Upstairs, Belinda helps me pack Kat’s things for our trip and then we head to my bedroom, where I do the same. I choose a few dresses, my mother’s old hat, my da’s word book. When we are done, we take the travel cases downstairs and set them by the front door. I place the files and the strongbox and the pieces of gold ore—which I have dried off and put into a drawstring bag—onto the entry table by the front door.

When everything is ready for our dawn departure, we head back upstairs.

“We can all sleep in here, in my room,” I say. I know Belinda will not want to sleep in Martin’s bed, and I certainly do not. And I don’t want Kat sleeping alone, either. I pull her mattress off her bed and drag it into my room and place it on the floor next to my bed. And then we change into our nightgowns—I loan Belinda a loose-fitting one of mine—and braid our hair for sleep as if it is just an ordinary day. I sing my grandmother’s Gaelic lullaby to Kat until her breathing finally slackens to that of slumber. In the darkness after she is asleep, I hear Belinda begin to softly cry beside me. I have to remind myself that she lost her husband tonight, and, yes, the man she loves does not exist, but she thought he did, and the loss feels the same.

“Will you be all right?” I ask her.

“No. Yes. I don’t know,” she says in a tired, grieved voice. “I don’t feel well. I don’t . . .”

She lets her voice trail away.

“There was a time when I felt like my world was ending, too,” I tell her after a pause. “But you’ve reasons to keep living, Belinda. And even if you were able to convince yourself you don’t, the sun always comes up the next day. It does. And the next and the next. It just keeps coming up.”

She says nothing, and minutes later she falls into an exhausted sleep.

As I lie there in the dark on the mattress where I let Martin touch me and delight me, where I cried out in pleasure at the union of our bodies, I am suddenly overcome with revulsion. I know it was not love between us at those times, but I’ve been blindly thinking it had been some kind comfort to us both, and I’m sick now that he was only pleasuring me to keep me compliant and content, like a stupid animal. I feel my gorge rising within me and I get myself out of bed as gently as I can so as not to wake Belinda or Kat, and I run into the water closet to heave into the commode what little supper I ate. When I’m done, I turn to run water in the bath as hot as I can stand it to cleanse myself of him, to wash any lingering fragments of his body from me. I cast off my nightgown and lower myself into the steaming water, nearly yelping at the heat, and I scrub myself until my skin is red and nearly raw.