I covered my heated face with my hands. “What will she tell him?”

“Hopefully nothing much.”

I peeked out at the firm lines of his face and sensed he wouldn’t make some false excuse if the nurse did describe how she’d found us. And for that, I couldn’t help but respect the man even more.

My first stint of night duty, three days into my time at Hurstwell, left me longing for the lumpy little cot in my shared room rather than sitting awake in the thick darkness that cloaked the place. Those enchanting corners and blue-violet shadows turned cold, with movement drifting across walls and sounds for which I could not account.

Propped up in a straight-backed chair in one of the acute wards with a cup of warm tea beside me, I drifted into a restless half sleep between rounds. I dreamed, as I had in childhood, about the pianoforte playing at night in the forgotten old rose room, the lost melody once again drifting up to me. My childhood self walked down the stairs as I’d done so many times to find the ethereal woman with her distant smile playing at my mother’s pianoforte.

Only this time, I had a name to go with the vision. “Hello, Miss Swansea,” I said, and she turned, beaming a smile of welcome, now tinged with a lovely sort of wistfulness. Her head tipped to the side just slightly. You know me, her look seemed to say again. I can count on you, can’t I? She laid her slender fingers upon the keys, and her smile grew, the welcome warming. I wanted to join her. I’d done so before.

“Where are you?” I asked, but my voice whipped away on a breeze. “Where?” I said again, louder.

But she merely faced her lovely instrument and sank into the music, into the act of playing, as I so often did. She never spoke to me in these dreams, somewhat disconnected from my world as if we didn’t quite share the same one, and I was a specter to her as much as she was to me.

The song swelled until it filled the room, then tapered off, she and her music fading together. Growing distant. A sense of desperation—an urgency—along with the sucking sensation of being pulled forcibly from the dream. From her. “Wait! Where are you?”

Then a harsh whisper cut through the scene, finally jarring it loose. I blinked in the dim light. It wasn’t her voice, though—wasn’t Rosamond. Wasn’t familiar. Don’t drink the tea, it said. As I shivered and strained to hear the ghostly pianoforte music that wasn’t there anymore, the voice inserted itself again into the remnants of my dream, slicing like a knife through its tapestry, and I was awake, blinking and cold in the dark.

“I said, don’t drink the tea.”