Pile Up the Books Cause Summer! –– Novels to Read This August in 2021

I awoke in the glow of a young world, when man knew of hunting but not tilling, of stone but not steel. It smelled of rain and earth and life. It smelled of hope.

Arise, beloved.

The voice that spoke was laden with millennia beyond my ken. The voice of a father, a mother. A creator and a destroyer. The voice of Mauth, who is Death himself.

Arise, child of flame. Arise, for thy home awaits thee.

Would that I had not learned to cherish it, my home. Would that I had unearthed no magic, loved no wife, sparked no children, gentled no ghosts. Would that Mauth had never named me.

“Meherya.”

My name drags me out of the past to a rain-swept hilltop in the Mariner countryside. My old home is the Waiting Place — known to humans as the Forest of Dusk. I will make my new home upon the bones of my foes.

“Meherya.” Umber’s sun-bright eyes are the vermillion of ancient anger. “We await your orders.” She grips a glaive in her left hand, its blade white with heat.

“Have the ghuls reported in yet?”

Umber’s lip curls. “They scoured Delphinium. Antium. Even the Waiting Place,” she says. “They could not find the girl. Neither she nor the Blood Shrike has been seen for weeks.”

“Have the ghuls seek out Darin of Serra in Marinn,” I say. “He forges weapons in the port city of Adisa. Eventually, they will reunite.”

Umber inclines her head and we regard the village below us, a hodgepodge of stone homes that can withstand fire, adorned with wooden shingles that cannot. Though it is mostly identical to other hamlets we’ve destroyed, it has one distinction. It is the last settlement in our campaign. Our parting volley in Marinn before I send the Martials south to join the rest of Keris Veturia’s army.

“The humans are ready to attack, Meherya.” Umber’s glow reddens, her disgust of our Martial allies palpable.

“Give the order,” I tell her. Behind me, one by one, my kin transform from shadow to flame, lighting the cold sky.

A warning bell tolls in the village. The watchman has seen us, and bellows in panic. The front gates — hastily erected after attacks on neighboring communities — swing closed as lamps flare and shouts tinge the night air with terror.

“Seal the exits,” I tell Umber. “Leave the children to carry the tale. Maro.” I turn to a wisp of a jinn, his narrow shoulders belying the power within. “Are you strong enough for what you must do?”

Maro nods. He and the others pour past me, five rivers of fire, like those that spew from young mountains in the south. The jinn blast through the gates, leaving them smoking.

A half legion of Martials follow, and when the village is well aflame and my kin withdraw, the soldiers begin their butchery. The screams of the living fade quickly. Those of the dead echo for longer.

After the village is naught but ashes, Umber finds me. Like the other jinn, she now glows with only the barest flicker.

“The winds are fair,” I tell her. “You will reach home swiftly.”

“We wish to remain with you, Meherya,” she says. “We are strong.”

For a millennium, I believed that vengeance and wrath were my lot. Never would I witness the beauty of my kind moving through the world. Never would I feel the warmth of their flame.

But time and tenacity allowed me to reconstitute the Star — the weapon the Augurs used to imprison my people. The same weapon I used to set them free. Now the strongest of my kin gather near. And though it has been months since I destroyed the trees imprisoning them, my skin still trills at their presence.

“Go,” I order them gently. “For I will need you in the coming days.”

After they leave, I walk the cobbled streets of the village, sniffing for signs of life. Umber lost her children, her parents, and her lover in our long-ago war with the humans. Her rage has made her thorough.

A gust of wind carries me to the south wall of the village. The air tells of the violence wrought here. But there is another scent too.

A hiss escapes me. The smell is human, but layered with a fey sheen. The girl’s face rises in my mind. Laia of Serra. Her essence feels like this.

But why would she lurk in a Mariner village?

I consider donning my human skin, but decide against it. It is an arduous task, not undertaken without good reason. Instead I draw my cloak close against the rain and trace the scent to a hut tucked beside a tottering wall.

The ghuls trailing my ankles yip in excitement. They feed off pain, and the village is rife with it. I nudge them away and enter the hut alone.

The inside is lit by a tribal lamp and a merry fire, over which a pan of charred skillet bread smokes. Pink winter roses sit atop the dresser and a cup of well water sweats on the table.

Whoever was here left only moments ago.

Or rather, she wants it to look that way.

I steel myself, for a jinn’s love is no fickle thing. Laia of Serra has hooks in my heart yet. The pile of blankets at the foot of the bed disintegrates to ashes at my touch. Hidden beneath and shaking with terror is a child who is very obviously not Laia of Serra.

And yet he feels like her.

Not in his mien, for where Laia of Serra has sorrow coiled about her heart, this boy is gripped by fear. Where Laia’s soul is hardened by suffering, this boy is soft, his joy untrammeled until now. He’s a Mariner child, no more than twelve.

But it is what’s deep within that harkens to Laia. An unknowable dark­ness in his mind. His black eyes meet mine, and he holds up his hands.

“B-begone!” Perhaps he meant for it to be a shout. But his voice rasps, nails digging into wood. When I go to snap his neck, he holds his hands out again, and an unseen force nudges me back a few inches.

His power is wild and unsettlingly familiar. I wonder if it is jinn magic, but while jinn-human pairings occurred, no children can come of them.

“Begone, foul creature!” Emboldened by my retreat, the boy throws something at me. It has all the sting of rose petals. Salt.

My curiosity fades. Whatever lives within the child feels fey, so I reach for the scythe slung across my back. Before he understands what is happening, I draw the weapon across his throat and turn away, my mind already moving on.

The boy speaks, stopping me dead. His voice booms with the finality of a jinn spewing prophecy. But the words are garbled, a story told through water and rock.

“The seed that slumbered wakes, the fruit of its flowering consecrated within the body of man. And thus is thy doom begotten, Beloved, and with it the breaking — the — breaking —”

A jinn would have completed the prophecy, but the boy is only human, his body a frail vessel. Blood pours from the wound in his neck and he collapses, dead.

“What in the skies are you?” I speak to the darkness within the child, but it has fled, and taken the answer to my question with it.

With steely determination and an upset stomach, I march over to Maxine’s bag and pull out The Elemental.

The book flips open to the page detailing the Resurrection like it’s been waiting for me.

“You can help me or not, but if William’s killer is out there, murdering other people, I’m not going to sit around and do nothing. We can ask William who killed him. We could stop this from happening to more people.” My heart is pounding; my words come out aggressive and quick.

Maxine and Lena share an uncomfortable glance. They’re doing that more often as of late.

“I’ll do it myself then,” I respond to their infuriating indifference.

I pull off the scratchy mittens Finn gave me, and ghost the tips of my fingers over the onionskin pages. They’re as cold as the frost-slicked underbrush. Finn’s lantern casts them in a flickering orange light.

