I felt good. No one knew me. No one was judging my clothes… or if they did, it wouldn’t reflect on anyone but me, and I didn’t care.

I didn’t have to eat when other people were eating or wear anyone else’s clothes. I didn’t have to follow anyone else’s schedule, and best of all—I didn’t have to make small talk with anyone.

At Tulsa, I changed trains with only a two-hour wait. I had found the ticket in my bag. I had only spent a little of Clayton’s money on food.

What did I think about during this long trip?

I tried not to think about anything, but that wasn’t possible.

I wondered if Eli was still alive. I was pretty sure he was. I had a reasonable amount of hope he would recover, since he’d been showing signs of life so soon after the spell had hit him.

Pretty sure Veronika would never speak to me again. I could bear up under that. Maybe after a while I could write Lucy, and after longer, Alice.

I wondered if Felix had stayed away because he knew what was going to happen. Or maybe he’d just skipped the last event because he was going to be a father. Maybe both.

I bought a paper in Dallas.

Everyone in the German contingent was dead. Hitler had had a drastic response to the loss of such a big chunk of his magical community. He had invaded a piece of Poland and hunted down every magician in it. He had killed every single one he could find, including Agnieszka’s family.

The list of the injured included Eli. The attached article said he was recuperating at his family home, and that his wife had been reported missing, presumed dead.

Wait. What?

“She rushed to the ferry to get help from the mainland,” Veronika McMurtry, wife of the tsarina’s aide, Captain Ford McMurtry, told our representative.

“That ferry was swamped by a wave, and her friend Harriet Ritter saw my daughter-in-law go overboard. She has been missing since then. I fear she perished.”

Well, that was… convenient. I had figured Harriet would want to kill me for having exposed Soo-Yung (and herself) to such peril. Then I realized I hadn’t seen Harriet that night. Had she been there at all? Or had Veronika somehow tracked Harriet and suggested she could help me out?

“I fear she perished” my right foot.

I got home the next day. I walked from Sweetwater, and it was quite a distance.

I could not think how to call someone to come get me without explaining a lot of things I didn’t yet understand.

It felt good to get the exercise, after San Diego.

I knocked on my mother’s front door that night.

I had hoped to make it up to my cabin, but I had to stop.

My mother’s face when she saw me was like that of someone who’d gotten a ticket to heaven. She hugged me, and she cried, and she called to Jackson, and baby Sam started crying, and it was perfect to be there.

When I’d explained enough to let myself off for a while, and my mother had given me a huge sandwich, and my stepfather had patted me on the back in a big burst of emotion (for him), and I’d held Sam until he fell asleep again, I went to bed on a cot in Sam’s room.

That was the nicest thing that could have happened to me.

No kidding, I slept like a baby. For most of the night and the next day.

Then I got up, ate as much of my mother’s cooking as I could stuff into my stomach, enjoyed every bite, and went to sleep again.

My mother gave me the telegrams the next morning. “They were for you, but the telegraph boy knew you weren’t in town, so he brought them here,” she said. “I didn’t know whether I ought to read them or not. I didn’t, but if you hadn’t shown up in a couple more days, I would have ripped them open.”

I nodded. “Would have been fine.” I took a deep breath and opened them myself.

The first one said, He’s going to mend. I didn’t know . It was signed “Felix.”

The first sentence made me very glad. Eli and I had both tried, I saw that now, and it just hadn’t worked.

Maybe if I hadn’t lost the baby, maybe if he hadn’t always had that bit of hope he could return to his place at court…

but maybes don’t amount to a hill of beans.

We had loved each other. I had had that.

The second one said, Made it here, F and J and his mom here, too .

It was signed, “S.” I knew many people whose names began with F, but I had only one sister.

I couldn’t figure out how she’d gotten to New York before I made it back to Segundo Mexia, or met up with Fenolla, Jason Featherstone, and his mom. But I would worry about that later.

Possibly she hadn’t gone to New York at all.

The third one was from Harriet. We’re even was the whole message. I’d killed those men for her, she’d “witnessed” me getting washed overboard to keep the heat off me. And maybe so that Eli could declare me legally dead sooner. That was four lives for one, but I wasn’t going to quibble.

