But I couldn’t type back because my hands were full of curlers, and I couldn’t voice text because Aunt Tilley had walked in and was wedging herself right beside me on the small window seat, her legs dangling down between the vanity and the toilet, and her full pink polka-dot skirt with the crinoline underneath filling up pretty much every ounce of the bathroom.

“You look beautiful for the ball tonight,” she said.

I studied her face, which was hard because focusing on anything but the vivid red blush on her cheeks took some skill. Was she still here? Was she somewhere else? I never could quite decide. I wondered if this was all an act, a willful undertaking so that she didn’t have to remember. What it was she didn’t want to remember, I couldn’t be sure. But something. Either way, I played along, even when it drove my mother mad. I always played along. Why not? If she didn’t know, she couldn’t help it. And if she did? Well, if she did, it was fun to be lost in her world sometimes. A lot of days it beat the hell out of this one.

“Not as beautiful as you, Aunt Tilley. You will be the belle of the ball.”

She smiled contentedly and fanned herself with one of the vintage hand-painted fans she was never without. I wondered if she possibly felt warm in here, inside with the air turned way down.

“It’s the things you don’t do that you’ll regret, darling.”

I eyed her. “What do you mean, Aunt Tilley?” This was the only hard part. Was she here in my world now, or were we still two genteel ladies discussing a fictitious ball?

She took my hand. “Amelia, I wish more than anything that I hadn’t let Robert run away. I wish I hadn’t sent him off to war without telling the truth. I sent him away with nothing, no wife or child to come home to.” She paused, tears in her eyes and said, “I sent him away to die, Amelia. I see it now as clear as the diamond he tried to give me the night before he left.”

I shook my head. “You didn’t send him off to die, Tilley. It couldn’t be helped.” Robert had not been off at war. He had been killed in a horrible, freak farming accident with a cotton baler. But I couldn’t explain that to Tilley now. She couldn’t hear me, wherever she was.

She shook her head and looked me in the eye. “Amelia, you’re not hearing me.” I put the last curler back in the container, looked straight at her, and pursed my lips, so she would know I was listening. “It is the things we don’t do that keep us up at night, that ruin our lives, that descend us straight into madness.”

“The things we don’t do,” I repeated.

She was right. So was Parker.

I glanced out the window to see Parker standing at the end of our dock, hands in his pockets. I felt warm at seeing him, but also at having a family that had friends like the Thaysdens. For my entire life, their house, their dock, the contents of their pantry… It had all been as much mine as theirs. I knew Parker felt the same. Growing up, I took it for granted.