I stare back at the familiar illustration of a human figure sitting in front of a mirror surrounded by other objects. The objects needed for the spell are sketched in black ink and labeled in slanted handwriting. A scrying mirror, a vial of graveyard dust, a hairbrush labeled item belonging to the deceased, and a dagger called Fragarach.

Like most of the pages in this book, the marginal notes are in a mix of languages. Most are in what I think is Gaelic, but there’s one in English that stands out the darkest: Only effective if done soon after departure from this plane. It’s the note I think about when I can’t sleep.

The others gather around to read the spell over my shoulder.

“What’s Fragarach?” I ask.

“It’s a type of dagger, an old one,” Finn answers reluctantly. He scrubs a hand across his neck; there’s something tortured in the simple gesture. “I can help you get it, if you’re determined to do this.”

“We need it soon,” I say.

“Before any more bodies wash up on the bay,” Finn agrees. I’m relieved he’s seeing my point.

Maxine looks grave as she speaks up. “I’ve been a little bored, and this seems like a terrible idea. Why not speak to the dead and solve a few murders?”

Lena looks between the three of us like she’s doing a calculation, her eyes fluttering, brow creased. Finally, she closes her eyes in a huff. “I wish I could see how this turns out. I cannot.”

There is no moon tonight. The thicket of trees is the darkest I’ve ever seen it. Shadows stretch long, like hands reaching out, grasping at the dark. A shiver goes through me and it’s more than the cold.

“We’ll need to minimize the risk.” Finn’s eyes are big and soft. He looks more lost than I’ve ever seen him, which is strange, because I feel balanced on the precipice of finally finding something. “The head of the Sons has always been a bit of a collector. He keeps the magical artifacts in his office. How morally opposed are you to cat burglary?”

“Sweet of you to assume witches have any morals at all,” Maxine answers. “How very modern of you.”

“Can you make it to the Commodore Club on the Lower East Side this Saturday? There’s an event, everyone will be busy, and security will be lax. It could be our one chance to sneak into the office,” Finn explains.

The excited rhythm in my heart beats an answer: Of course, anything.

Lena frowns. “Why do you need us to break into your own organization?”

“I can’t magick objects as well as you. There’ll be locks and wards, and I don’t have the power to get through them myself. At least not quietly.”

“Yes.” My answer is immediate.

“It has to be two days from now?” Maxine asks, incredulous.

“Unfortunately.”

From somewhere nearby, an animal scurries in the underbrush. It sets my teeth on edge.

“What about the mirror?” I prod. We have to think of the big picture. If we’re going to do this, we need to do it properly.

“I’ll do some research” is Finn’s curt reply.

“Does your brother have a grave?” Lena asks quietly.

“Yes, in Manhattan. The dust will be easy.”

Maxine brushes a strand from her forehead. “And the ‘item belonging to the deceased,’ do you have anything of your brother’s?”

This question stings. “I don’t, but I know where to get one.”

And suddenly we have a plan. A plan that begins with us breaking into the Sons of Saint Druon.

I grip The Elemental all the way back to Haxahaven. It stays cold no matter how long I clutch it to my chest.

Maxine unlocks the gate, and we slip into Florence’s dark kitchen. She hasn’t stayed up for us tonight, but she has left a warm pot of tea on the stove.

“This is getting dangerous,” Lena says. Her voice is hollow. It bounces off the bricked floors.

“Yes,” Maxine agrees. “But at least it’s not boring.”

My eyes flooded with tears that began rolling down my face. Horrified at my public display of grief, I had to keep myself from all-out sobbing over Isabel’s death before the person sitting next to me on the plane thought me mentally unstable and requested to be moved to another seat.

This was my third time reading the book The Saving Graces, and I cried all three times when each of the friends read Isabel’s letters after her death. I stumbled upon The Saving Graces, a novel by Patricia Gaffney, one evening when perusing Barnes & Noble for something good. The words “New York Times Bestseller” caught my eye, and I decided to give Gaffney a try, though I was unfamiliar with anything she
had written.

The Saving Graces is the story of four friends and how each is there for the others through the ups and downs of life: childlessness, broken relationships, love, illness, and death. I read the book three times because I wanted to join the friendship circle of Lee, Rudy, Isabel, and Emma again and because it deeply impacted the way I viewed friendship, both the kind of friendships I wanted and the kind of friend I wanted to be. For me The Saving Graces raised the bar, as well as the stakes.

I loved the way the others supported Rudy when she moved out of her home and through the abuse she encountered. The unmitigated appreciation for each individual friend was evidenced as Isabel wrote parting letters to her three friends. I was inspired by the manner with which the friends got snippy with each other, and yet quickly forgave and forgot.

Finally, I was moved by how the loss of one left an enormous hole that could not, nor would, ever be filled in the others. I found this especially, exquisitely stunning, thus moving me to tears each time I shared these women’s lives. They were there to defend, laugh, comfort, give physical care, and even
give space—all that real life requires. These were friendships of depth and honesty, strength and longevity. These friends loved each other in all their messiness. No one had to bring perfection to the friendship, only loyalty.

My reluctance to leave the world of the four women and close the book for the third time invited explorational thoughts of friendship. What was it about their friendships that left me reluctant to leave their company and return to my own life? Is that what my friendships were supposed to look like? Did I need to find a Rudy, an Isabel, a Lee, or an Emma to fill the longing that this novel surreptitiously uncovered in my soul? Did my own small collection of friendships seem not enough compared to the bond these four shared? And why not? Was it the way they supported one another or the way they always made time for one another? Or was it the way one could behave in a manner that was very unlovable and yet still remain loved?

At the risk of making a grand, sweeping gender statement, I’ll point out that some men seem to have categories of friends. They have work friends, friends for playing weekly pickup basketball games, golfing friends, and friends forced on them by a significant other. Seldom do they see these friends outside their category of identity, yet they would call them friends.

Many of the friendships women hold, however, seem to make their way beyond the circumstances that brought them together and meander into their lives through both the valleys and the peaks, eventually ending up in the women’s souls, where they can both restore and destruct. And yet, isn’t a real friendship one that would bring both the yin and the yang, so to speak? Is the multidimensional aspect of the relationship the very characteristic that makes it a true friendship? Would I have been so captivated and, yes, envious of the saving graces if their friendships contained no shadows?

History is rife with story upon story of love, commitment, bravery, loyalty, betrayal, and disappointment—all within friendships. And in our own personal histories, many of the same stories can be told Friendship is a relationship we desire and cultivate early in our development, whether we had an imaginary friend as a constant companion or we began the first day of school as a shy, pigtailed little girl inviting another to be our friend.

For a woman, the connection to friendship is innate and essential. It feels so vital to life and to living that the desire for it seems part of our fabric of being. Cicero said friendship “springs from nature rather than from need—from an inclination of the mind with a certain consciousness of love.”1 This is certainly true across generations and cultures. Early Chinese culture held women’s friendships as almost sacred. In her beautiful work of historical fiction Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Lisa See educates her readers about sacred friendship practices.2 The Chinese women of this patriarchal culture committed themselves to very deep friendships, knowing there was substance and soul that could exist in no other relationships.