“Thanks, Mother,” I said. “I can’t tell you the whole story right now, until I know if someone’s going to come looking for me.” I’d told her what Felicia had done, and that Eli and I had come to a parting of the ways. That was enough.

My mother, still beautiful, still with only a tiny thread or two of gray in her hair, was changing Sam’s diaper.

She’d had to work all through my infancy and for years after.

When I’d been a baby, her parents had kept me every day while she taught school.

Mother had made the big decision to retire when she’d found she was pregnant this time, and Jackson was all for it.

The new schoolteacher, Miss Widmark, was only twenty-two and the object of a lot of attention among the local men.

Mother laughed and said she’d done Segundo Mexia a favor by retiring, so a single woman could take her place.

“Honey, you tell me what you can, when you can.” She pinned the diaper expertly.

“I am only glad you are home. I know this is a painful time for you, and I’m sorry.

But you’re only twenty-one, and you have many years ahead of you. ” She gave me a beautiful smile.

“I’m half-mad at Felicia, and I’m half-frightened for her. I don’t know where she is, or what she’ll do, but I know she’ll be in this war.”

“That’s her say-so. It seems pretty clear she’s declared herself an adult, and it’s pretty clear she’s going to make her own decisions.

It also stands to reason some of those decisions are going to be bad ones, dangerous ones, or both.

That’s her nature, Lizbeth. She was never going to think things through like you do.

I like the girl, but she is who she is.”

There was so much truth in this. I knew in time I would not worry so much about Felicia.

My mother was right: my sister would do what she would do, and nothing I could say or do, even if I were right on the spot, would change that.

I knew that now. She had not even given Eli and me adequate warning before she and her friends let loose hell.

We might have looked like we’d be okay, at the back of the circled crowd.

But that was only a “looked like.” Felicia simply hadn’t wanted to risk us stopping her.

And I figured she hadn’t wanted any of the Germans to escape, so she had attacked as quickly and thoroughly as she could.

To accomplish that, no one except her teen accomplices could know.

I picked up the duffel bag I’d carried along for so many miles. “Heading up the hill,” I said. “Going home.”

Mother smiled at me over Sam’s shoulder. “Pretty soon he’ll be able to say ‘bye-bye’ when his sister leaves.”

“I can hardly wait,” I said. And I meant it.

Four weeks later, I was on my way home from hunting.

I had gotten three rabbits, which would make a good stew.

I knew I had an onion in my larder, but I was wondering about carrots.

I’d come up the back of the hill, and when I got to the top and walked around my cabin, I found someone sitting at my picnic table.

“Clayton Ashley Dashwood,” I said. “I bet you never thought you’d come to Segundo Mexia twice in your life.” I fetched a piece of wood and threw it on the table. Kept the blood off the surface. I threw the rabbits on it and got out my skinning knife.

“Oh, I knew I’d come back to Segundo Mexia,” he said, perfectly at ease. “I had to wait awhile, because I wanted you to have time to recover.”

“From my drowning death?”

“That, and other things. You look good for a dead woman.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I’m going to set to on these rabbits. Would you see if I have any carrots on the shelf in the kitchen? I couldn’t remember as I was coming home. I should have an onion or two.”

“The door’s unlocked?”

I appreciated him not trying the knob.

“It is. My neighbors always know if someone’s at my house. They keep an eye.” Especially since I’d started giving Chrissie’s boys a nickel a week to be my warning system.

“The two boys? I thought they were going to tie me down and start asking questions,” Clayton called from inside the cabin.

“That’s what I pay ’em for.”

Clayton was smiling when he came out, three carrots and the onion in his hands.

Doesn’t take long to cut up rabbits, and in thirty minutes I had the meat, carrots, and onion in the pot with some salt and pepper and a little spring water, which I’d add to from time to time if the liquid got low.

I threw in some cilantro my mother had grown, and some dill I’d gotten from her, too.

Time to put it on the stove. The glowing coals fanned up into a small flame pretty quickly.

It was cool enough at night to cook in the house, made it pleasant.

I was at a loss after I’d finished that task and cleaned my hands. But Clayton wasn’t.

“You got any cornbread to go with that?” he asked.

“You bring some?”

He laughed. “No, but I can make some if you’ve got the cornmeal.”

“I do.” I watched, wondering, as Clayton Dashwood made cornbread in my kitchen and put it in the oven.