even when I had dipped inside her dream, she had not perceived me.

And so, forced into the role of voyeur, I had observed her in her sleeping fantasy bestow her affections on the yellow-haired boy. The one who I had ascertained, through the eavesdropping of her conversations with her father, went by the name of Kyle Benedict.

My being invisible to Stephanie, though, did not disturb me quite so much as the presence of this angelic statue.

Because its placement in her otherwise unadorned room suggested that she reserved for the artifact some measure of reverence.

Also that she did believe.

The stoic and levelheaded Stephanie. The sensible and seasoned scholar.