There were two types of soul friendships: sworn sisters and laotongs, which means “old same.” Sworn sisterhoods were groups of unmarried women who became friends. These sisterhoods dissolved at the time of marriage. A laotong relationship was between two girls from different villages. Many superstitions were observed before two girls would be found to be a match. They were usually the same age and both born in auspicious years, according to the tradition. The girls were bound together in lifelong friendship, in a ceremony that was nearly equivalent to a marriage ceremony in its commitments and gravity. The larger world only learned of the existence of this tradition of special friendships when, in a crowded train station at the height of China’s Cultural Revolution, a woman was detained as a suspected spy after fainting. Authorities searched her belongings in an effort to identify her and found papers written in a language none could identify. Scholars were brought in to examine the writings, and they discovered that the elderly woman was not a spy after all; rather, her writings were in a secret language used only by women in the region of Yao. This language was a secret for more than a thousand years.

Sadly, most of the writings in nu shu have not survived over the years as they were either buried with the women at their death to accompany them to the other world or destroyed in the revolution. In the twentieth century, the nu shu language is all but extinct and no longer needed. But its existence and use discloses the depth of friendship and community among these women—and the universal, powerful longing for friendship that exists among us, the desire to be known and heard.

How do you know your friends, and how do you find them? Most of us look back on lives decorated with stories of friendships from the time we were young. There are the friends we hurried home from school to play with every day. After donning play clothes and perhaps wolfing down a snack, we’d join them for some clandestine adventure until we were summoned to dinner at dusk. There are the friends who gave us our social life when we were teenagers, inviting us to something somewhere that opened an entire new world of cliques, jealousy, loyalty, and, ultimately, resiliency. There are the friends of our early twenties, alongside whom we entered independence, straddling worlds of codependency and experimental autonomy. There are the friends who champion us through many of the celebrations and disappointments of adult life, from marriage and professional promotions to buying a first home and having children, along with a myriad of heartbreaks and losses.

And there’s every kind of friend in between. The friend you go to the ballet with; the friend you shop with—the one who talks you into a regrettable purchase every time; the one who will tell you what you want to hear and the one who has the courage to tell you what you don’t; the friend from whom you always get the latest news on everyone else; the one who will listen when you need to be heard and the one who will talk when you only have energy to listen. There’s the role model, the mentor, and the friend with whom you have a love-hate relationship. There are group and work friendships, friendships within a larger community, the “our children are best friends” and “our husbands are best friends” relationships.

If so many different types of connections are called friendships, do they all come from the same well, some single essence of friendship? What is it that creates a friendship? Is it social obligation, the fact that you wanted a large wedding party so the pictures would look better, necessity, or essential longing? And if it is longing, is the primary catalyst our longing for someone’s friendship or that person’s longing for ours? Do we need to know the answers to these questions to be a good friend or to have a fulfilling friendship—or am I simply overanalyzing that which just happens naturally?

My worn paperback copy of The Saving Graces placed back on my shelf of fiction between authors Fielding and Grisham, these were the questions I went looking to answer.

For centuries poets, authors, and song and screenplay writers have sought to define friendship—with results ranging from Aristotle’s conclusion that friendship is “a single soul dwelling in two bodies” to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s description of a friend as “a person with whom I may be sincere.”

Certainly a distinction should be made between an acquaintance and a true friend. Is friendship simply companionship? For me, this is not the case. The Saving Graces taught me a narrower, even sacred definition of friendship.

What qualifies someone to be called your friend?

I read a sweet story by F.W. Boreham about a little boy plagued by nightmares.4 Rather than visions of sugarplums, a frightening tiger intrudes on the boy’s dreams. Night after night, the child wakes in fear, a cold sweat, and a rapidly beating heart. His parents are concerned (and probably lacking sleep if the boy is crawling into bed with them each night), and they send him to a child psychologist. After listening to the boy recount his dreams, the psychologist gets an idea. He tells the child, “The tiger visiting you is actually a good tiger. He wants to be your friend. So next time the tiger appears in your dream, simply put your hand out to shake his paw and say, ‘Hello, old chap!’ ”

And so, the story goes, that very same night the boy asleep in his bed suddenly becomes restless. He thrashes about in his bed, sweating and crying out in his sleep, until a small hand, partly hidden by cotton pajamas, suddenly juts out from the covers, followed by a sleepy little voice saying, “Hello, old chap!” Thus he made friends with the tiger.

That story makes me smile, and I suppose, partly, this is because of the old English language that scripts a little boy using amusing terms like “old chap.” But is that how it’s done? Is mere familiarity how friendships are forged? Does simply banishing the title of stranger make way for friendship? Or is something more required?

Perhaps it is the banishing of danger. The reason the tiger trick worked on the little boy’s nightmares was that it removed the danger. Maybe that works in making friends too. Maybe, beyond simple introductions so that we are no longer strangers, we enter a shared space with a person that we hope is safe—safe for us to be ourselves and to be real.

What creates that safe space? Is it simply shared interest or geography? Is friendship born in similar goals or experiences? What about behavior? If two people act in a certain way toward each other, are they friends? If so, then what does friendship look like?

As I thought about how art imitates life, and ever a lover of art, paintings, literature, poetry, films, and music, I mulled the characteristics of friendship and the numerous recent pictures of friendship, specifically women’s friendships. When I interact with these different mediums, something in them resonates with me, something that moves me, and I stop and notice. Whether it’s a tearjerker movie, a painting whose brush strokes create a gentle gesture, or lyrics so poignant, art inspires me to pay attention to what is within myself.

In the 1980s film The Four Seasons, the opening scene depicts three couples going away for a few days in the spring. Toasts and speeches characterize this holiday together, and the couples celebrate the depth of their friendships. We learn that the men were introduced to each other after the women became friends. The following season, summer, one friend is missing. During the previous few months, one couple has divorced and a cute young girlfriend has joined the circle to now complete the six. I couldn’t help but wonder what happened to the wife. Why is she eliminated from the circle of friends? And if the
women were the original friends, why have they agreed to oust her from the group? Why doesn’t the divorced couple at least get joint custody of their friends?

Throughout the movie’s four seasons, we see what each friend brings to the circle of friendship. We see the idiosyncrasies, bad habits, and selfishness, but also the commitment to one another through all the terrain in each season of friendship. And when one woman cries out in sheer frustration that, in spite of it all, she needs her friends and always will, we feel the truth of her statement reverberate through us.This was a climactic exclamation after months of tension created by selfishness, lack of awareness, and judgment between the friends.

But yes, in spite of the hurts our friendships can cause, we need them, we want them.

For the first time in thirteen years, it snows in Snakebite.

