“Stage a fall down the steps of your house,” she said, “in the early morning, before witnesses. Be sure the injury is well wrapped before you do; you’d not want blood to betray you, but you can feign a wrenched ankle then and none can disprove it.”

It was good, practical advice, and I nodded to her. I no longer trusted my voice; it wanted to soften, to warm, to say things I could not allow. It came to me with a horrible sense of sorrow that she would know these things from all her sad experience of concealing and explaining away her own injuries, suffered at the hands of her brother.

I let the friar shut the door, and sank down on the confessional seat with a feverish feeling of . . . what? Loss? I did not want to examine the feeling so closely; it felt too big, like a storm caged in the bone of my chest. She’d been alarmed for me. Worried. She’d touched me so gently, and the shape of her fingers burned and tingled still.

And tonight, she was leaving to fade away into a convent, never to be seen again. She’d have her books, her study. I should be happy that she was safe from her family’s ambition, from her brother’s fury.

But I could not be happy.

I waited in the cold, lonely confessional with my ears pricked for any words from her, any sounds; even the whisper of her skirts against the floor tantalized my senses. The smell of roses and oranges lingered on me, though I could not say why it clung so closely; she’d scarcely touched me at all (though it burned still on my skin). I ought to have been ordering my thoughts around salvation, around repentance, but all I truly repented was that I would never see her again. I gently bounced my head upon the hard wood behind me, trying to disrupt the thought. The chair was uncomfortable, the space narrow and close, and as the imaginary, intoxicating smell rising from Rosaline’s skin faded, the reality of stale incense and sweat descended around me. I heard Friar Lawrence whispering to her, his voice low and urgent, and her own replies carried some hints of reluctance. I thought she might wish to say something to me, some sort of good-bye . . . but perhaps it was only fear of change, of trusting to her fate.

I put my hand flat against the door, a silent valediction, a good-bye, a wish . . . and I waited, in silence, as I heard the groan of the chapel’s outer door open.

I slowly lowered my hand to my lap. I suppose it would have been appropriate to spend the time in prayer, but all I could think was that God had just taken away my only light in a dark, comfortless future—however distant and dim it might have been, still, it had been hope.