“I can’t say without knowing a specific poem.”

“Let me think.” He squinted at the ceiling. I stared at his lips, remembering how they felt when we kissed. “I’ve got it. ‘Stand and face me, my love, and scatter the grace in your eyes.’ That is a fragment by Sappho.”

I dropped my gaze to the book. Right then, I knew my eyes were scattering grace everywhere. “You’re right. I don’t understand that, but I do love it. You ought to write poetry.”

“Nay, Comet. You’re the one with the mind full of poems and dreams.”

“I used to be.”

“You are.”

“With you.”

“Because when I am with you, you are with you.”

That was true as the sun was bright. He’d helped me become Miss Coates once; now he allowed me to escape her. With him, I felt my tongue loosen. Become “vulgar” again, as it once was. I began to laugh again. Truly laugh, with shaking shoulders and tears and everything. There was no point in pretending round him, nor in lying, so I didn’t bother with either.

But that didn’t mean I told him everything.

One week spilled into two. As Asa regained his strength, we left his room for the parlor. The library. The dining room. Taking our world with us wherever we went and never once bringing along his cane. When he leaned on anything, I made sure it was on me.

I left his side only once, to see Townsend briefly so we could repeat our grumblings about how our dispatches took too long to reach General Washington in New Jersey.

All I wanted to do was stay with Asa. We created our own little seventh fathom when we were alone.

Together, there was no rising. No sinking.

We just…floated.

A month after we moved into the judge’s home, we returned to the Holdridge house and Asa began to fit out Endurance to leave New York. I spent the next week adrift, unable to concentrate on the simplest tasks.

The day before his departure, we piled into carriages and headed to the Winterses’ country house. Charlotte’s favorite spaniel had whelped a litter of puppies, and Charlotte was hosting a naming party. The winter had made everyone far too miserable, she’d decided. Our attendance was cordially demanded.

As we trundled along Bowery Road, the women in one carriage and the men in another, barren fields spread in every direction. Every tree, fence, and shrub had been sacrificed to our hearths over the past months. Deer that had frozen to death lay by the roadside, their thawing carcasses pecked at by crows. Making matters even more dismal, an insect plague had caused the spring growth to look sickly and wilting.

“This year’s food rations will be worse than ever,” Mrs. Winters said, staring out the window.

“Worse? How is that possible?” Charlotte drew the curtain closed with a snap, blotting out the landscape. “Sometimes I wish the rebels would win so we’d be done with this misery.”