The snow is a gentle thing, lilting like dust on the early-January wind, coating the rocks along the Lake Owyhee shore in thin slush. The lake water is black and seeps like ink into the snow-hazy sky. It is nighttime, the people of Snakebite warm in their homes, fingers pressed to their windows while they nervously watch the snow fall. For a moment, the world is silent; it is only the wind and the shifting trees and the hushed pulse of water against stone. It is held breath.

A boy stumbles to the lakeshore.

He thinks he is alone.

He holds his hands in front of him, palms up as though the snow is only a figment of his imagination. Flecks of it stick in his eyelashes, in the navy netting of his basketball shorts, in his hair the color of the golden hills that border town. He pauses at the water’s edge, looks out at the horizon, and sinks to his knees. He is far from home, far from the light, far from anything.

The Dark watches the boy. It is tucked into the body of a new host, staggering across dead grass and juniper boughs for a better view. This new body is unwieldy to the Dark. It will take time to adjust to this skin, to these eyes, to the anxious beating of this new heart.

What are you afraid of? the Dark asks, quiet as the whispering wind. You have a plan. Act.

The host tenses. His fingers are clenched at his sides, lips pressed together, eyes wide. He is a wild animal frozen in fear. “Something’s wrong,” the host whispers. “Why’s he on the ground?”

Does it matter?

“I don’t know.” The host does not move. “What do I do?”

Go, the Dark breathes.

The host nods. He inches from behind a thick juniper trunk, standing closer to the boy, just out of sight. The boy does not notice. Does not move. Through the flickering snowfall, the boy’s face is tear-streaked, red with grief, hollow. He stares out at the black horizon, but he stares at nothing.

The host hesitates again.

The boy pulls a cell phone from his pocket. The glare of the screen washes over his face, the only light in the unending dark. He taps out a message, and then stares at it in silence. Tears are still wet on his cheeks, rivulets of white light.

All at once, the host is overtaken with the idea of marching forward, grabbing the boy by his collar, and pressing thumbs to the column of his throat. He feels skin under his fingertips, the tangy scent of iron mixing with the snow. For years, he has imagined this. He pictures death running through him like a current.

As quickly as he imagines it, he chokes the vision.

The Dark has dealt with this kind of hesitation before. It slithers through the host, coiling around his heart until it finds the black rot of hate it knows well. This host craves death. The desire has bubbled under his skin for as long as he can remember, but he has been too afraid to claim it as his own.

Do you want me to help you? the Dark asks. Do you want me to make you strong?

The host scowls. “I do.”

It is the truth.

Then do this, the Dark breathes. It simmers in the shadows, the water, the sky. It is the truth you have been hiding from all these years.

“The truth,” the host whispers. He clenches and unclenches his fists, fingers fidgeting at his sides. A silent moment passes, then another.

And then the host moves.

By the time he crosses the distance to the boy, the snow is falling in heavy sheets. The sky is a blur of gray, closer than it should be. Stifling. The host grabs the boy and there is no going back.

The boy’s eyes catch the host’s for a moment, flashing from sorrow to surprise to recognition. He does not scream. Above them, the sky is gray, then black, then nothing. 

The Dark slides deeper into the host, sinks its claws in, roots itself in the rot.

After thirteen years, the Dark has finally come home.

Tess Matheson was one of the few people on campus who didn’t think that the Jessop English Library was haunted. This wasn’t because of a lack of belief in the paranormal. Tess, who’d grown up under the watchful presence of a host of ghosts that haunted her family’s central Pennsylvania farmhouse, considered herself to have a particularly keen sixth sense. The Jessop Library never gave her any hair-raising or spine-tingling sensations beyond the regular chills from the abnormally forceful air conditioner.

If anything was haunting Jessop, it was Tess Matheson herself. And for the first time in her employment there, she was late for work. A miscalculation on her part: too long spent playing her cello, stealing whatever time to practice she could.

She considered her options as she power walked up Dawson Street and took a detour through the alley between her favorite Indian restaurant and a frat house. It was possible she would get there in time—but no, she couldn’t vault over the chain-link fence of the parking lot in her favorite pair of white lace shorts. Another miscalculation.

It was also possible that Aunt Mathilde wouldn’t notice that Tess was late. Possible, but unlikely.

Mathilde—or Ms. Matheson, to the rest of the students at Falk—had a reputation. There used to be three other students working at Jessop before they violated Mathilde’s strict code of conduct. One, a sophomore, had accidentally spilled coffee on some printouts that belonged to Dr. Birch. The second, a junior, was let go after he let a student check out books from a senior’s research carrel. The final student was released the first week of summer after showing up late.

Just like Tess.

And that wasn’t counting the students who’d been fired before Tess even got to Falk, the ones Regina was all too happy to tell her about. Part of Tess wondered if the only reason she’d managed to get a work-study there was because they couldn’t keep anyone employed at Jessop for very long.

Tess threw open the heavy door of the English building and rushed through the hallways to Jessop. It was early enough in the morning that she was the only one in the hallways. The building smelled of lemon-scented cleaner and pencil shavings. Normally, this was one of Tess’s favorite times of day, when the building was quiet and clean and deserted. But today, when she punched her ID number into the keypad outside of the door, the clock read 9:07.

Everything was terrible.

“Theresa?” she heard, barely before she had the door open. No matter how many times Tess had asked Mathilde to call her by her nickname, her great aunt always used the same incorrect pronunciation of her full one. It was always “Tur-eh-sa” to Aunt Mathilde, never “Tess” or “Tar-ee-sa” or even her sister’s personal favorite, “Tessy.”

“Sorry I’m late,” Tess said, pulling open the other door until it clicked into place. She knew Mathilde hated excuses more than anything, so she didn’t bother offering any. Instead, Tess took the velvet display case covers from Mathilde’s pale, withered hands and set to folding them.

Mathilde sighed. There was something unspoken in that small noise. A warning. A you-know-what-strings-I-had-to-pull-to-get-you-here. And worse, the stern look at Tess that said if-anyone-else-was-here-I-couldn’t-ignore-this. She wrapped her ever-present cardigan around her thin shoulders and shuffled towards her office. “I have a stack of requests for you to find. I’ll bring them out.”

It was only when Mathilde was out of sight that Tess felt her shoulders relax. She slipped her bag off and stowed it under the circulation desk, taking a deep breath of dusty air.

The Jessop English Library was the undeniable golden child of Falk University Preparatory Academy’s campus. The reading room was paneled with shining wood and lined with five floors of balconies. Each floor had fifteen offices, which seniors used in their last year of studying as they put together their final projects. If Tess was still here for her senior year, she’d claim one on the fifth floor, where she could spend all day looking down at the reading room instead of bustling around it.

“Theresa?” Mathilde called again, as if Tess had run away in the time her great aunt had spent walking to her office and back. Mathilde walked halfway into the reading room and abruptly stopped, like going any further would mean spontaneous combustion. She held a book in one hand and a nauseatingly large stack of requests in the other. “Can you find these?”

