That was high society for you, Alva thought. About as much caring as could be packed into a walnut shell. Her parents would have done the same.

“The New York Hospital is on Broadway, a few blocks up from City Hall,” she said to Sam. “We could walk there in fifteen minutes or so.”

He nodded, his skin a little white around his mouth. “Write us if you or Mr. Hargedy remember anything else,” he said. “And thank you.”

Silence hung between him and Alva as they walked out of the house. The air was cold, biting through Alva’s coat and dress and seeping in with the snow through her boots. She glanced at Sam as they walked, his expression grim.

“What parent could do that?” he asked, and his tone broke her heart. He was genuinely shocked, she realized, and seeing his surprise and horror only made her understand how completely not shocked she was.

Suddenly the weight of her cynicism hung around her shoulders like an extra hundred years. “The families I grew up with could have,” she said. “Some of them, at least. You don’t … show your weaknesses, in that circle. A child who was odd, who had fits, who maybe scared people a little—and those kinds of people are easy to scare—is a weakness. They’d want to hide her, put her away where they didn’t have to look at or think of her, not even remembering the weakness in question was a child.”

Sam fell silent once more, staring at the pavement as he walked. They passed from the quiet residential streets to the bustle of Broadway, walking past small businesses and men in dark overcoats, hurrying along in the abruptly bright midday light. Carriages rolling past splashed dark, icy water onto the sidewalks as undernourished children with dirty faces looked for easy marks with poorly secured wallets. It was a normal winter day in the city, beauty and horror walking arm in arm and yet invisible to each other.

The New York Hospital was an imposing building of gray stone, stained darker by smoke and dirt. Alva looked at Sam’s furious face, wondering if there was anything she should say, but there were no words that could—or, perhaps, even should—make this better.

She simply put her hand on his arm and nodded towards the large double doors. “Shall we?”

Ten minutes later, they stepped out.

“The Bloomingdale Insane Asylum,” Sam said, biting out the words. “Do you think they even noticed she’d been transferred?”