There was a streetcar waiting down Colorado Boulevard. It was bound northward, glistening red and gilded with the letters of Pacific Electric emblazoned on each side. The trolley Sadie rode up from Los Angeles only the day before had also been a Pacific Electric vessel. These were a common sight and a smattering of color on major thoroughfares between Los Angeles and its foothill cities to the north. A man named Huntington held their monopoly, which made him another west coast millionaire with riches to rival Carnegie and Vanderbilt. The trolleys, powered by electricity, were the link between the foothills and the larger rail networks that had stretched to tame the entire continent under the weight of iron and steel.

Given a window seat, Sadie stuck her head out of the opening, marveling at life’s capacity to cut suddenly and jaggedly away from straight lines. The street car’s route, however, was perfectly linear, taking them past town and then through the fields a few miles north. It was late for the poppies, but there was still a smattering of marigolden blooms just below the mountains. The streetcar window framed strokes of orange and gold that fused with the green peeking through.

The ride took them to Rubio Canyon, just below Mount Lowe, named for another locomotive man who had put his fortune into constructing a mountain track network, including the ascent awaiting them. The tracks ascended vertically at a steep grade, scaling directly up the mountain face at a 62 degree angle. The vessel that would transport them upwards was an open-air funicular, paused at the base of the mountain to board passengers. With three levels open to the elements, and a low railing at each, it promised a vertiginous ascent which would transpire over the course of six agonizing—breathtaking—minutes.

“How’s that for an opera box?” Jasper joked. Sadie did not quite know what he meant, as she had never been to the opera.

“That’s how we’re getting up,” Nathaniel explained, grinning, as Sadie stared open-mouthed at the contraption.

They had to cram into the car, a quantity of people which seemed far too dense for the small funicular opera box, but no one seemed concerned about the weight which was about to travel up such a height. Nathaniel escorted Sadie to the lowest level which had the clearest view of the valley. The three squeezed in together and soon the little box moved upward, diagonally, at an angle that defied nature, logic, and all possible human feelings of safety. At first, Sadie hid her eyes from the view, a sweltering vertigo threatening to pound the borrowed hat off her head.

“Don’t close your eyes!” Jasper urged. “The view’s better than any fear you might be feeling.”

She didn’t believe him, but she listened. She opened her eyes, felt her head leer as she grasped the top of the railing, and watched the valley fall away while her body fought against gravity. She felt the ascent pull her heart into her throat and was wracked by a suffocating sense of distance—a helpless, all-encompassing breathlessness.

“Isn’t it something?” Jasper asked.

“It’s something,” Nathaniel agreed.

The two were banking on Sadie’s eyes staying glued to the rapidly descending scenery as their gradual swoop upwards heightened the pressure in her head. But they hadn’t accounted for the shock of glee which overcame her once she’d accepted that the ride would be smooth.

She turned towards them, suddenly, eager to match her strange-feeling smile to the merriment on someone else’s face. But she found only bewilderment mirrored back upon glimpsing Nathaniel’s hand placed gently on Jasper’s shoulder. He remedied the gesture by patting Jasper boyishly on the back and murmuring preeningly, “This was an excellent idea, Lennox.” But there was something suddenly less fluid in their interactions. Uncertain of what was the matter, Sadie turned back to the view and squinted towards the horizon and saw waves of green and gold stretch all the way to a dark and distant blue. A haze hung over the coast, offering a greyish mist between a visible reality and the unknown or unacknowledged beyond. That grey churned something murky in Sadie’s soul into a crisp stream of clarity.

Maybe people were simple in their profundity, she thought, if all it took was finding a high place to look down upon a situation in order to gain some semblance of perspective. Maybe seeing how small the world could look from afar made its hills and valleys seem surmountable. And of course, the haze rimming her own thoughts and feelings came from a sustained disbelief that she should be precisely where she was. Time had been a persnickety ally. How could it be possible to forget nineteen years in one afternoon? How could rewriting one’s destiny—overriding one’s past—be so immediate and omnipotent? There was a blessed curse in the efficiency of human adaptability.

As they continued to rise, Sadie began to see a world larger than she had ever known. The same straight streets she’d traversed with Jasper ad Nathaniel stretched all the way to the edge of the continent, or perhaps even the edge of the world, which was veiled in the haze and mystery that hovered above that faraway blue. Though the haze obscured the distinction between sea and sky, the mountain beneath them was more real than it had ever been while gazing upon it from below to pick out the outlines of slumbering griffins curled up protectively against the valley.

It was Califia’s view. Something regal and queenly settled over the crown of mist ringing the valley and the coast. From so high above, one could see things from beyond—or at least outside of—a human perspective. This was the territory of the gods or the guardians, and it felt as sanctimonious as it felt sacrilegious to tread upon their unsettled earth. It was easier to feel that from up above, Sadie figured, as being on the ground gave less of a sense of the dust beneath the civilization constructed on top of it, or the lives that had come first, or the natural way of things. What was California but an idea, a corner of a continent fought for and won by players in a game of ownership and make believe. Made-up laws had written it into Statehood, as part of a country that was just another penned set of values applied conditionally to a select, bloodthirsty brotherhood. Califia and her bountiful, fecund fields and valleys had been far too obliging. Sadie wanted a different fate for the Amazon queen, for the griffins to rise up and fight for the land back, for its laws to be absolved.

She was stunned, then, to find an act of vengeance at the top of their mountain ascent. The funicular stopped at a plateau just beneath a series of peaks, and its passengers filed out, their exit confronting them with a view of charred ruins atop a large, concrete foundation. Many of the other passengers passed these ruins to board another trolley, which would take them further up the mountain. But Jasper and Nathaniel made a turn for a set of concrete stairs leading up to the foundation of a building that was no longer there, stopping at the invisible entry that had since burned away. Skirts gathered up inelegantly in both hands, Sadie stopped at the base of the stairs. From that vantage point, they seemed to lead nowhere but the cloudless sky.

She felt a whoosh of wind inside her head as the valley a far fall below called from the corners of her vision. She had never been so close to the sky before. Up there in the blue, she could feel its benevolent wisdom, that calm oblivion hovering above humanity to suggest infinite imaginings of a reachable beyond. Protector or menace, it could not be ignored while so high in the air.

“We came up here sometimes before it all burned,” Jasper said. “Some marvelous parties!”

“This was the foyer,” Nathaniel called from further along the concrete blueprint of what once had been. “There was a doorman to greet us. And a parrot on a perch.”

“He bore a striking resemblance to your father’s parrot,” Jasper smirked.

“Echo came to us of his own accord.” Nathaniel chuckled, eyeing Sadie curiously. “Did you know they call this place Echo Mountain?”

Sadie stepped up to join them both on the charred foundations of a large rectangle, the remnants of a structure she could imagine but not quite fathom. “It doesn’t seem very big for a grand hotel.”

“The foundation is a bit deceptive, I suppose.” Jasper shrugged. “It wasn’t the Ritz, but you can’t build the Ritz on the backs of donkeys, now can you?”

