A week later I use Elliot’s telephone and I ring up the San Francisco Police Department and ask to speak to Detective Morris. I ask if there is any news on the whereabouts of my husband. There isn’t.

Belinda rings the county sheriff and officially reports her husband as having deserted her. For the next month and a half we inquire about our missing husbands on a regular basis. In those six weeks Sarah grows cuter and fatter, Belinda looks less and less like a grieving widow and more like a woman in love with Elliot, and Kat begins to say a word or two every hour. As the weeks pass I find that I no longer startle when an automobile pulls up outside the inn or when the door to the inn opens and the first thing I hear is a man’s footfall. Martin would be a fool to come back if he’s somehow still alive.

And Martin is no fool.

I write my mother that Martin—the quiet man I married for convenience—was sadly a victim of the terrible quake and fire, but that Kat and I are safe and now living south of the city with friends. I tell her that she needn’t worry about a thing, that everything she’d wanted me to have and sacrificed for me to have, I have.

Candace is the only one of us who seems to be waning rather than gaining strength. When the first day of August approaches, she calls me to her bed, which she rarely leaves now. She is as pale and thin as she was when I first met her, perhaps more so. We have had the doctor from the village to see her twice, and both times he has told us she needs to be sent to a warmer, drier climate. Both times Candace declined to follow his advice.

When I arrive at her bedside, she reaches for me with a weak arm and takes my hand. I sit down next to her.

“I want to go to my cousin’s in Texas,” she whispers.

The words hit me hard. “But . . . you said you wanted to be here! You said you wanted for you and Kat to be here. With me!”

“I do want Kat to be here with you,” she murmurs. “But I don’t want to be here. I don’t want Kat to watch me die. I want to say good-bye to her while I’m alive. I want her to remember me alive.”

Relief and concern immediately twist themselves inside me. Candace doesn’t want to take Kat. But still. How can she possibly travel in her condition? “You are too weak to go such a great distance by train, Candace.”

“I have the money to hire a private coach and a nurse.”

“But it’s so far and . . . and what if you die along the way?”

“What if I do? It would be a blessing to go so quickly. I want to go. I’m ready to go.”