They went back into the bedroom and Girard took out a pair of black heels. Ettie, however, had taken note of a pair of red shoes at the rear of the closet. They were exquisite, highly polished leather. “Perhaps these.”

“Ah.” The doctor nodded. “Her favorites.”

The shoes were tight at the toes, but they would do. Ettie practiced walking in them out in the barn until, at last, she didn’t stumble.

All the rest of the night, the doctor thought about the red shoes. He couldn’t sleep, and sat up thinking about Sarah. He had felt her tumor when he held her breast, but he told himself he was wrong. He had been wrong before, so why not now? But in truth he was a good diagnostician, and he had gone outside to be alone that night after his wife fell asleep. He walked in the woods and wept. He knew he was right, and yet he, who had told patients the state of their health time and time again, even when the news was bad, couldn’t bring himself to tell her.

In the end she was the one to come to him. She had felt the lump while bathing.

“It’s like a stone,” she told him.

He brought her to the hospital in Lyon, where they removed her breast and a good deal of tissue surrounding it, down to her ribs. Sarah was in terrible pain after the surgery, but said nothing. She wouldn’t look at him after that, or let him see her. She locked herself in the bedroom, filled with shame. He had been her husband for nearly fifteen years, but there were things that were impossible to share with a husband, even after all that time. Her savaged beautiful body was now kept secret from him.