The ghost of the structure began to take form, slightly—luscious carpets and wicker chairs and sweet, alpine breezes through open, lace-curtained windows with views of the valley far below. All to the tune of an orchestra playing all-night parties to keep the wild animals away. It must have been a splendid hotel with a marvelous view, but Sadie felt secretly glad that it had burned up. No one should have been able to gaze upon that vista from the comfort of a cushioned room. It was a view that ought to be earned if it was going to be enjoyed at all—not a playground, but a place of perspective. Hammering stakes and rail ties into the mountain—innovative as the engineering was—seemed, somehow, worse than doing it on the valley floor below the foothills. Sadie had a distinct sense that she was witnessing a failed last push to defy nature’s sovereignty. It had been a bated act of hubris, Nathaniel explained, which sabotaged itself through bankruptcies on a dream and, later, in the heat of a kitchen fire which burned everything to the ground.

So Califia’s last defenses were working on something. Sadie felt a strange relief come over her then, but realized she had been lost in thought for a few moments too long. Jasper had just posed a rhetorical question about donkeys and the Ritz. She tilted her hatted head up towards him. “What is the Ritz?”

“Oh, just some grand hotel in Paris,” he said. “But they’re all the same, really. You can have champagne and caviar for every meal of every day, but a view of some bloodstained old cobblestones simply doesn’t compare to this mountain air. Is that sage not intoxicating? It’s the whole history of the earth in one sniff. Makes you feel time differently, doesn’t it?”

Sadie inhaled the fresh mountain air and those whispers of sage and felt all that was immortal in the dry earth beneath her feet. And as she exhaled, the wind whipped up the dust covering the foundation upon which she stood and she had an even clearer vision of the building that had been there before. And the workers who had ascended the mountain leading pack mules laden with building materials. And the travelers who had erected the town below that provided the workers. And the valley that had been pinned down beneath the weight of settlement. And the trains that had brought those people with their myriad reasons for coming west.

She saw as many people escaping as they were laying claim. And among them, all of them the same shape and size from so far above looking down through the dust, she saw her mother.

Lenora, down there, with all that perspective and time filtering her pinpoint person into its truest essence, was not the sick woman whose life had slowly shuttered to a close in a small, dim apartment in a dark corner of Los Angeles. Down there, far away, she was as seasonally free as the poppies covering the hillsides in their shimmering gold. Free from the corseted clauses of life in the east, but bound to the land, working the fields every day of the harvest. The rancho had made her one of many victims of the land’s bounty. There was always something to reap.

She had found it funny—Lenora, that is—how a dream could shift with a perspective. She’d dreamed of wedding any of the strapping generals in livery who passed through the house to convene with her father, a tantalizing escape from the repetition of her agricultural inheritance. But she might never have dreamed such a dream if she hadn’t overheard her parents discussing the prospect of these prospects quietly by candlelight in her father’s study. Was it that a dream could coalesce as an acceptance of an unavoidable fate? This dream gave context and momentum to Lenora’s days in the fields—an out, someday, and sooner than later—until the bandits passed through. They were plentiful in those days, while California was changing hands from one government to the next, transforming laws into wishes.

The rancho did not go untouched. When the bandits passed through to pillage the house, Lenora’s father was away on business, and she had been out tending to the cattle. She managed to escape their clutches because her mother did not. They had already done their damage by the time Lenora arrived to chase them off with her father’s hunting rifle. They escaped with the family savings and her mother’s dignity, and nothing was ever quite the same afterwards.

Lenora wanted nothing to do with men after that, nor could she find any solace in the freedom of lawlessness. So many of the settlers in the west, when left to their own lusts and fancies, seemed all too willing to disregard all proprieties and attack. Approaching womanhood, Lenora began to crave civilization, the mythical, structured society so far away in the east, where there were rules and laws and therefore possibly even consequences for evil acts. Stranded at the western edge of the continent, the only home she knew, Lenora would often climb the hills to look towards the nearby coastline (a view similar to the one Sadie had just discovered) and consider all possible beyonds.

Strange, then, that Lenora should find herself in a greater land of lawlessness by heading to Virginia City when she got the chance. She had always intended to go east, as far east as the continent would take her. Eventually, after Rebecca’s fate and Leland’s departure, she made it.

But she wondered long and hard, after leaving Rebecca’s haphazard grave behind, whether anyone would want the same things if these weren’t expected of them. This she began to mull over every time she attracted a man’s attention. Was she supposed to enjoy the admiration? To relish his not-so-secret desire to take her alone to a dimly-lit place? Was she missing out on some fundamental magic by not pursuing this union of two parts into a new configuration? She had seen too much too young to be easily swindled by a rosy-eyed romancer with sweet words and saccharine promises. She might have thought she’d been in love with the miner, Monroe, but she felt some murky chill up her spine when considering that his companionship would inevitably have been besmirched by the same desires in other men’s more leering stares. That was why she had encouraged Rebecca to seduce Leland. To see if there was only one thing behind his intentions.

It was an impossible reconciliation to consider sex and love, love and marriage, marriage and law. All of them had become tied up together to render the most intimate the least significant. Once she’d made it to the East Coast, Lenora realized that this was what civilization did, binding up the most intimate human acts in a chain of decrees and ownership. Not only was it difficult to escape this cycle, it was expected that all denizens should conform. If she had, by choosing marriage, she would have been limited to the permission or sponsorship of a husband. Property, bank accounts, all the logistical foundations of independence... it was all less old-fashioned in the west.

No matter where she ended up, Lenora’s desires seemed to contadict her circumstances. While in the East, she began to crave the lawlessness again. She was afraid of it too, but at least, out West, there was more freedom to choose. This was, in the end, what happened when the rancho foreclosed after her father’s death. She chose to be an unmarried woman, a working woman, an unmarried, working mother. And she was content to have decided a fate for herself. Before the illness set in, that is. The illness she contracted in the East—she was sure of it—while briefly employed in a damp textile factory full of coughing, depleted spirits. It was the illness of a civilization sick with grey ideas and automated destiny. After abandoning the factory job, she had found herself on a boardwalk facing the Atlantic—the extravagantly opposite view from her hills looking out upon the Pacific coast—and wondered with a bitter ache in her heart whether it mattered that no one else might want what she wanted, whether the safe choice was the best choice, whether she could survive the scrutiny for allowing herself to choose.

That might have been what it came down to in the end. Those who had followed the status quo were affronted by those who had the courage to choose something different. Lenora had not known what the grail was for her. She only knew, after seeing the opposite coastline, that she wanted her life to feel like the view from the poppy-covered hillsides that gave way to the Pacific, like the paradise ruled by Queen Califia before men and matrimony conquered her warrior women. And for a time, it was this way…

…Sadie, meanwhile, was in the process of realizing the peculiar tragedy of many relationships, that people who knew each other did not always have the privilege of truly knowing. She recognized, in that pinpoint version of her mother down there in the immortal valley, that she would never know Lenora. Nor, despite her private suspicions, did she know for certain whether she was a Monroe. She also didn’t know if she was someone playful or reserved. She had opted for the latter to avoid backlash at the bindery, but choosing to be a certain way was another matter entirely. Glimpsing her two companions’ contagious, cavorting banter on that mountain plateau with a view of the Pacific, she wanted to try and be like them and see if it felt more like her.

