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I’m shaking when I come back downstairs. All through dinner, I think of Weston’s portrait, dread filling my gut. His image looks slightly different since I last saw it—there’s a crueler turn to his lips, a malicious gleam in his eyes that wasn’t there before. I’m glad, suddenly, that it won’t just be Marguerite and me alone in this house tonight, that we’ll be surrounded by the bustle of my family. I’m afraid. Terrified. What was I thinking, all those nights, when I gave myself to him, when I took an entity for my lover?

The thought of it sickens me now.

I raise my wineglass to my lips—from a bottle of 1918 merlot I found in the kitchen pantry and eagerly uncorked—my food barely touched. Beckett looks at me from across the table, his forehead creased with worry. I’ve never had a poker face. I should tell him about the portrait after dinner. Have him help me destroy it.

Later, while Beckett resumes entertaining my little cousins, I air out two adjoining bedrooms on the second floor, the largest for Louise and the children and the smaller for Pauline. I open the windows and shake out quilts as Pauline watches from the doorframe.

“I saw that man looking at you, at dinner,” she says. “Beckett. Do the two of you have something going on?”

“No. We don’t. Not that it’s any of your business.”

Pauline frowns. “I just worry.”

“Why?” I fluff the pillows, ignoring the implication in her words.

“Because I know how you are , Sadie.”

I whirl on her. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

She shrugs. “You should be more careful, is all. With your reputation. It reflects poorly on your family.”

I laugh. “I’ll never go back to Kansas City. You needn’t worry about my reputation soiling yours.”

“But people still talk , Sadie. I haven’t had a single suitor since things came out about you and Ted.”

I smooth the coverlet over and over with my palm, considering my words carefully. I could choose to be as petty as her. I could cut her in any number of ways—from insulting her looks (which she can’t help) to criticizing her abhorrent personality (which she can) as reasons for her lack of suitors, but I choose not to. Instead, I smile at her. “It’s just a matter of time, Pauline. The right one will come along. You’re still quite young.”

“I’m twenty-five. They’re already calling me a spinster.” She crosses her arms in front of her, her frown deepening. “Do you know what Aunt Laura told Mama, the week before she died? She said she was ...” Pauline pauses, eyes searching the corners of the room. “Oh, it doesn’t matter. I shouldn’t tell you.”

“What, Pauline? My mother was what?”

Pauline sucks in her lip. “She was ashamed, Sadie. Ashamed of you. She told Mama she couldn’t believe how far you’d fallen, to take up with a married man. She said that worrying over you would be the death of her.”

The words cut into me like thorns. Part of me pushes back—disbelieving that my sweet, caring mother would ever say such a thing about one of her children—but then I remember her words to me, when the truth came out. Words I’ll never forget. He’s covered you in shame, Sadie. I raised you for better than this. And she had, just as my grandmother had raised her , despite the dark secrets Grandmother had kept hidden from all of us.

A secret that now sits on my dresser, with hungry, heartless eyes.

“I don’t believe you,” I say to Pauline. “I think you’re making things up to be mean. To hurt me.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because you’ve always hated me. Louise does, too, but at least she has the grace to hide it behind a smile.”

“I don’t hate you, Sadie. I pity you. You’re just ...” Pauline sighs dramatically. “You’re just so loose .”

I flinch, hearing such a crass word fall from my prim cousin’s lips, but then I laugh, my lingering kindness taking flight. “And you’re a prude. Perhaps that’s why you can’t find a beau, dear cousin. They take one look at you and know your bed would be a cold, barren desert.” Her mouth drops open. “Tomorrow morning, I want you gone. All of you. You can tell Louise. I’ll have Beckett drive you to the station.”

Pauline’s sallow face flares with pinpricks of red. “Louise says you’re only here because you want Aunt Marg’s money. This house,” she sputters. “She and Felix have been talking. He thinks the same thing.”

“Oh? Is that so? Well, I don’t see anyone else in this family willing to give up their precious lives for Aunt Marg’s sake. Not even one of you. Think of me what you will, Pauline. I care very little about your opinions. I never have.”

I storm out of the room, my anger souring the wine in my stomach. You’re just so loose. The word is vulgar. Offensive in what it implies. I was a flapper, yes. I’d flirted, gone to petting parties, had a handful of lovers before Ted, worked at a supper club with a topless cabaret. But I’m hardly the harlot they imagine me to be.

Not that it matters. Even if I’d been as chaste and prudish as Pauline, in my family’s eyes, I’d always be a nothing. A nobody.

I’m halfway down the stairs when I smell smoke. I pause on the landing, sniffing. It’s coming from above me. The attic. Marguerite. With Beckett occupied with the children and the hubbub over bedroom arrangements, no one was watching her. I take the steps two at a time, flinging open the attic door. The unmistakable flicker of flames reflects on the ceiling.

“Beckett!” I scream, covering my nose with my apron as smoke rolls toward me. “Help! Fire!”

I stumble upward, heat accosting me. Through the smoke, I glimpse Marguerite standing in front of my dresser, a bottle of turpentine in her hand, watching as Weston’s portrait burns, flames darting toward the dry lath above us. Time seems to slow to a crawl as I push her out of the way and grab the covers from my bed, throwing them over the burning painting. It falls to the floor, still smoldering beneath the quilts. I stomp the flames out and then turn to the wall, where tendrils of fire are beginning to catch. I remember my basin full of wash water from this morning, and haul it out of the washstand, water splashing over the rim and cascading over my arms as I rush back across the room to douse the flames. They die with a wet sizzle, and I collapse onto the edge of my bed, my legs shaking. Marguerite sits next to me, calm as a windless sea.

