“Girls are soft, sensitive creatures, prone to close friendships,” the schoolteacher said, clasping her hands around Mrs. Hart’s as if gifting her some natural truth. “Soon enough, you’ll remember these days fondly. A girl like Emma is destined to become a handsome woman.”

The teacher’s prophecy came true with a frightening quickness. A year later, Emma walked arm in arm with Ada down the main street of Tempest, holding her sharp chin high but casting her eyes down whenever a young man looked at her. They checked to see if her cheeks had gone that telling rhubarb pink.

They hadn’t.

“It’s one thing to be humble and chaste, but you can’t look away from every one of them,” Ada said one night as she stabbed a pin through Emma’s hair. It did nothing to restrain the great pool of it.

“You don’t smile at any young men,” Emma challenged.

Ada’s frown thickened to a paste. “I’m needed at home.” Ada’s mother had died two springs ago of a fever that also took her brothers. “I don’t have to worry about marriage. I won’t have time for it.”

The next day at school, Emma traced the word spinster on her paper over and over, though it wasn’t one of the spelling terms.

That night, the schoolteacher paid the Harts a visit. Over dinner, when Emma had gone to the kitchen to fetch a plate of rolls, she leaned toward Mrs. Hart and said, “You might have cause to worry.”

Less than a month later, Robert Mason, a young man from town who Emma barely knew, arrived at the Hart house for dinner. After stew and potatoes and pie, Emma found herself in the parlor with this stranger and his sickly pale face as he lowered himself to one knee. Her parents hovered in the background, donning masks of happiness so Emma would know how to look.

Before they took the engagement photograph, Ada spent an hour on Emma’s hair and fussed over the mother-of-pearl buttons on her collar. She stood beside the photographer and blinked a little too often, blaming it on the great flash of the camera, rising in a puff of smoke.

Robert kissed Emma on the cheek. She shuddered. Girls in the schoolyard said that shuddering when a boy touched you meant that you were destined to be his wife. It meant Emma would love him soon.

Later, in Emma’s childhood bed, she cried with her head in Ada’s lap, her body curled tighter than a young fern. Ada stroked her hair and told her in a low voice that everything would be fine, and Ada would help Emma raise her babies.