She scurried after them. They had clambered over the ruins towards a gulley on the back side of the plateau. There, they stood looking out at the rest of the mountain range looming beyond, both of them small against such an imposing height, the boyhood versions of the men they’d begrudgingly become.

Jasper cupped his hands over his mouth and yelled towards the other mountain, “Hello!”

The sound echoed back his voice, concentric ripples that grew fainter with each repetition.

“Monroe!” He yelled again, the phrase once again bouncing off the rockface.

“Lennox!” Nathaniel yelled back, the name following as they turned to see Sadie approaching.

“Sadie!” Jasper yelled out, and her name, too, echoed back.

“What?” She called out, her words reverberating until she’d caught up with them. “Is this why they call it Echo Mountain?”

“Not very original, is it?” Jasper mused. “Go on, try it for yourself.”

“How?”

“Just yell into the gulley. Yell at the mountain. Start with hello.”

“Hello!” Sadie yelled, breathless from the echo that swung back at her.

“Echo!” Nathaniel called.

“We’re here!” Jasper yelled.

“We’re here!” Sadie and Nathaniel called out in unison, all three voices resonating in a waltz of call and response.

Sadie could feel the mountain stirring. The griffins heard their cries. Something cast up a rustle through the pines and conifers sprawling in a blanket of green over the golden hills turned silver with altitude. Something had awakened.

“Califia!” Sadie yelled. “Califia, are you there?”

And where, in all of this, was Echo? The bird had not been with Leland when the old man collapsed at Castle Green, and had not been spotted since. He had flown—the distance short, but steep—back up to the nearby mountain whose name he shared. It was darker than the night sky, reflecting back only density under the pale flicker of moon and stars as Echo ascended its sage-scented silhouette up to the summit. (In those days, the stars still shone over the foothills and the valley, before an abundance of lights blotted them out of the sky and sent them into the concrete…)

Echo didn’t know what he hoped to gain from the perspective of gazing down at the dimmed valley. Atop the mountain were the ruins from the hotel that had perched with a bird’s eye view before burning down five years before, the calamity freeing the hyacinth macaw who’d lived in a cage in the foyer. The ruins still emitted the charred perfume of absence. Echo felt a similar void (of something burned and gone which had only just been there) when Leland collapsed. He had never expected he would find such friendship in the old man, but five years of camaraderie under the Monroes’ roof made Echo realize, in a panic, that there was very little left for him on Millionaire’s Row if Mr. Monroe was no longer there.

Echo also had to admit, albeit reluctantly, that his drawn-out attempts to woo the green parrot, Envy, had been unsuccessful. She had not let herself imagine what might lay beyond the confines of her cage. It had become apparent, after five years of trying to make things work, that they wanted different things. Echo conceded he may have been pressuring her too much from the start, as he was of a parrot persuasion that mated for life and sought this same commitment from a partner. He recognized it might be a lot to ask, especially when Envy only had the human example as her frame of reference. From what Echo had observed, humans were not like macaws in this way. At least, most of them weren’t. Most primped and preened like birds to attract a mate and made promises till death once they had one, but this was not guaranteed to be a happy outcome. Part of this, Echo knew, was because people had a confusing and harmful way of merging that thing called money into matters of utmost human intimacy. They ran the whole thing like a business, and had issues with equality, besides. The human pecking order made no sense to him with its value placed on a fleeting commodity, rather than merit or virtue or legitimate compatibility…

…Alas, the narrow-sighted nature of human ambition was a tangent which worked Echo into a state of frustration every time it crossed his mind.

With his sudden need to take flight that night and be up there alone in the crisp mountain air, Echo watched the shadows ripple all the way down to the grey line which marked the coast and realized that his eyes were starved of views. Before he lived in the Echo Mountain House, he had seen more of this earth than most of his kind. Macaws were not migratory birds, but because he had lived the precedent of a changed landscape, he had entered that cycle of the migratory and needed something different again. He had made a promise to himself to look after the family who had taken him in. As such, he would wait by Mr. Monroe’s side until his time came. And maybe just a little bit longer, because a new Monroe child had entered the story, and he wanted to be sure she would settle in alright. After that, he would let a wider horizon beckon.

Conviction puffing his chest feathers, Echo flew one last loop above the summit and plunged back down into the foothills, straight for Millionaire’s Row...

********

Leland Monroe was still alive and breathing and would be for a little while yet. But he would not leave his bed. Nor would Echo, his steadfast companion, once the blue parrot returned from his mountain stint, appeared at the windowsill, and settled on his usual perch at the foot of Leland’s bed.

Once fully conscious, Leland insisted that his family continue on with their lives, rather than waiting around for a flame to flicker out. He further requested all manner of officials come through the door—lawyers, and the like—and declared that the house should not be closed off to callers in anticipation of a mourning period that had not yet begun.

Because of this, business continued with the proverbial usual. Which was why, despite the dying man upstairs, a caller appeared at the doorstep the next afternoon. Expecting Dr. Wheatley, Scottie was surprised to find Jasper Lennox on the front step. She warned the two Miss Monroes who were out on the back terrace, dazed from sleeplessness and speechlessly absorbing the rising heat of Sadie’s second afternoon in the Monroe house. Sadie recalled, then, the proposition from the night before which she had entirely forgotten while worrying over Leland’s fate.

“Delia,” Sadie whispered, panicked. “I have to tell you something about Mr. Lennox’s plan...”

“Oh, I can very well guess,” Delia chirped. “Send him in, Scottie. We’ll be right there.”

Sadie gaped. “I thought you didn’t like him.”

“He’s not coming to call on me.”

“But he said he wanted a second chance.”

“I do admire a persistent heart,” she mused. “Come on. Nathaniel will be our chaperone.”

Their entry into the parlor echoed with merry, conspiratorial laughter. Jasper and Nathaniel were teasing each other in that languid, easygoing way of old friends. It was, most probably, the adult male iteration of earlier boyhood scuffles, that infectious, unfettered merriment of male freedom that confident young men were adept at pulling out of even the stalest, saddest air. The two seemed almost loath to accept the girls’ company when they came in.

“I hear you’ve come to call on Miss Monroe,” Delia smirked, her tone brazenly flirtatious.

“Ah, yes.” Jasper rose to his feet, the act drawn out with a strange reluctance. He approached the two young women and gave them both a pursed kiss on the back of a hand.

“This is going to get awfully confusing if you call her that,” Delia went on. “Her name is Sadie Reyes.”

Jasper gave a gallant little bow. “My apologies, Miss Reyes.”

He returned to his chair near Nathaniel as the two women sat across from them, side-by-side on a loveseat.

“I was just telling Nathaniel,” Jasper turned half away from the girls, “that they’ve spotted the cat again. Higher up in the foothills this time.”

“We ought to be organizing a hunt instead of sitting around here,” Nathaniel muttered.

“You can’t!” Sadie interrupted.

Jasper turned to her, amused. “Can’t we?”

