No, no, no. I looked for a box of tissues—why weren’t there tissues in here? I found myself irrationally annoyed at Laura’s lack of forethought. Shouldn’t they have assumed I was going to cry all the time?

I pinched my nose shut and tipped my head back, hurrying to the bathroom and then leaning my head over the sink, where more blood fell in lazy drops and mixed with the water from the faucet. I managed to grab a wad of toilet paper and press it to my face, finding that it was the supersoft kind that left lint everywhere and made me sneeze, which was gross.

Finally, the bleeding stalled, and I went to my room to survey the damage.

It was worse than I’d thought. The pillow looked like a murder scene, and there was blood smeared on the sheets from my hands and sleeves.

For a while I stood there, feeling hopeless and lost. I couldn’t let Laura see any of this. It felt like a personal insult. It felt . . . disrespectful.

When the bleeding finally seemed to have stopped, I removed the pajama top and slipped on one of my T-shirts. Then I pulled the sheets off the bed and the case off the pillow and balled them up.

I’d been operating on pure adrenaline, but now that I was slowing down, I felt fuzzy and drained. Part of me was tempted to just spread one of my other T-shirts over the pillow and climb into bed. Deal with it in the morning.

But I couldn’t do that, not on my first night. What, then? Should I wake Laura? No, terrible idea. The mere thought of tracking down their bedroom in this sea of closed doors, then knocking loudly enough to get her attention, then dragging her out of bed to see the chaos I’d brought into her perfectly controlled home was enough to make me need to sit down and catch my breath.

I had to clean up my own mess, and I had to do it before anybody saw.

Agatha was still and silent as I crept through the nursery and tried to silently open the hall door. The old knob made a distressing series of clanks and whines, but she showed no sign of waking.

Now to find the laundry room.

I stood in the dark hall, looking around at the somber, melancholy paintings that lined the spaces between doorways. Serious women and sad farmers with droopy-eared dogs . . . No happy summer scenes, no portraits of smiling children. Copeland Hall, for all its beauty, was not a cheerful place.

First, I tried to open the doors of the other upstairs wings, but they were locked. Then I remembered the service hallway Laura had pointed out as a place I’d never need to go.