“Are you hurt?” I ask, looking her over. No burns, at least none that I can see in the dim light.

“I’m just fine,” she says. She gestures at the sodden mess on the floor. “That should have been done a long time ago.”

“Maybe,” I concede, “but not inside the house. You could have killed us all, Aunt Marg.”

“I had things well under control, my girl. Well under hand.”

I coax the bottle of turpentine away from her—the same bottle Beckett procured in town earlier this week. Another thing I’ll have to hide, as well as the matches she must have found somewhere to start the fire.

Footsteps clatter up the attic steps. My cousins and Beckett burst into the smoky murk, eyes bouncing from me to Marguerite to the smoldering mess on the floor. The space reeks of turpentine.

“What happened?” Louise asks while Pauline merely scowls at me over her shoulder.

“Aunt Marg decided one of her paintings wasn’t to her liking,” I say lightly. “So she burned it.”

“Oh. Oh my .” Louise’s eyes widen. For a moment, I think she might faint, but Pauline goes to her, fanning her hand in front of her face. Louise slaps her away in annoyance.

Beckett crosses to my side, helps me to my feet. At his touch, reality comes crashing down. I might have died. Marguerite might have. My knees tremble, my heart racing as delayed panic overtakes me, stealing my breath. “I need air,” I pant. “I can’t breathe. Louise, Pauline, can you take Aunt Marg downstairs? Stay with her. Please.”

Beckett leads me outside, onto the front veranda, my head pounding from the acrid smoke. The air is cool, soothing. He guides me to the porch swing and sits next to me, rocking us slowly back and forth until my breathing steadies and my heart resumes its normal cadence.

“I’m moving into the house, Sadie,” Beckett says. “I won’t hear anything else about it. If you hadn’t ...”

“I know.” If I hadn’t noticed the smoke when I did ... if I’d lingered even just a moment longer, the outcome might have been tragic.

“I’ll take one of the bedrooms across the hall from Marguerite,” he says. “I’m a light sleeper. I’ll hear her if she gets up.”

“Thank you. I’d ... feel better having you here.”

“I’d have done so weeks ago if you’d allowed it.”

“I shouldn’t have been so stubborn,” I say. “I’m sorry. I thought I had something to prove.”

“It’s all right. We’re both a little proud. A little stubborn. I think it’s time to be done with all that, don’t you?” He takes my hand, the warmth of his touch grounding me. “You were very brave tonight.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“You thought so quickly.”

“It was so strange,” I say. “Time seemed to slow down.”

“I’ve had that sort of thing happen to me before, as well. My little brother fell from the stone wall by our cottage when he was five, busted his head on a rock. There was so much blood. It was just a surface wound, but I thought he was dying. Still, I stayed calm and did what needed to be done, just like you did. Everything slowed to a crawl—as if time was giving me momentary grace to think. To act.”

“It’s such an odd thing, isn’t it? Time. I often wonder if we’re only imagining its passing—whether we’re all still bumbling around in the past somewhere, replaying our scenes like a cinema film.” I think of all the places I’ve been with Weston, where the others we encountered seemed just as full of life and vitality as the people in our time. “It would be a form of immortality, wouldn’t it?”

He hums in agreement. We sway back and forth for a few moments in silence, listening to the cicadas sing. I see the parlor curtain twitch, and spy Pauline’s baleful eyes glaring out at us. The curtain quickly drops back into place.

“Beckett?”

“Hmm?”

“They already think we’re an item. My cousins. We might as well be, don’t you think?”

He laughs, a low rumble. “You’ve had too much wine, Sadie. We’ll see how you feel after you’ve sobered up.”

I allow my head to drop against his shoulder, the tension between us melting, at long last. My eyelids begin to grow heavy. At some point, I feel myself being lifted and carried, then hear the squeak of a screen door and the slam that follows. I’m nestled somewhere comfortable and warm, covers pulled around me. The click of a light, and then the darkness wraps me in silence.

The dream feels real ... so real that I smell the scent of sage, wafting toward me on a fitful breeze. I hear waves crashing against a shore but can’t see their source. I look around, trying to get a sense of time and place. Perhaps I’m in France, or Italy, somewhere in the Mediterranean—places I’ve only been to with Weston in our nocturnal ramblings through the past. I walk along a sandy, narrow path, my feet floating above the ground. A woman stands in the distance, silhouetted against the dusky sky, her long skirt buffeted by the wind. As I near her, she turns. It’s young Marguerite, but something is terribly wrong. Tears run freely from her eyes, a look of anger and immense pain lashed across her face. Her dress is stained crimson and a bloody knife lies at her feet. She points past the edge of the precipice she stands on, beckoning me to look. I come closer. The sea crests in satiny waves to the shore, its sound a soft whisper in my ears.

Where the smooth sandy sides of the dunes give way to the rocky escarpment below, a woman’s body lies broken, her long copper-colored hair streaming in the breaking tide. It’s Aunt Claire. Marguerite’s mouth opens in a bloodcurdling scream.