“Sadie’s a woman of principle.” Delia offered.

Sadie shrugged. “I just don’t believe in senseless things.”

Jasper countered. “Then you’ve obviously never been in love before.”

The observation was such a deft change of subject, and so tersely unexpected, that Sadie held her tongue. She would not reveal in that moment that she suspected she did know that singularly irrational feeling called love. She would not admit it out loud yet—or probably ever—because she could not yet tell the difference between torrid infatuation and unconditional admiration.

“We’re like a family already, aren’t we?” Delia grinned into the confused speechlessness that fell over the room. “Teasing each other all the time. I do admit it would be a lot simpler, Jasper, if you married in.”

“Don’t you think I haven’t tried?”

Sadie admired the easy interactions between the three other people in the room. How familiar they were in each other’s presence. But she found it odd that Delia and Jasper should have such a gliding rapport after whatever might have happened the previous summer. It was odder still that Nathaniel had suddenly retreated into the same stiff comportment she recognized from the day before. The only difference was that he couldn’t make the muscles in his face force down the stubborn last corner of a smile that would not give way.

“I really came to propose…” Jasper proposed, reveling in the suspense his unfinished sentence gleaned before innocuously concluding, “that we all go into town. Just a stroll.”

“I’m afraid I cannot join you.” There was a hint of charade in Delia’s sigh. “I’ve got to stay here for calling hours.”

“You wouldn’t have to if you had not rejected me,” Jasper offered pleasantly.

“This is the one moment in life where I get to feel like a queen,” the golden girl parried. “Will you begrudge me the chance to have options groveling at my feet?”

“I cannot begrudge you that,” Jasper consented. “Will you permit us to go into town as long as Nathaniel serves as chaperone?”

“Oh, these formalities.” Delia laughed. “Enjoy yourselves. That is, Sadie, if you would like to go?”

“I would very much,” Sadie admitted. “Are you sure you won’t come?”

“There’ll be plenty of time to go together.”

Confused by the whole affair, Sadie wondered why Delia would not join them, and why the others would let her stay. Jasper had made it clear his designs were not on Sadie, anyway. But perhaps they all intended a thorough ruse, and strolling about town with Sadie would likely have such an effect. She was whisked towards the door between the two tall, dapper gents, feeling strangely à la mode, despite her disorientation, in the same pale green frock Delia had lent her the day before.

Delia herself hurried to retrieve a hat from her collection upstairs—a wide-brimmed, flower-trimmed confection—and returned to the entry to perch it atop Sadie’s head, fastening it in place with an assortment of long pins.

“You couldn’t leave without a hat.” She smiled triumphantly, then whispered, “You really don’t mind the ruse?”

“Not at all,” Sadie replied, still confused. “But I’d rather you joined.”

“It would be more suspicious,” Delia said cryptically. “I’ll make it up to you! We’ll go into town together very soon.”

Minutes after the three set off on foot, both gents claiming one of Sadie’s arms, the door chimed again.

Scottie, who had been lurking at her usual clandestine post in the corridor to listen in, hurried to the door in a huff. “I knew she should have taken a parasol...”

But she was surprised to find a different gangly figure clearing his throat on the other side of the threshold. “I’m here to call on Miss Monroe.”

Hesitant, Scottie led him into the parlor where Delia stood up to greet the unexpected guest. Her smile twitched in the effort to keep her expression from visibly distorting with confusion. Everett, too, stared at her in surprise.

“Have a seat, won’t you?” She asked him anyway.

“This is a bit embarrassing,” Everett stuttered, placing the book that had been tucked under his arm onto his lap once he’d claimed a chair. “I meant to be calling on the other Miss Monroe.”

“Oh, you mean Miss Reyes. She’s not yet a Monroe in name. You’ve just missed her. She’s out with my brother and Mr. Lennox.”

“Ah.” Everett nodded slowly, disappointment coloring his cheeks. “Should we not have a chaperone if we are to be here together?”

“Scottie’s just around the corner,” Delia smirked. “Isn’t that right Scottie?”

They heard a brief scuffle as the housekeeper made a show of pretending she was further away than she was. She appeared in the doorway with a feigned look of innocence. “What was that, Miss Monroe?”

“Would you stay nearby while Mr. Wakefield and I are chatting?”

“Of course,” Scottie nodded, only half-succeeding at hiding her grin—i was rare she was invited to sit in on conversations out in the open. She sat herself down in a faraway chair near the entry. “I’ll be right here.”

“Thank you,” Delia assented, returning her attention to the nervous young man across from her. She nodded towards the tome in his lap. “Is that for Sadie?”

“Last night I said I would lend it to her, but you all left in such haste that it was quite forgotten in the rush.”

“It was on account of my father.”

“Is he quite alright?” Something proper in his trans-Atlantic accent piqued Delia’s curiosity.

“He’s not well.” The consensus sounded far too benign after the nearly sleepless night she’d spent in his room with the others, willing the old man back to consciousness before she succumbed to exhaustion herself. She knew, of course, that he did not have much time left. But the suspense kept her from accepting the extent of what was to come. Denial was a pleasant enough balm and so she said simply, “I don’t want to be bothering you with all that.”

“It’s no bother,” Everett spoke hastily. “In fact, I think I understand your plight. My mother has not been well for a long time, either. That’s why we came here all those years ago.”

“Is it really?” Delia’s eyes watered. “I never knew. I remember when you first came to town though. You used to like more than mere books.”

“Well,” Everett mused uneasily, “they’ve never been difficult company.”

“Boys can be bullies, can’t they? Girls too, for that matter.”

“Yes.” Everett stared at the ground. “Especially when you’re different.”

“You’re not really interested in Sadie, are you?”

“Why do you say it like that?”

“I like gentlemen to be honest about their intentions.”

“My intentions are marriage,” Everett said. “I’ve made that abundantly clear.”

“You just seem a little overzealous is all.”

“Do I? I suppose that’s not very polite.” Everett chanced a glance upwards, but let his gaze waft far away as he continued, “It’s just that I finally met someone who gave me the slightest bit of courtesy, and laughed with me, and held my gaze, and I thought that might have meant something. So I’m here to find out—these kinds of things don’t come around very often for outcasts like me. And I know that sounds like I’m feeling sorry for myself, but it’s true. I think maybe people hold the Wakefields at arm’s length because it’s an old name and they feel slighted. But I hate saying that because I disapprove so thoroughly of this rivalry between old money and new and—” he stopped himself suddenly. “A thousand apologies, Miss Monroe. You know I have a tendency to ramble.”

“Quite alright, Mr. Wakefield. But I feel I should warn you that your efforts will be in vain.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because Sadie has confided in me that she wishes not to marry.”

“And yet she’s allowing Mr. Lennox to court her?”

“That’s a strong word. He’s an old friend of the family. He just wants the chance to know her.”

“Or to try for things again with you?” Everett stopped himself, bewildered by his boldness. Delia’s bemused expression forced his gaze back to the carpet. “I don’t blame him for trying.”

“Oh, Everett. I mean—Mr. Wakefield,” Delia said bashfully, surprised by the young man’s awkward candor, “if a woman rejects a man once he should know there’s a reason.”

