Em went back to her bedroom, or to visit the snowshoer, before we could fall asleep together. We knew Matthew would come looking for me when he woke up and didn’t find me in bed with his mom. Matthew was used to finding me in one of the guest bedrooms in the morning. He thought I was playing a game with him—hiding in another bedroom. “Found you!” Matthew would say with such delight, you’d think it was the first time he’d discovered me, every time. It was the best time of my days and nights, when Matthew climbed into bed with me. I could imagine he was my one and only—no strings attached. I am my mother’s son, as Nora and Molly always said. For Matthew and me, there were strings attached. The morning after the Madeline reading, when Matthew found his sleeping father, I was still seeing Em’s scar.

The morning after the Madeline reading, Matthew couldn’t be separated from those little girls in Paris; he carried the nuns and their charges with him everywhere he went. Em was Matthew’s new favorite reader, but she was aware that Grace hated listening to her read. Grace’s body became tense; her physical movement resembled the wariness of someone anticipating a muscle spasm with every step. Over the weekend, although we must have listened to Em’s rendition of Madeline half a dozen times, Em kept suggesting other readers to Matthew.

“It makes Molly sad not to read to you—Molly loves Madeline, you know,” Em would say to Matthew.

Even my mom was called upon to read. Little Ray wasn’t much of a reader; I couldn’t remember her reading to me. Yet my mother was the first reader who paused before saying the end of certain lines. She let Matthew speak the words that rhymed. Matthew had memorized the rhymes—the vines that rhymed with lines, the scar that rhymed with far. And my mom made sure to pause, to let Matthew say Miss Vell’s “Now what’s rrr-rong?”—the way Em always said it, not the nighttime nun’s actual words.

For the rest of the weekend, all the Madeline readers paused before reading the part about Madeline’s being littler than the other little girls—inviting Matthew to whisper in their ears.

This pause, and the whispering that Grace could still hear, made her so tense that she trembled in an unspoken rage. “I’m the littlest one!” Matthew would whisper in his readers’ ears; then the reading would proceed. Even at four, Matthew knew better than to ask his mom to read Madeline; Em didn’t suggest Grace as a reader.