“The next bill to Hurstwell is due in just a fortnight, but that is one account your father managed to keep current all these years. I suppose you could let it lapse for a time if you need to attend the more pressing notes . . .”

I rested my forehead on my fingertips, blowing out a breath. “I’m sorry, but how is this woman connected to us?”

“Your father didn’t share those details with me, but I do have this.” He took an unfinished yet striking ink sketch from his folder and slid it across the desk.

One look and I sucked in my breath. It was her. That ethereal face, the gently angled jawline, the rich hair piled atop her head . . . all my spinning thoughts stood still. I sat straighter. A choking sense of dread came over me. Prickles and chills that climbed my skin, right into my hairline. Richard was waiting for me, notes had to be paid, but all of it melted away as I stared at the face of the woman whom I hadn’t thought of in many years.

Impossible. This is simply not possible!

Yet there she was, perfectly portrayed with those sweetly imploring eyes that resonated in my mind, a hauntingly beautiful face resurfacing in my memory after all these years. This . . . this was the mysterious ward? It was uncanny. Unsettling, even. I knew those laughing eyes, that tilted head resting on her hand in just that way, but it couldn’t be the woman I remembered. Couldn’t possibly.

“I’ll leave the matter to you, Miss Mourdant. Her fate is now in your hands.” He handed me the asylum’s address and rose to leave as if he hadn’t just tipped my world off its axis. I stared down at that image, fighting panic.

There exists in most of us a small, hidden fear that we are secretly mad and on the verge of being found out. Mostly I had lived with the niggling worry in the background, in the quiet part of my brain that admitted I was odd and slightly music obsessed, synthesizing every ordinary collection of sounds into a personal symphony. But those dreams I often had—odd and vivid ones, and always with music—had the maids looking at me as if I truly was mad when I dared speak of them. They’d felt so very real, and I’d thought, until the maid had set me straight, that they truly had happened.

Perhaps some of them had. Like the dream of this woman. A specter who played the same haunting song on Mother’s old pianoforte while she smiled at me, wordlessly welcoming me to join her. It had been one of the more pleasant of my dreams, and the memory of her face had become a comfort to me in those days.