“I imagine you have your pick of suitors, anyway.”

“They all fell away when Mr. Lennox started hanging around last year.”

“And now?”

“It’s no matter. I’ve been reconsidering my prospects lately.”

“Thinking of going abroad? I hear it’s still quite à la mode for heiresses to merge with the English nobility.”

“I mean no offense, Mr. Wakefield, but not all my designs are presently centered around marriage prospects. Once upon a time that may have been the case, but no longer.”

“A thousand apologies. I did not mean to assume.” The conversation slid to a halt at the brink of that dreaded chasm of silence…

…But instead of avoiding it, Everett had an epiphany.

The solution to transcending these strange pauses he so feared, was not, he suddenly realized, to babble through them. Rather, the key was to simply ask the other party a question.

And so, with tremendous relief, he let propriety give way to curiosity. “May I ask what you were referring to?”

“University,” Delia said, the answer gliding out without resistance. “I’ve been thinking I might like to give it a try. It’s not that I feel left out exactly, with all the girls from Miss Orton’s going off to do their four years in dormitories, but... I’m coming around to recognize that it is an opportunity, and these things should not be squandered.”

“I think it’s a marvelous idea.”

“You don’t think it would be futile?”

“Learning never is.”

“And if I still want a family... later won’t be too late, will it?” She stopped herself, wondering why she was voicing this most private concern to the awkward though not unpleasant bibliophile who lived down the street. Wondering, also, why it was so much easier to talk to people she did no know so well. Then wondering if some people, such as Mr. Wakefield, were simply easy to talk to.

Everett considered her words thoughtfully, not even realizing another silence had fallen between them. After some consideration, he concluded, “If you have a chance to do something for yourself, to expand your horizons, to live elsewhere and try something new, why not take the opportunity?”

Delia stared at Everett, charmed by his conviction. She was distinctly aware that in that moment she began to see him differently, and to feel the first hazy reckonings of understanding that would later coalesce into her own quiet conviction. But because it was all so sudden and unformed, she restrained herself to mere politesse.

“Mr. Wakefield, I am very heartened to hear someone say these things out loud.”

“I’m glad if I could offer a bit of encouragement, then.” Everett hesitated, never sure how to proceed when confronted with the tricky subject of modernity. “I am not the most modern of men. But I do think all people who have the chance to do something which might add dimension to their lives ought to pursue that to the utmost. It need not be education; that’s just a regimentation of the learning that life can be filled with. Travel might serve the same purpose. Have you travelled much, Miss Monroe?”

Delia sighed. “Father has never been well enough.”

“Then someday you must!” Everett insisted. “The world is full of different landscapes, and the more you see, the smaller this valley becomes each time you return.”

“Too small for you, Mr. Wakefield?”

“It is still home.”

“But your family is from the east, aren’t they?”

“I’ve spent most of my life here. Though I suppose I’ve never really thought of what home was. Mostly felt it. You know, in the familiarity and such.”

“Would you ever move back East?”

“It would depend on whether I found any prospects here.”

“So you don’t intend to remain a bachelor, then?”

“Would I be here if I did?”

They were both startled and yet not surprised to excavate the same conclusion in the meaning beneath his words. It trilled with the comfort of the inevitable, of glowing, reachable horizons and the safe, well-trod path of an imaginable destiny. Delia felt something supremely calm and comforting settle over her: the weightlessness of a decision making itself.

But then the clock chimed the half hour, startling them both.

“I didn’t realize how much time had passed,” Delia gasped politely.

“Nor I,” Everett admitted. “It has been most pleasant sharing your company.”

He hesitated, then, desiring to stay but realizing that propriety was asking him to leave. As he rose to his feet, he cleared his throat.

“Would you see that your sister gets this?” He handed Delia the book, the gesture feeling useless in the wake of their conversation. Delia smirked at the title.

“I never imagined you might be one for novels, Mr. Wakefield.”

“Are you, Miss Monroe?”

“I see we will have much to discuss on another occasion.”

Formality, then, enabled Everett to continue on his newly emboldened path. “Would you permit me to call again?”

Stunned and satiated all at once, Delia’s smile was decisive. “I would like that very much.”

The suddenness of their shared realization left them bashful and clumsy in their goodbye. As Scottie escorted Everett back out the door, Delia felt herself pinned down to her seat, confronted with an imminent choice, and the trilled thrill of things she could seize for herself. Things could seem so hopeless when they remained abstract, but they were not unimaginable. Suddenly she had a clear picture to replace the void that had been riling her uncertainties. It was so starkly definite that she could taste the sweet ochre of its horizon line. This was all the sweeter for its languid lingering—the inevitable left her in no haste.

********

Sadie, however, did feel quite rushed as she struggled to keep pace with her two tall, long-strided companions down Orange Grove and into the city.

“These houses are marvelous,” she said while she scuffle-stepped. She pronounced the word oddly, the emphasis on the second syllable, having only read it before but never said it out loud. And yet, it had come to her as naturally as breath to describe the resplendent structures that lined the wide, tree-lined street.

“They leave a open-mouthed first impression,” Jasper agreed, “but after a while you start to find them grotesque.”

“At least it’s not Summit Avenue,” Nathaniel reasoned. “Remember those months I spent in Saint Paul with an aunt who wanted me to marry the daughter of a railroad baron? Those brownstones are too weighted down with wealth. I’m becoming increasingly more inclined to the new Greene style.”

“That would be the Greene Brothers.” Jasper explained, as though implying that there was more than one would give Sadie a better understanding. “All those cloud lifts in Arts and Crafts.”

“They’re changing our perceptions of art and beauty,” Nathaniel said. “I find it very refreshing.”

“You’re so modern, Monroe,” Jasper chuckled, “especially in your conviction not to pair up with a railroad heiress. They’re around here too, you know. I don’t see why you had to go all the way back to the Midwest when the Huntingtons’ daughters are just across town. I rather like Elizabeth and Marian, don’t you?”

“You mock me, Lennox,” Nathaniel said good-humoredly.

“I’ll behave now,” Jasper ceded.

“What’s a cloud lift?” Sadie lifted her head to glance beyond her hat brim at the wide, unadulterated blue sky above them, with no clouds in sight.

“Do you have an interest in architecture?” Jasper queried.

“I don’t know.” She had only read about three pages worth of something called Italianate while in the midst of binding a series of architectural manuals.

“We’ll have to take you to one of Eva’s salons,” Jasper decided. “She always loves new and interesting people.”

Sadie’s gaze falling back to earth. “I don’t think I’m particularly interesting.”

Nathaniel raised an eyebrow. His usual coldness had thawed in the sunlight, and a warmly resigned acceptance entered his tone. “The waif who shows up on our doorstep with a letter from a mysterious woman from Father’s past and no preconceptions of this strange valley? I’d say you’re very interesting, even intriguing. Eva will be delighted.”

“You’ll have your taste of a proper soirée. Nothing posh and stifling like that ball last night.” Jasper’s eyes crinkled with mirth. “But we amused ourselves anyway, didn’t we?”

