Grace cautiously entered behind him to find Mr. Stokes standing in the parlor, staring at something. “Mr. Stokes?”

He said nothing.

She came to his side and followed his stony gaze. It took a moment to realize that what she was looking at had once been a person. Had once been Mrs. Driscoll.

Grace’s stomach roiled, but she gripped her hand into a fist to hold herself together as she added this sight into the neat little box in her mind, along with her fears of what could happen to Mrs. Weatherford in such a circumstance.

“Mr. Stokes,” Grace said.

He didn’t look at her.

“Mr. Stokes,” she said sharply.

He turned his head to her slowly, his gaze wide and distant, in a dreamlike state. A single, silent tear spilled over his lower lash line and crawled down his cheek. He blinked, as though startled to see her standing there.

“We can’t do anything for her now,” Grace said in a matter-of-fact tone she didn’t know she could possess in such circumstances. “We need to see if there are survivors we can help. I’ll go next door to Mr. Sanford’s.” She nodded to the wall to indicate the townhouse standing on the other side of Mrs. Driscoll’s and hoped the elderly man hadn’t suffered the same fate. He had stopped going to the shelter as well. There were too many who had.

They wanted a night of sleep in their own beds. They wanted normalcy.

But one couldn’t wish the world into its previous state. Not when it was rife with dangers.

“Will you go around to the townhouse beside Mr. Sanford’s?” Grace asked of her partner.

Mr. Stokes nodded and shuffled outside. She followed behind him, pausing only to ensure the mains had all been cut off, to prevent an explosion.

She did not turn to look back at Mrs. Driscoll again as she left.

The rest of the night was a blur, a forceful redirection of thoughts into that box in her mind. She focused on calling up her training, binding the bloodied limbs of survivors, helping put out meager fires with her stirrup pump, or sand if the oiled ground and odor indicated a recently dropped incendiary. It was one task after another until the sun rose and the night watch came to a blessed end.

On her way home that morning, despite Grace’s resolution, that locked box in the back of her mind began to rattle.

As if it too were a bomb whistling toward her. She threw open the door to the townhouse and raced upstairs as its shriek in her mind went silent.

And the box erupted.

The horrors she’d seen peppered her thoughts like shrapnel.