“Okay,” Tess said, taking the papers. It wasn’t like she had a choice. Usually, someone requested a couple of books at a time, maybe as many as ten. This stack, though… Tess thumbed through the papers. She gave up counting when she got to twenty-five.

“It’s a big one,” Mathilde said. Her voice was as thin and frail as old paper. When Tess was younger, Mathilde always made her think of a story her mother used to tell her, about a woman who died and became a butterfly. In Tess’s eyes, Mathilde, who’d never been young for as long as Tess had been alive, was half butterfly wings herself.

“Do your best not to be late again, dear,” Mathilde said, giving Tess another significant look before turning back to her office. She didn’t tell Tess she got special treatment. She didn’t have to.

Tess counted more from the stack of requests. This many would take her hours to locate, if not days. And the stack was another reminder that she’d be spending her summer here, in Jessop, or at Emiliano’s, where she waited tables.

This was not a comfortable home, no matter how much she tried to rearrange herself into a Falk-shaped box, no matter how much she worked to act like she loved this, if only to convince Nat.

On days like this, when she still had the memory of the scent of dewy grass in her nose and the sun shone vividly through the windows, the idea of sitting in the library was unbearable. It was one of those thick, rare mornings that flung itself right into summer, made for spreading blankets on the quad and rolling her tank top over her ribs to catch some sunlight. It didn’t help that today was a Wednesday, which meant that her library jail time would be followed by an extended probation at Emiliano’s.

And now, she couldn’t even sit in a patch of sunlight and pretend she was outside—because she had to go to the stacks and find those books.

She grabbed a cart and steered it back to the staff area. Jessop was a closed stack system, which meant that patrons weren’t allowed past the reading room. The seven floors of books were only accessible to staff, who had to pull everything. Even so, the stacks were a little too secure. To get back there, she had to use a staff key to unlock the door to the stacks and another key if she needed into the cages.

The smell of dust, faded ink, and old paper immediately surrounded her. There was no metallic tinge of technology back here, no hair-and-skin scent of other humans. In the stacks, Tess was alone, surrounded by ink and paper.

She was in a sour mood by the time she keyed herself into the cage on the first floor. This was her second-least favorite part of the stacks. On the first floor, there was barely any Wi-Fi and never any people. It was impossible to tell what noises were from the old building shifting and what were from a potential axe murderer coming to kill her in the depths of the library.

On the bright side, it wasn’t the basement. The basement cage was even worse.

Instead of focusing too much on the noises, Tess put in her headphones and flipped to the concerto she was practicing for Friday. She could wall herself off, imagine the movements of her own hands over the body of her cello as she worked. When she couldn’t hear any of her thoughts over the sound of Barber, she flipped to the first of the requests and began to search.

All the books were for the same patron: Birch, Eliot. Status: FUFAC. Really, it was unfortunate, Tess thought, that Falk leaned into the F-U branding.

It was like this. Person: Where do you go to school?

Tess: Falk. FUA Prep.

Person: Well, FU too!

Tess: withers in exhaustion.

The same thing, repeated over and over again. It didn’t matter that Falk was one of the best high schools in Pennsylvania. That nearly every graduate got a full ride to college for either academic achievement or from the trustees. It was always just FU.

And to make matters worse, Tess knew exactly who Eliot Birch, FUFAC, was. She could see the cruel curl of his thin upper lip and the glint in his brown eyes. Though she’d never heard his first name, Eliot Birch could be none other than Dr. Birch, the headmaster.

Unfortunately, Dr. Birch was one of the first people she’d met at the school. Tess and her sister Nat’s enrollment at Falk was the result of years of favors to Mathilde called in at once. Their presence broke multiple rules: no students admitted midterm, no students admitted without entrance exams, no scholarships awarded for the year past January. They were only here because of Mathilde’s flawless thirty-year record at the school and the board’s general respect for her.

It also wasn’t a secret that Tess didn’t fit in. She and Nat weren’t wealthy, like the regular kids. Nor was Tess anywhere near smart enough to be a scholarship student there, even if Nat was. If anything, Tess scraped by here and would’ve been out of luck if her roommate Anna hadn’t tutored her.

Based on her brief, tense meeting with Dr. Birch, it was clear no matter what Tess or Nat did to prove themselves, he would never think them worthy of places at his school.

But that was the arrangement they had. Tess and Nat were admitted to Falk based on nepotism alone—not that they didn’t have good grades back home, which they did, Nat especially. But grades were such a small factor in the decision of who was accepted into the school.

It was not a comfortable agreement, and she was reminded of that every time she had the misfortune of running into Dr. Birch. But she cared about Nat’s future, and so it she dealt with it.

At least, this time, she could take some enjoyment in the easy insult that was already there. Every time she added to the ridiculous Dr. Birch’s stack, who she considered to be one of the authors of her misery, she was rewarded with FUCK YOU FAC. Book one: Magyc and Ritual. Birch, Eliot. Fuck you too. Book two: Witches of Southern Wales. Birch, Eliot. Fuck you again, Birch. Book seven: Alchemy of the Stars. Birch, Eliot. Fuck you a thousand times to the Milky Way and back again.

By book twenty-three (Rituals of the British Isles), she was pretty certain the headmaster could feel the force of her annoyance from whatever hellhole he occupied around campus.

And she wasn’t even a quarter of the way through the request stack yet.

There were a million things she could’ve been doing: practicing the concerto for Friday, conducting in front of a mirror, checking in on Nat. All these options were more desirable than being in this cage, where she felt more trapped in this dull life than anywhere else on campus.

“Theresa?” Mathilde’s thin voice floated down the stairs in the silence between the concerto ending and beginning again.

Tess abandoned the books half-loaded into the dumbwaiter and ducked out of the cage. She could just see Mathilde’s thin, wrinkled ankles and orthopedic flats at the top of the stairs above her.

“I’m coming,” Tess called, pulling her headphones out and looping them around the back of her neck. She hurried up the stairs, stopping a couple of steps below Mathilde. “What do you need?”

“Are you busy?”

It took all of Tess’s effort not to roll her eyes. Of course she was busy.

“I can make some time,” she hedged.

 “A few requests came in.” She had another unbearable stack of papers in her hand.

It was one of those moments when Tess fantasized about quitting. She’d done this a few times, mostly during spring semester, when the sting of turning down her music scholarship and choosing Falk instead was still searing on her skin. But in the end, she’d made this choice months ago. Coming to Falk was the only way to make sure Nat’s future was taken care of.

Tess held her hand out for the stack. Mathilde passed it to her, saying, “Take your time.”

She glanced down at the name on the pages. Birch, Eliot. FUFAC.

Hopefully, Dr. Birch would find some sort of protection charm in the magical books he was requesting. Because if not, Tess was fairly certain that she was going to murder him.

She had to send the first round of books up the dumbwaiter to the cart so they wouldn’t be in an ungainly pile in the cage. Tess darted up the stairs to the cart and was passing the office supply closet when she noticed the boxes full of sticky notes.