“I enjoyed myself,” Sadie replied. “But I hope you two aren’t planning to get me in trouble.”

“Good grief, Miss Reyes,” Jasper preened, feigning offense, “that’s no way to live.”

The three turned a corner, and Sadie stared avidly at the long stretch of Colorado Boulevard, the city’s main thoroughfare. The elegant brick and mortar façades suggested the usual eminence of human hubris, that hard-and-fast clamoring for legacy paired with the compunction that it must be erected quickly. Mankind was in an awful rush to get on with eternity—to lay claim, to leave a mark, to make a name. That is of little consequence to this part of the story, however, as Sadie was dazzled nonetheless by the busy street and the neatly lined shops on either side. These swallowed and regurgitated well-starched denizens in petticoats and top hats, equality melting all throes of status as they all perspired uniformly in the summer heat.

It was, of course, a city like any other, except this one was cradled by the mountains and fully formed out of the golden dust that drifted up with the cart wheels. Miles of dry land sprawled from the edges of town, waiting to be coaxed into fertility. But behind the storefronts, one could not squint into recent history and pick out the wild west. The land seemed too tame and civil and ripe with that ever-present fragrance of orange blossoms wafting in from near but unseen orchards.

“Marvelous,” Jasper grinned, gently stressing the first syllable. “How many towns do you know in the shadow of the mountains?”

“She’s not from the other side of the world, Lennox,” Nathaniel teased. “Father said you came up from Los Angeles?”

“Yes, I worked there.”

“A working city girl,” Jasper grinned. “How does this compare?”

Sadie contemplated the fresh storefronts, the dust coming off the road, the bustle she imagined was the same in any city. There was not the same industrial shadow, and the buildings weren’t quite as tall, but otherwise, it was hardly different. “Maybe it’s a bit newer,” she decided. “It looks like this all just sprouted out of the dust.”

“Maybe it did,” Jasper agreed merrily. “Progress is a most insistent mistress. Or at least we make her out to be.”

They traipsed down the sidewalk, Sadie walking a bit ahead of the other two as they strolled in good spirits, buoying up Sadie’s own steps with a bubbly brimming lightness as she admired all the shop fronts and window displays. She wondered how it was that Nathaniel could have become so amenable after being so resistant the day before, especially when they had spent the night in such bated turmoil at Leland’s bedside. Jasper did seem to have a merry effect on whomever he gave his attention to, and joy was all the more poignant when it herded sorrow. It was a relief to laugh—at nothing, everything—and to ignore that imminent darkness. And to accept the light which was there to define the shadows, no matter how imposing they became.

Sadie glanced back at the two men cutting similar silhouettes as they laughed again.

“It is rare that we have occasions to be out like this,” Jasper explained. “Usually, we’re off hunting or attending requisite luncheons—you know, the usual social drudgery.”

She didn’t know, but she liked thinking he thought she did.

“Funny how some moments of being on the ground can make you feel like you’re on top of the world,” he mused languidly.

“Why don’t we go up to the top?” Nathaniel suggested, eyes glittering with non-ordained folly.

Jasper grinned. “The mountain, you mean?”

“We’ll take the funicular.”

“The what?” Sadie asked, alarmed.

“An excellent idea!” Jasper affirmed. “You couldn’t get a better view from New York!”

Jasper and Nathaniel’s casually cosmopolitan airs left Sadie pleasantly breathless. They spoke of faraway places in a way that made them seem near. They had been formed with the well-greased hinges of an easy life, and it made everything they did, even spontaneous whims, seem smooth and effortless. What she liked the most was their unjaded enthusiasm. They had never had to curtail anything, and so Sadie drank up their smiles and vivacity and the sunlight which had been there smiling through these unshadowed souls all along. Without hesitation, she followed them northward, towards the sleeping beasts that formed the looming mountains beyond.

It took all three Monroe children, the chauffeur, and Scottie to help Leland out of the car, into the house, up the stairs, and into bed. Feverish, sweating profusely, and mumbling nonsense, his mind was entirely elsewhere, lost in concentric waves of gold, silver, money, and dust.

The three Monroe children waited at his bedside, trying to decipher some meaning from these ramblings. Scottie sent for Dr. Wheatley, who arrived to bear unsurprising news. Leland’s disease, in its advanced stage, had reached his brain and was causing hallucinations. That, or the arsenic pills he was taking as an anti-inflammatory. More probably both. His consensus was all the worse for being what they had all secretly suspected: there was nothing much more they could do for him. Wheatley left with a tepid promise to return in the morning, more for the others’ sake than any hope of changing the patient’s outcome. And so the three Monroes stayed there in the room, unmoving and uncertain of how to proceed under the weight of the inevitable.

The first hints of horrified dissociation which Sadie had felt during the carriage ride home had numbed to a hazy sense of distance. A potent disbelief pushed her out of her own skin, out of the room, and into a high, far place. There was no way to understand, then, in connected terms, how forty years of regret and untold secrets had brought her to bear witness to this scene. She watched the brother and sister across from her, both of them suspended, on the brink of sadness, in that gasping, hard-to-breathe place of accepting a horrible thing that was not over yet. She saw them succumb to the paradox of begrudging both sides of a situation, saw them taste one of the many bitter tragedies of grief—the sometimes-true illusion that someone has not been loved the way they should have been.

Recognizing that familiar void, Sadie felt her mother’s ghost enter the room—enter her heart, really. When Lenora finally lost the breath in her lungs completely, what had filled the room was an emptiness, or rather, a sort of nothingness filled to the brim. Sadie had figured grief might be the thing to replace Lenora’s presence, to compensate for her departure, but all the worry and pain and heartache had already been used up in a vague fret for the end which came so gradually it seemed unannounced.

At first, Leland’s mumblings seemed illogical, but after some water and a few hours of violent slumber, he started to become coherent. In the dawn’s dusky blue, however, no one was awake enough to listen. Even if they had been, they likely wouldn’t have been able to make sense of the names.

There were three which were tormenting Leland’s hallucinations, two of which might not come as a surprise. Comstock and Lenora echoed off his lips in between other incoherent murmurs—nothing which hadn’t been heard before, albeit misunderstood. The third name he hadn’t uttered in forty years. Even Leland had forgotten about it, in that sort of vague preponderance which comes with guilt, denial, and the amnesia of time. But the memories flooded into the cracks, harsh and cold as the mercury in his veins. What came out in his murmurs was less coherent than what flowed through his mind in an icy flash of reckoning. Memories buried deep rushed to the surface with a strangely silver tint.

Rebecca. That was her name. The reason everything had happened the way it had. How he’d lost the love of his life and gained a fortune. Her vengeance had been accidental, but omnipotent.

Leland would have preferred to let the apex of his thoughts be of his memories of Lenora, the woman he’d let possess his memory for the same four decades. But erasing Rebecca removed the context for why things had worked out as they had. He didn’t know if having a reason made things better or worse. It had been the place and the time and the primitiveness of all choices and consequences in that Nevada boomtown. And yet, because Rebecca’s demise had become his success, Leland felt that he must have been made to atone. There were numerous regrets thereupon that he had spent the rest of his life atoning for.

