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“And then you met John Colson?” I guessed.

“The innkeeper’s son.” She nodded, passing me a washcloth, a nailbrush, a bar of soap. “He promised me a lot of things, let me tell you. He were a Crafter, through and through. But I always thought he might’ve had an Artisan’s imagination. He was always makin’ somethin’ out of nothin’. He promised me an easier life. A life free of the mines. He’d take over his family’s wasted business, sell his inventions and oddities on the side. Our children would never step foot beneath ground, he promised.” Tess shook her head. “I was a fool, and I believed him. I had always prayed for daughters, but when Gunner came, then Patrick and Donny, all I wanted was to keep them out of the mines.”

I braced myself. I knew the ending to this story already.

“But you can’t rise above the mines out here in the brink,” Tess stared out the window, eyes glazed. “It’s not designed that way for us Crafters. The money is always too tight. By the time Gunner came of age, we weren’t a penny better off than the day we’d married. Colson & Sons was barely holdin’ on, and there wasn’t any other choice but for Gunner to go into that damned pit with his father.” Here Tess’s lip trembled, just as it had downstairs when her eldest son turned his back. “There was a collapse on his very first day. Did Patrick tell you that?” she asked.

I shook my head, my heart pounding hard enough to disrupt the bathwater.

“That’s why he is the way he is,” Tess closed her eyes. “Got stuck in an air pocket and almost died. His father kicked his way through a wall and dragged him out. And you know the cruelest thing in all of it, Nina? The worst part is—”

“They have to go back down the next day,” I answered. “And cheat death again.”

She nodded, jaw tense. “Most of the men here, they’d never admit it, but they spend most of their lives afraid. Afraid of the dark, of small spaces. Their lot in life is to live and work in fear. For Crafter women, we live our lives listenin’ for the whistles, the sirens. We make plans for whatwill happen to us after our fathers and husbands die.” Tess shook her head as the corners of her eyes grew wet. She blinked away the tears. “I don’t envy the Artisans their dresses and parties any longer. But I envy them their sons and daughters, who’ll never step foot in a pit. I envy them their clearheaded men. I envy them the ease of sleep.” She sighed. “I owe you my sleep tonight, Nina. You saved my son.” She didn’t look at me as she said it.

“You don’t need to thank me,” I told her. Something oily and foul slithered into my stomach as I said it, reminding me of what I’d once intended to do to Kenton Hill.

Tess wiped her eyes, dried her hands in her apron and stood. “Patty… I think he might be in love with you. Has he said as much to you yet?”

I pressed my lips together and said nothing, staring at the reflection of the light on the water.

“He will,” Tess told me. “You ought to start preparin’ your response now. Once that boy sets his sights on somethin’, mountains won’t move him.”

“He asked me to stay,” I admitted, sinking a few inches deeper into the bath.

“Hmm,” Tess mumbled. I wasn’t brave enough to observe her expression. “Then I’d ask you to break his heart sooner rather than later, if indeed, you intend to break it.”

My eyes snapped to hers. “I don’t intend to.”

“Good,” she said, grinning slightly. “I doubt he’ll let you leave now, in any case. I’ve never seen him so infatuated.”

“I think I mostly infuriate him.”

“Trust me, darlin’, he’s always lookin’ at you, even when you think he’s not.”

I looked down at the water again, holding back a smile. It still seemed unbelievable that I should be the one to enthrall a man as enthralling as Patrick.

Tess sighed. “You should know he’s intent on seein’ this war throughto its end, come what may. A smart woman would factor that into their decision-makin’. He won’t be convinced to sit it out, especially after comin’ this far.”

I nodded. “He is determined to rescue your husband.”

“My husband is gone,” she said. And it was not cutting, or bitter, or devastating. It simply was. The ghosts in her eyes swirled on. “He was dead the moment he founded the Miners Union, Nina. There ain’t a damn thing waiting for my son in that city but more blood. And he won’t stop until he’s won or he’s dead.”

It was a story with a sad ending no matter the outcome. She read from it as though it were imprinted on the walls of her chest, a future she couldn’t avoid. “It ain’t our lot in life to live easy, Nina,” she said. “Men like Patrick die young, and the people who love ’em live on without ’em.”

She retrieved clothes from the wardrobe and laid them on the bed. She looked back at me one last time. “Don’t fall asleep in that water. Best you get out soon.” Then she left, taking her ghosts with her.

She’s wrong about men like Patrick, I thought.

She’s wrong about women like me.

The bathwater became still as a lake, monsters hiding beneath the surface.

CHAPTER 47PATRICK

All the people who’d gone under the mud came back up. Four came up dead.

Their bodies were with their families, in their kitchens or laid out on their beds, the grievers sobbing, whispering prayers on their knees on the sides of corpses.