Was he right, about her sacrificing love for safety, for control? Perhaps, she decided, but what he didn’t understand was sometimes a person couldn’t bear even one more risk. She could fight Alfred, but she’d rather lose Sam now than risk seeing him changed or hurt later.

The decision had been made. The only thing to do was go on.

Still she sat a while longer, remembering and not crying. There weren’t any tears inside of her: only hollowness and cold and the kind of exhaustion that refused sleep.

She’d see him again, she realized, which provoked longing and surprise in equal measure. How could she grieve someone so much and still see him?

How could she grieve someone she’d barely had the chance to love?

“Enough,” she whispered, shaking her head and standing. “It’s time to end it.”

Liefdehuis, the ghost, Sam—they were all tied together. She needed to cut through the knot once and for all, which meant only one thing. She needed to talk to Rose.

She called for Liza and asked for the carriage to be brought around.

In the faded light Liefdehuis was little more than a black hulk rearing high above Alva’s head. The air was sharp around her as she walked up the front steps, stabbing little daggers everywhere her coat didn’t quite cover.

Inside, the dark pressed close around her. She left the front door open so a sliver of light could leak through, using the mild illumination to spark the oil lamp she’d brought with her. If she came to injury out here, there would be no one coming to her rescue.

Rose had lived here for the first decade of her life, Alva mused as she looked around the dusty wreckage of the interior. She’d talked here, eaten here, slept here. What part of the house would her ghost be drawn to?

A memory, hazy around the edges, drifted through Alva’s mind: a beautiful May day when she was nine or ten, seen only through the windows of her room because she’d spoken at dinner, violating her parents’ strict rule against child-speech at mealtimes. The afternoons she’d spent imprisoned in her room, because she’d failed somehow to meet standards she didn’t even understand until much later.

If her development had been cruelly arrested at the age of eleven and she were to pick a room to haunt at her parents’ house, it would have been that room, the place she’d been sent to so very often, decorated in pink and white ruffles, with a dollhouse she wasn’t allowed to play with in the corner.