She had been an up-and-coming socialite who’d fled west to escape a family who saw her as a means to an end. Back in those days such a bluff was a life or death matter. Because she was clumsy and no cook, she couldn’t have found a job serving miners as Lenora had. Instead, she fell easily into the other career available to her. Falling, some might say, was the only way to end up there.

She had been charming on account of her exhilarating charisma, the momentum of someone who recognized, preemptively, that she had been presented with a choice. She had opted to make life more vivid than long. This cavalier sense of her own mortality was what endeared her to Lenora. They had been tickled by the strangeness of finding the same place from opposite directions, with the delight at having escaped something preordained. Amongst all people everywhere, this has never been an easy path, as all those who have opted for safety, comfort, and familiarity have difficulty understanding the motives or contentment from those who have chosen the unknown.

In many ways, that was precisely why Rebecca and Lenora were content. Knowing the fates which awaited them on opposite coasts—cookie-cutter domesticity, the usual linear melodrama—they preferred the choice which was not knowing. Before making her way west, Rebecca felt the heavy leaden destiny of an all too visible horizon, where a pale and uninteresting sunset cast no wonder in the furrows. She preferred not to see the horizon, opted, instead, for the shadows and twists and turns of something which could not be planned or decided. It was an unsafe choice, a recipe for disaster, and a surefire way to an unquiet demise. But that was what she wanted, something more than a demure, resigned surrender to the expected. Out west she was, at least, living on her own terms. Lenora had admired her for this. And Rebecca had reveled in this admiration. It was not typically what people saw in her profession.

They had admired each other, in fact, for their restlessness and daring. Their shared conviction to defy made them fast friends, essential to each other. Rebecca shared her quarters and Lenora offered her meals. The two developed a quick and overwhelming intimacy which Leland never understood. He saw its burning fury in Lenora’s eyes when she pulled out a pistol—provenance unknown—and pointed it at Slum Guillion in the saloon after hearing he had shortchanged Rebecca. The same thing never had to happen twice.

In between clients, Rebecca sometimes hung around in the evenings, dripping charm and smirking with some ultimate knowing that no one else could decipher. She would stop by for coffee or a meal, sometimes being the one to chat with Leland when Lenora was busy with a rush of hungry miners. There was no possibility for fear left in her easy and uninhibited manner. She had been with enough men to know how to see right down through to them no matter what they were seeking. She saw Leland was smitten. She also saw that Lenora was being swayed.

It had seemed to Leland, unprivy to the women’s intimacies, that there was no reason for Rebecca to suggest what she suggested. She had said as though proclaiming a diagnosis that it would be a pleasure to do him a service. Her insistence stirred something in Leland after the long months of longing for the woman who shared Rebecca’s bed. There was something irresistible about her, but maybe that was only an excuse. He had kissed her as tenderly as he longed to kiss Lenora and wondered in the act of pretending why he sought out a surrogate for his deepest desires. But Lenora was, conversely, doe-like in her flighty evasion of all male advances, and so he preferred not to risk losing her trust.

The two both had a moment of reckoning as they removed their clothes under the thousand-eyed stare from the peeling rose-patterned wallpaper above Rebecca’s bed. They had both come from back east—left respectable lives—to find themselves in a cheap façade of civilization, a limbo of dust and time in which nothing was certain and none of the same rules applied. It was as pitiful as it was exciting to see that this was what lay interred beneath all the hovering expectations defining society back east and before. There was a sort of nothingness buried under all the floundering pomp, a void as dark as the mine shafts beneath the boomtown despite their occasional silver echoes into the abyss. Civilization was so quickly undermined by its own absence that the world became ridiculous in the dust. This made Leland and Rebecca laugh. Their encounter was a joyfully nihilist affair. Liberty from social expectation, however, was not beautiful. Out West it was bedraggled, decrepit, grimy, and noxious. But it was the unimaginable made tangible, and that was a discovery more valuable than all the silver in Virginia City.

But afterwards, Leland felt cheap for paying Rebecca—overpaying her—when she insisted she didn’t want the money. And then he felt guilty for having pretended she was someone else, then contrite for being excited by how easy it was to pretend. After that evening, the guilt never went away.

Naturally, there was no way of really knowing who was responsible for Rebecca’s condition when it became apparent a few months later. Some scorners might have called it carelessness, the empathetic might have considered it bad luck, and the neutral parties might have believed it inevitable. She did not seek someone to blame, only an escape route.

She didn’t tell Lenora what she planned to do, nor that her implement of choice, though sufficiently sharp, was unsterilized. She never expected that Lenora would have to find her hemmoraging and unresponsive in their bed. Maybe she had feared Lenora wouldn’t understand. But because she never lived to explain herself, Lenora never did understand completely.

That night Lenora had no bed to sleep in, but she would not have slept anyway. She did her best to clean away the blood and make Rebecca presentable before some ludicrous whisper of a funeral could be arranged. She and Leland dug the grave in a quiet place outside that shell of a town and placed Rebecca’s body in it. Once it was done, Lenora requested to be left alone. She sat there all night, recognizing the breeze billowing through the fresh absence as another reckoning. It was there in the cool stillness of the desert, alone in the night which unfurled into a vibrant green dawn, that she devised a promise no one else would ever know.

When Lenora next spoke with Leland, she was angry. It came voraciously burbling from somewhere deep enough to make her realize it had been stirring for a very long time—a clawing, claustrophobic fury at the limits, the incompetence, the presumption of the inevitable. At how a woman’s life could never be the same once a man entered into it. And how it was expected to change. Leland might have been able to guess but would never fully understand that Rebecca’s fate had decided Lenora’s, too.

What Leland derived from their lamenting conversation that night after Rebecca’s death was that something needed to be done. Something preventative. Despite their bashful skirting around the topic of romance, generally, they discussed the physical act of desire quite candidly that night. Their hypothesizing was business-like, for future girls to avoid what had happened. There were ways, after all. It required a bit of ingenuity, but there had been vague and primitive solutions much farther back in history. All it required was a material as infallible as their conviction. Something other than sheep bladders or pig intestine or whatever else had been used in the past. Prophylactics were not a glorious industry, but neither was the beer, soap, or bubblegum that would later put other millionaires on the same block.

Determined, Leland made plans to head back east, revive his contacts in the Mid-Atlantic shipping business, and make use of the factories and rubber imports. The way he and Lenora discussed, he was convinced that after establishing himself well enough, she would come out and join him—in business, in life. She had led him to believe as much. It was true that neither of them could stay in Virginia City after what had happened. But what Leland was not willing to admit in the moment and all moments thereafter was that if Lenora had truly wanted to join him, she would have accompanied him straight away.

He buried his doubts in determination. He had dug up enough small shards of silver to pay for suppliers, workers who were willing to be discreet, and collaborators to construct the necessary machinery. In a few years’ time, Leland had his prototype, and began producing industrially to sell in semi-secret. He wrote letters to Lenora all the while, his abstract invitations for her to head east becoming concrete and ever more insistent.