Tess considered the closet. It would make her feel better to write down what she really thought, especially since she could just crumple up the notes and toss them later. And she had her favorite pen tucked behind her ear, already inked with California Teal.

She hated how awful she felt, both because of her job and her tenuous position at Falk. She hated even more that Birch had power over her—that everyone had power over her, and that she had so little of her own.

It would eliminate some of the tedium, at least. One reckless, wasteful thing that she would obviously clean up before there were consequences. Tess grabbed a stack of sticky notes.

When she got back down to the stacks with the notes, she didn’t hold back. Every few books got a bright yellow square with a new, horrid thought about Eliot Birch.

Eliot Birch is a fuckmonkey.

Eliot Birch’s family tree must be a cactus because everyone on it is a prick.

Eliot Birch’s birth certificate is an apology letter from the condom factory.

When she had Wi-Fi, she googled one-liners. When she didn’t, she entertained herself by coming up with the crassest insults she could imagine. By the time Mathilde called down to tell her that it was nearly 4:00, the carts of books were peppered with sticky notes of insults.

When Tess changed for Emiliano’s, she had a trace of a smile. She almost felt better about Dr. Birch as a human being.

Almost.

“What do you think they are?” Sven asks, nodding to the lights they don’t seem to be any closer to yet.

“Giant fireflies,” Lotte says with a secret thrill. “American fireflies.”

“Mastodons met—with bioluminescente tusks,” Sven says.

“Air jellyfish,” Lotte says, quieter, like a prayer.

“Isn’t there a tree fungus that’s fosforescerend?” Sven asks. “Being serious, nu.”

“Now,” Lotte corrects, still using her wispy-dreamy voice. “It’s the Indians. They’re painting their faces and their bodies for revolt.”

“Until John Wayne Gacy hears about it,” Sven says with enough confidence that Lotte has to giggle.

“It’s just John Wa—” she starts, doesn’t finish because Sven is jerking back from leaning over the side of the canoe, jerking back and pulling his hands up fast, something long stringing from it. He stands shaking it off, trying to, and the canoe overbalances, starts to roll. Instead of letting it, he dives off the other side, his Netherbits mostly hidden from the phone’s hungry eye.

He slips in almost without a sound, just one gulp and gone.

Alone on the canoe now, Lotte stands unsteadily, the back of her hand coming instantly up to her nose, her mouth—the smell from whatever stringy grossness Sven dragged in over the side.

She dry heaves, falls to her knees from it.

They’ve drifted into . . . what? A mat of algae? Lake scum? At this altitude, snow still in the ditches?

“Sven!” she calls to the blackness encroaching from all sides, now.

She covers herself with her arms, sits on her heels as best she can.

No Sven.

And now she knows what that smell has to be: fish guts. Some men from the town gutted a big haul of them over the side of their boat, the intestines and non-meaty parts adhering together with the congealing blood to make a gooey floating scab.

She coughs again, has to close her eyes to keep from throwing up.

Or maybe it wasn’t a whole net of fish—they can’t do that here in inland America, can they?—but one or two of the really big fish, pulled up from the very bottom of the lake. Sturgeon, pike, catfish?

Sven will know. His uncle is a fisherman.

“Sven!” she calls again, not liking this game.

Not necessarily in response to her call, probably more to do with his lung capacity, Sven surfaces maybe twenty feet to Lotte’s left.

“Gevonden—got it!” he’s yelling.

What he’s waving over his head is the bright white lid of the little cooler.

“Come back!” Lotte calls to him. “I don’t want to see the giant fireflies anymore!”

“Mastodons!” Sven yells back, clapping the lid on the water, the sound almost unbearably loud to Lotte, like drawing attention they don’t want. She looks to the lights on the far shore to see if they’re all turning this way.

She gathers her phone-balloon, shakes the camera so it’s facing her, and says into it in perfect English, “I hate you, Sven. I’m cold and scared and when you’re asking yourself what you did wrong, why you didn’t get any in the big state of Idaho, you can play this and you can know.”

Then she wedges the phone backwards half under the canoe’s bow deck, up against the stem—the pointy hidden corner at the front where you can stuff a ziplock baggie you’ve blown up and hidden a phone inside.

“Come to me!” Sven says. “I don’t want to touch that . . . that hair again!”

“It’s not hair!” Lotte calls back. “It’s fish gut—”

What stops her from finishing is the distinct sense that someone was just standing behind her. Which would be impossible, of course, since behind her there’s only the lake. Still, she whips around to the other end of the boat, certain there was a shadow there, just in her peripheral vision, already gone.

June 10, 1971

He didn’t like beating people.

El Elvis realized this was ironic considering his line of work. Imagine that: a thug who wanted to hold his punches. Then again, life is full of such ironies. Consider Ritchie Valens, who was afraid of flying and died the first time he set foot on an airplane. Damn shame that, and the other dudes who died, Buddy Holly and “The Big Bopper” Richardson; they weren’t half bad either. Or there was that playwright Aeschylus. He was afraid of being killed inside his house, and then he steps outside and wham, an eagle tosses a tortoise at him, cracking his head open. Murdered, right there in the most stupid way possible.

Often life doesn’t make sense, and if Elvis had a motto it was that: life’s a mess. That’s probably why he loved music and factoids. They helped him construct a more organized world. When he wasn’t listening to his records, he was poring over the dictionary, trying to memorize a new word, or plowing through one of those almanacs full of stats.

No, sir. Elvis wasn’t like some of the perverts he worked with, who got excited smashing a dude’s kidneys. He would have been happy solving crosswords and sipping coffee like their boss, El Mago, and maybe one day he would be an accomplished man of that sort, but for now there was work to be done, and this time Elvis was actually eager to beat a few motherf***ers up.

He hadn’t developed a sudden taste for blood and cracking bones, no, but El Güero had been at him again.

El Güero was a policeman before he joined up with Elvis’s group, and that made him cocky, made him want to throw his weight around. In practice being a poli meant shit because El Mago was the egalitarian sort who didn’t care where his recruits came from—­ex-­cops, ex-­military, porros, and juvenile delinquents were welcome as long as they worked right. But the thing was El Güero was twenty-­five, getting long in the tooth, and that was making him anxious. Soon enough he’d have to move on.

The chief requirement of a Hawk was he needed to look like a student so he could inform on the activities of the annoying reds infesting the universities—­Trotskos, Maoists, Espartacos; there were so many flavors of dissidents Elvis could barely keep track of all their organizations—­and also, if necessary, f*** up a few of them. Sure, there were important fossils, like El Fish, who was twenty­seven. But El Fish had been in one political shenanigan or another since he was a wee first-­year chemistry student; he was as professional as porros got. El Güero hadn’t achieved nearly as much. Elvis had just turned twenty-­one, and El Güero felt the weight of his age and eyed the younger man with distrust, suspecting El Mago was going to pick El Elvis for a plum position.

