She wandered away from him, turning slowly. “I didn’t really look around,” she said. “That marble thing across from the Astors’, she must be furious. It looks more like a Napoleonic monument than a home.”

“Alva, where are we?”

“This is where I grew up,” she said absently. “See, Mrs. Astor built first, and the people who wanted to be like the Astors built as close to them as they could. My parents have always wanted to be like the Astors.”

Sam didn’t know who Mrs. Astor was, but he could fill in the blanks.

“You don’t talk about your parents much,” he said cautiously. “You visited them when you were in town?”

“Mmm,” she said, which Sam took for a yes. There was still so much he didn’t know about her, so much he had to guess at.

“Which one is theirs?”

“This one,” she said, gesturing to a wide three-story brownstone with some sort of decorative white edging.

“And which was your window?”

“Second story, farthest to the right. But I don’t think your habit of late-night calling would be quite so tolerated here.” She smiled a little but slipped away, moving closer to the house. She stopped by a large tree, empty of leaves and dusted with snow. “This was only a sapling when we moved here. I was … ten, maybe. It grew up with me. I used to stare at it out of my window.”

There was sweetness in the words but loneliness and wistfulness, too, and Sam pictured a ten-year-old girl, staring outside and wishing for something that didn’t come. Alva may not have spoken much about her parents directly, but he remembered her comment about families who would discard their children rather than lose social standing, and he thought about the kind of parents who would let a monster like Alain Webster marry their seventeen-year-old daughter and take her an ocean away, and the anger that had been sweeping over him ever since the night in Alva’s bedroom poked its head up again and growled.

The door to the brownstone opened, and Alva froze. A footman walked out, followed by a man and woman, dressed in layers of finery. The man was of medium height, with thin hair on the sides showing underneath his hat and a belly even his heavy coat couldn’t disguise. The woman … the woman looked like Alva.

Sam heard Alva’s intake of breath, saw her take one quick step forward, as well as the second her mother noticed her. The woman paused, a perfect statue of Alva in twenty years, but with none of Alva’s warmth or humor or intelligence. Just the features, with nothing familiar or kind underneath. Alva had stopped breathing next to him.