To her father-in-law, Mary is that girl—always emphasizing the word. A bad influence on your household, and by that, Wendy knows he means a bad influence on her. You know how their kind are. And those are only the words he’s spoken in her hearing. To Ned, Wendy knows he’s said far worse, calling Mary savage and heathen, dangerous and untrustworthy. Only Ned’s steady touch, his calm, has kept her from lashing out at her father-in-law and forbidding him from ever setting foot in her home again. Not that she could. Despite everything she has worked to build for herself in the past eleven years, so much of Wendy’s life is by her father-in-law’s grace alone.

In addition to being Ned’s father, he is Ned’s employer, and John’s. She suspects, though her brother refuses to speak to her candidly on the matter, that John is indebted to him financially. There was a time, before he began working for Ned’s father, when John put his trust in the wrong man, investing money their parents had left them in what appeared to be a promising business venture, thinking himself a grown man when he was still so young.

Most of this Wendy has gleaned from overheard snatches of conversation, snooping and sleuthing on her own. Any time she’s asked directly, her brother always steers the conversation away, telling her business dealings are not a woman’s concern.

It’s more than that though. A delicate balance exists between Ned and his father, and thus between her and Ned’s father, and even her and Ned—one she is still trying to understand. Ned fears his father’s disapproval, and he craves his respect, craving it all the more fiercely every time it is withheld. Despite everything, despite the man Wendy knows Ned to be deep down, part of her husband still longs to be his father’s image of what a man should be. Thus his bluster before Scotland Yard, thus his acquiescence to every one of his father’s rules. It is an irony Ned doesn’t seem to realize. His father respects strength, yet Ned remains cowed. What would happen, she wonders, if he stood up for himself, if he demanded respect for who he is, and not who his father wants him to be?

“Of course,” Wendy says. “Very proper.”

She hears the frost in her voice, swallows around it like a lump of ice in her throat. Ned flinches, the slightest of motions. Is it from her, or from resisting glancing at his father? His eyes find Wendy’s, begging her for patience, even now, when their daughter is missing.