Lately El Güero had been making snide remarks about how Elvis was a marshmallow, how he never went on any of the heavy assignments and instead he was picking locks and taking pictures. Elvis did what El Mago asked, and if El Mago wanted him to pick the locks and snap photos, who was Elvis to protest? But that didn’t sway El Güero, who had taken to impugning Elvis’s masculinity in veiled and irritating ways.

“A man who spends so much time running a comb through his hair isn’t a man at all,” El Güero would say. “The real Elvis Presley is a hip-­shaking girlie-­man.”

“What you getting at?” Elvis asked, and El Güero smiled. “What you saying ’bout me now?”

“Didn’t mean you, of course.”

“Who’d you mean, then?”

“Presley, like I said. The f***ing weirdo you like so much.”

“Presley’s the king. Ain’t nothin’ wrong in liking him.”

“Yankee garbage,” El Güero said smugly.

And then, when it wasn’t that, El Güero decided to use an assortment of nicknames to refer to Elvis, none of which were his code name. He had a fondness for calling him La Cucaracha, but also Tribilín, on account of his teeth.

In short, Elvis was in dire need of asserting himself, of showing his teammates that he wasn’t no f***ing marshmallow. He wanted to get dirty, to put all those fighting techniques El Mago made them learn to good use, to show he was as capable as any of the other guys, especially as capable as El Güero, who looked like a f***ing extra in a Nazi movie, and Elvis had no doubts that his dear papa had been saying “heil” real merrily until he boarded a boat and moved his stupid family to Mexico. Yeah, El Güero looked like a Nazi and not any Nazi but a gigantic, beefy motherf***ing Nazi, and that’s probably why he was so pissed off, because when you look like a blond Frankenstein it’s not that easy to blend in with no one, and it’s much better to be a shorter, slimmer, little dark-­haired f***er like Elvis. That’s why El Mago kept El Güero for kidney-­smashing and he left the lock picking, the infiltrating, the tailing, to Elvis or El Gazpacho.

El Gazpacho was a guy who’d come from Spain when he was six and still spoke with a little bit of an accent, and it goes to show that you can be all European and pretty much fine because that dude was as nice as could be, while El Güero was a sadist and a bully with an inferiority complex a mile wide.

F***ing son of an Irma Grese and a Heinrich Himmler! F***er.

But facts were facts, and Elvis, only two years with this group, knew that as the most junior of the lot he had to assert himself somehow or risk being sidelined. One thing was clear: there was no f***ing way he was headed back to Tepito.

Therefore, it’s no surprise that Elvis was a bit nervous. They’d gone over the plan, and the instructions were clear: his little unit was to focus on snatching cameras from journalists who would be covering the demonstration. Elvis wasn’t sure how many Hawks would be coming in and he wasn’t quite sure what the other units would be doing, and really, it wasn’t like he was supposed to ask questions, but he figured this was a big deal.

Students were heading toward El Monumento a la Revolución, chanting slogans and holding up signs. From the apartment where Elvis and his group were sitting they could see them streaming toward them. It was a holy day, the feast of Corpus Christi, and he wondered if he shouldn’t go get communion after his work was over. He was a lapsed Catholic, but sometimes he had bouts of piousness.

Elvis smoked a cigarette and checked his watch. It was still early, not even five o’clock. He went over the word of the day. He did that to keep his mind sharp. They’d kicked him out of school when he was thirteen, but Elvis hadn’t lost his appreciation for certain types of learning, courtesy of his Illustrated Larousse.

The word of the day was gladius. He’d picked it because it was fitting. After all, the Hawks were organized in groups of a hundred, and they called the leaders of those groups “the centurions.” But there were smaller units. More specialized sub-­groups. Elvis belonged to one of those; a little goon squad of a dozen men headed by El Mago, further subdivided into three smaller groups with four men each.

Gladius, then. A little sword. Elvis wished he had a sword. Guns seemed less impressive now, even if he’d felt like a cowboy back when he first held one. He tried to picture himself as one of those samurais in the movies, swinging their katanas. Now wasn’t that something!

Elvis hadn’t known anything about katanas until he joined the Hawks and met El Gazpacho. El Gazpacho was all over the Japanese stuff. He introduced Elvis to Zatoichi, a super fighter who looked like a harmless blind man but who could defeat dozens of enemies with his expert moves. Elvis thought maybe he was a bit like Zatoichi because he wasn’t quite what he appeared to be and also because Zatoichi had spent some time hanging out with the yakuza, who were these crazy dangerous Japanese criminals.

Gladius. Elvis mouthed the word.

The grinding noise and vibration of the rumble strips under her passenger-side tires snapped Sunday to attention. Getting behind the wheel had been a bad idea. She tightened her grip at ten and two. Then she worked her eyes a bit, blinking and widening them, because a passing “Construction Ahead” sign briefly doubled. Her exit was coming up, just a few more minutes. She checked her speed and nudged the accelerator. Denny used to tell her the cops looked for cars going too slow, a sign of drunk driving.

She’d ordered an Uber, but the estimated time of arrival kept getting pushed back. Probably some Hollywood event going on, which always played havoc with the traffic. At some point she looked up from her phone to realize she’d been left alone with the bartender. That’s when she rushed out of there and decided to chance it.

It had been a last-minute invite that afternoon. Mia—or was it Maia?—another waitress who’d only been at the diner for a couple months, asked Sunday to come out for her birthday. She almost said no and went home. Like she did most nights. But if she went home she would open the email from Jackie and stare at the photo again, and that thought was too damn painful. She wanted to be anywhere other than her lonely apartment that night. So she’d gone to the annoying hipster bar with the LED ice cubes to attend a birthday party for a girl she barely knew.

She leaned forward in the driver’s seat and slowed her speed. This work zone was tricky. There were tight lines of orange barrels along both sides of the road, shifting lanes around in some random way. The lights on top of the barrels blurred and blended with the electric speed signs.

That bartender must have thought she was flirting with him because he’d been chatty, offered some cheesy compliment on her dimples. But she’d only been watching him pour her drinks, trying—and failing—to keep count. It was probably mixing alcohols that had put her over the edge. Denny would shake his head and call her an idiot. Her brother always said that was just asking for trouble.

Early in the night she’d had a get-to-know-you-better talk with Mia/Maia, and afterward Sunday had just wanted to quiet her mind for a while. Mia/Maia was turning twenty-four that day, soon to complete her graduate degree, and had recently gotten engaged. The diner job was just a stop-gap because her real life was about to start. Everything Sunday learned about the younger woman was a by-contrast commentary on her own life. If Jackie’s email had started her down Regret Road that morning, the conversation with Mia/Maia had sped up the trip.

When the world started to spin in a scary way, along with her stomach, she cursed herself again for drinking so much. What the hell had she been thinking—she knew better. She looked for a place to pull over but there was none. She didn’t know what the hell this road project was about, but her car was pinned in between the barrels, which seemed to be taking her through a maze. The swirl of lights and painted lines in the wrong places on the road only made it harder to thread the needle. She bumped up against one of the barrels on her right side and the car jerked back and forth a bit before she steadied the wheel.

