I did, but I didn’t want to think about that. It had been a scrap of cloth from Helin’s dress. In the orphanage, we had only two sets of clothes: a work dress and a nightdress. Helin’s body had been taken away in her nightdress. In the night, I had found her other dress hanging beside mine in the wardrobe. My hands shaking, I had cut a thin ribbon from the hem. I would bundle it in my hand at night. It helped me sleep. She had been my only friend.

“Raven burned it,” Morah said.

I remembered the raw pain in my throat when I couldn’t find it. My cheeks wet. How I had sobbed and Raven had comforted me, saying that she would help me find it. Chin up, she said. It is just a dirty old rag, she said. What could I have wanted with it anyway?

“No,” I said. “She looked everywhere for it.”

“I saw her burn it, in this very stove.”

I felt like I was groping for familiar things in an unfamiliar darkness. “Well,” I said, “if she did it’s because she didn’t know what it was.”

“She knew. I knew. It was a little strip of gray wincey.”

“Then,” I said, “she didn’t understand what it meant to me.”

“She did it because she understood what it meant to you. That was why she took my baby.”

I remembered my illusion of a baby in Morah’s arms. Of a child standing near her, growing older as the years passed until my eyes refused to see the little boy, before I became successful at banishing most of the strange visions that afflicted me.