Sam was already several strides away from the table by the time Henry caught up.

“Sam, don’t do it. Not right now.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense,” Sam pointed out, quite reasonably. Henry could be a little shortsighted from time to time, but his willingness to handle the entirety of the business and administrative tasks more than made up for that. “We’re here, she’s here, and she just bought a house with a surprisingly modern ghost story—when was the last time you heard one that originated in the last fifty years? It sounds like the perfect test case for my theories.”

“A letter,” Henry said, leading him back to the table. “That’s the way to do it. A letter, introducing yourself, laying out your proposal, discussing how much you’d be willing to pay. You can’t accost the poor woman in the middle of a restaurant. It’s not done.”

Sam looked at the woman again and was forced to admit his scientific theories about the afterlife were only half the reason he wanted to approach her. He was just preparing to acquiesce when she and her companion stood up from the table and turned to leave.

“There,” he said, breaking away. “She’s not in the middle of the restaurant anymore.”

He hurried after her.

Alva stood on the city sidewalk and sucked in a deep, triumphant gulp of air. The clock had just struck ten—the middle of the evening by New York City standards—and she was surrounded by elegantly dressed men escorting women dripping diamonds and rolled up tightly in furs. A few feet from her, the street was busy with carriages. She could smell the city: The damp fog, the sharp tang of refuse, the high floral notes of perfumed women. Horse dung.

Had she missed it? She wasn’t sure, although she knew she missed the steep, tangled streets of Montmartre already. But it was America that held her future now, even as it held her past. For a second her triumph was tempered by the remembrance of the thin envelope in her pocket, a few brief lines from her mother’s secretary, thanking her for her interest in visiting and regretting that Mrs. Rensselaer would be unable to see her. Alva knew her mother, likely even now sitting down to a stiff dinner with her husband and twelve of their closest friends fifty blocks away, did indeed feel regret. She just suspected it was about giving birth to her at all.

The restaurant door opened behind her, and, recalled to the moment, she signaled to the boy hailing cabs to find her one.

“Excuse me,” a deep voice said. “Mrs. Webster?”