All she had to do was make it home. Her exit was up ahead, though it was difficult to spot the turnoff among the sea of orange markers. She’d drink a gallon of water, down a couple ibuprofen, and head straight to bed. No detour to the laptop. No opening Jackie’s email again.

When a concrete barrier materialized before her out of thin air she slammed on the brake with both feet. She heard the roaring squeal of tires, felt the violent resistance of her old Toyota as the seat belt dug into her chest and shoulder. But she knew it was too late.

Another Denny-ism came to her: “You have fucked this up on a grand scale.”

Then she slammed into concrete and everything went black.

August 23, 1912

My Darling Jakey,

​I gave you his name. He gave you his eyes and that swirl of fair hair. I suspect your chin is mine, however, and I suppose that’s as it should be. Your father towered, remarkable and alone, over everyone we knew and certainly over my heart. There can be no true living reflection of such a man left, not even you.

​As I write, you’re nestled in your bassinet, so tiny and tranquil. Whenever the breeze from the nursery window swells the lace curtains, scented of horses and muggy summer rain, your lips purse into something I fancy is a smile—one that strikes me to the bone. I am filled with both astonishment and despair to think that you will never know Jack, nor he you. Even these four months later, the truth of it will still steal up on me, as surprising and damning as a blow from behind: Jack will never see that dimpled smile, or celebrate your first steps, or fall in love with the shape of your toes or the burble of your laughter. And you, my own brilliant miracle of a son, will never have a single memory of him.

​Yet my mind overflows with memories. I am a waterfall of memories of Jack; I drown in them; and so for your sake, and perhaps for my own peace, I will write down what I can for you now. Someday—some faraway day—I will hand these pages to you, and my memories will become your own.

​I won’t begin with our ending, which everyone in the world knows anyway: that jet satin night, the slight rumbly tremble that shook me in our bed—like it was nothing, like the ship had briefly and inexplicably sailed over a field of stones. The groggy minutes spent getting dressed, my body heavy with five months of you and the unyielding desire for more sleep.

​Making our way above deck. Watching the panic begin to wheel, stronger and stronger, through the masses, until the shoving and screaming had consumed everything the North Atlantic had not.

​Being helped through the slant of that promenade window, teetering at its brink. Your father’s hands, hard and certain, pushing me along. Women moaning, crying, stretching out their arms to their men left behind on the ship. Trying to find a place in that lopsided little lifeboat—

​Well. I suppose I’ve begun with our ending, after all. But as I said, everyone already knows it, has shed their tears over it and offered their (copious and entirely uninvited) opinions about it. Our beginning, however, belonged only to us.

​And it was sublime.

​He had been noticing me for weeks. I felt his gaze whenever we happened to be at the same garden party or concert, or riding through the same park or visiting the same club. Colonel Jack Astor was likely the richest man in America, and difficult to miss. Missing the force of his gaze was more difficult still—a calm lucid gray, clear as a winter dawn.

​(I made the mistake once of telling him so. He laughed, bussed me on the cheek, and called me infatuated. I do think I was more subtle than that. I did say winter.)

​Your grandmother drifted about in spasms of hope. Your grandfather was more pragmatic but no less optimistic. It didn’t seem to bother either of them that Jack was divorced and nearly thirty years older than I.

​“He would be fortunate to have you,” my father said.

​“Do not contradict anything he says,” commanded my mother.

​“He has said practically nothing to me so far beyond how do you do,” I pointed out, but we all three knew it was merely a matter of time and opportunity for that to change. I was young, but not that young; I’d already been escorted to picnics and teas by a clutch of interested fellows. I knew what that clear, steady gaze of Colonel Astor’s meant.

​He invited us for a weekend at his cottage in Bar Harbor, even though we summered at our own—far more modest!—residence in town. It was a penny-bright August in Maine, and everything was scented of honeysuckle and cut grass and the salty strong sea. We were not the colonel’s only guests during those few days, but it seemed by the attention of the servants and splendor of our rooms that we were the ones who mattered.

​There was a dance to attend, and seven-course meals, and a trip around the harbor upon Jack’s steam yacht Noma (I did get seasick, but I believe I managed to successfully hide it). We played games of whist and croquet, poker for the gentlemen. The hours spun out, lazy and golden, and nearly all of them remain a blur to me except for one singular moment.

​Mother and Father and Katherine were resting after Saturday’s luncheon. The colonel was to take us on an automobile ride along the coast later on, and Mother had wanted to look her best for it—because even then, we were shadowed by the press. I considered myself already at my best, and lying about in bed in my corset and all my hairpins for an hour sounded interminable. I’d slipped away as soon as she’d started snoring.

​And so I was seated alone in a corner of the brass-and-mahogany citadel of the cottage’s library, flipping through the pages of what I suspected to be a book of Grecian poetry. I was the successful product of a proper finishing school, but Latin was my strength. Beyond the most basic alphabet, I did not speak or read Greek. I was instead studying the strangely emphatic flow of the letters, the structure of the stanzas, guessing at sounds and meanings, when I sensed that he had entered the chamber.

​Thinking back on it, I realize now he must have been stalking me a bit, waiting for the perfect instant to encounter me alone, and normally I would have been both flattered and prepared. He was, after all, the reason I was there. But as soon as I realized he was walking toward me, all I could think was, Oh, no.

​I wished, with all my heart, that I had any other book in my hands but the one I did. If he asked me about it, I’d either have to lie and say, yes, indeed, Grecian poetry was so divinely brilliant . . . or else admit that, like a toddler, I was merely entranced with the pretty shapes.

​I looked up as he approached, tall and angular and so sharply handsome, his pale brown hair combed flat against his skull, his moustache neatly trimmed.

​“May I?” he asked, gesturing to the burgundy leather chair opposite mine.

​“Please do.” I closed the book and turned it over, so that the title and author were hidden against the folds of my skirt.

​He sat. He crossed his legs. The sun-pebbled sea in the window behind him shot platinum along his hair and starched collar and the taupe serge of his lounge coat.

​As I said, he was older than I, but in that moment, with light gleaming so bold and blinding behind him, he might have been a young man on the verge of his first brush with courtship.

​He cocked his head, met my eyes directly.

​“How lovely you are, Miss Force.”

​I looked down at my lap as I had been taught, and murmured, “Thank you.”

“And how opaque.”

​That made me look up again. Opaque? Was it a compliment?

​The colonel smiled. “Like no woman I’ve ever known before. Your mind is a mystery to me.”

“Oh,” I said, “sometimes it is to me, as well! But I’m not really very mysterious, I’m afraid.”

He leaned back his head and laughed. I felt the sudden spark of the power of that, of making a man like John Jacob Astor laugh in genuine amusement. Of making him react. It rushed like lightning through my veins, hellish and bright.

I think, from that instant, we were both doomed.