But Lenora stuck to the decision she’d made that night after Rebecca’s death. A promise to herself. No matter the good intentions that came with the invitation, she did not want her life to become something beyond her control.

As Leland waited for her, expectant in his desperate hope that she would come as soon as she was able, the war of North and South broke out in the east. The Civil War wreaked havoc on the region, but it also gave Leland more clientèle. Soldiers bought his prophylactics by the dozen, soliciting the most human form of oblivion in the blood-sown fields of inhumanity.

Leland had not chosen a side, but sold to both. He chose enterprise, the free market, when other freedoms were fueling the fight. If he’d been peddling something no one was ashamed to buy, he would have been called out as a war profiteer. As it was, his semi-clandestine business showed no signs of slowing even as the war drew to a close.

But by then, Lenora had stopped answering his letters. Years became indistinguishable from one another in Leland’s fervent delusion of living out his days with her. He became—quietly, discreetly—a millionaire. Until 1873, when Comstock whispered fate to him again. Fate, a return west, and the chance to see Lenora again…

…The memories settled around Leland and a moan caught in his throat, that excruciating suffocation, the what if’s slow, poisonous crawl through the past. His own humanness had sought its revenge, and he could not have closed his eyes with a clear conscience. Except, in one regard, he could. Lenora had entrusted to him the most extraordinary gift.

“You really do look so much like your mother,” Leland said, the most coherent phrase he’d uttered all night. He had turned blue with the smoky dawn coming through the shutters, blue and sallow and barely there. He was staring at Sadie, seated on the other side of the bed from Nathaniel and Delia. He reached for Sadie’s hand, which he clutched tightly to prevent his own from shaking. “I wish I’d known sooner.”

A great and unoriginal regret, but one which consumed Leland entirely. Forty years of guilt had evolved into a karmic disease. Money had only made him more miserable. He should have given it away. There was no excuse for having languished in its possibilities. It hadn’t even succeeded in luring Lenora to him.

He surveyed his three grown children around him and hoped he hadn’t spoiled the first two too hopelessly in his efforts to atone. He did not know if his attempts as a father had come from what was called love or whether these might have been mere acts of self-preservation. He felt vindicated, in that small, bitter, human way, that his three children gazed upon his end with sorrow. It made him smile, an upturned grimace, as he regarded the triptych legacy of his regrets. His last contorted smile was for Sadie. A smile of finality. Inviting her into the family was the last good thing he would ever do.

There may come a moment in life when we become the center of an orbit. Depending on the individual in question, this is something which becomes the objective in life thereupon, or something to be avoided at all costs ever after.

Delia seemed to belong to the former category, and so she could not quite imagine the enormous leap disguised in Sadie’s next step forward as she left the anonymous current of the unacknowledged. People circled them immediately—vultures, wolves, perhaps something more benign—in a flurry to introduce themselves. Sadie felt them gulp her down with their eyes, a blurred thirst captured in a glittering swirl of stares and jewels and bated curiosity.

She wondered briefly if she would have enjoyed this attention if she knew what to do under its spotlight. She then wondered briefly if anyone knew what to do beneath it, or whether being at the center of this strange social orbit was not just a game of improvisation, tempting the fates of human interest towards admiration or disapproval (which in that moment did not seem so distinct). Someone handed Sadie something made of paper, small and light, which she clasped distractedly in her hands as the surrounding eyes consumed her.

At first it was mostly young men in velveteen black evening jackets. They all had a sameness about them, in their costumes and manners, their combed and parted hair, their clean, perfumed scent hovering over the fresh sweat percolating beneath the velvet. They did not stand around to say much, only hovered asking if they could pencil themselves in for a dance.

Sadie nodded numbly—observers might have said demurely—at all these requests, uncertain why so many would insist on this point when she hadn’t the slightest notion of how to dance. Delia carefully unfurled Sadie’s clasped hands and showed her what she’d been holding on to: a small bound paper booklet, a miniature of so many she had bound together during her days at the bindery, attached to a miniscule pencil with a loop of ribbon.

“We must write their names on the dance cards,” Delia explained. Sadie clung to her calm, exacting instructions. Delia took the booklet from her and began to pencil names in as the young men stepped forward.

“Alright Howard. Yes, William. Of course, Frederick. I’ve put you all down for waltzes. Are any of you saving me a dance, too? That leaves us with a Mazurka. Maybe a polka if you prefer.”

Sadie marveled at Delia’s easy demeanor in front of the boys. There was no Victorian blushing or swooning or general timidity as the young men fumbled to add their names to Delia’s dance card. With a casual flick of the wrist, she sent them off again, then helped Sadie fasten the tiny booklet to her wrist with the ribbon attached to the binding.

“Doesn’t seem very practical,” Sadie mumbled.

“It leaves your hands free, and keeps it clear who you’ll be dancing with.”

“Why are they all so eager?”

“It’s their chance to get a moment alone with you.”

“You know all of them?”

“We’ve all grown up together,” Delia laughed. “This town isn’t so very big, you know. Most of them are neighbors.”

“And they all want to marry you?”

“Perish the thought!” Delia gasped dramatically. “One or two might be eager to come calling and tempt their chances. The point is more that we all must dance as much as we can. It’s rather dull and unfashionable to stay on the sidelines all night. Better to be in the center where it’s all happening. But you don’t have to agree to anything you don’t want to. And you can always disappear somewhere if you don’t feel like dancing.”

“I think I’d prefer to disappear now, before anyone can find me again.”

Delia’s effervescence settled for a moment into something calm, cool, and currentless. “I’m sorry, I think in my excitement I didn’t consider that you might feel anything less. I just wanted them all to know you.”

“I’m happy just to observe.”

“Why don’t we go get a little courage first?”

Curious as to how courage was something that could be gotten, Sadie allowed Delia to take her arm and lead her along the ballroom’s periphery. The answer soon revealed itself when they came upon a table in a corridor, laden with crystalline coupes of a sparkling gold ambrosia. Delia reached for two glasses and handed one to Sadie.

“Champagne,” Delia grinned. “It has a way of easing one into an evening. And it’s really quite good. But don’t drink it too fast.”

Sadie stared at the glass dubiously and took a sip. Of course she had heard of such a substance, but doubted that something so sparklingly acrid could have a magic potion’s effect. It was bitter and sweet all at once. The bubbles felt funny on her tongue. It seemed to do something strange to her thoughts after a few sips.

“Are you alright?” Delia asked, as if, somehow, it would be difficult to imagine her being anything other than glowing, as she was.

“I think I’d just like to observe. I really have no idea what to do.”

“I suppose it couldn’t hurt to sit out for a little while,” Delia murmured. “But then I’ll have to leave you for a few dances because I can’t have anyone thinking I’ve taken myself off the market.”

It seemed a funny way to say this, painting herself as a commodity. But when Delia led them back towards the ballroom, stopping at the threshold, Sadie stared out at the diamonds and rubies and emeralds dripping from pale, powdered throats and saw that everyone there had indeed put themselves on display. There would be much to understand before she would be able to grasp the interest in attracting partners through a mating ritual of fanning wealth like feathers, but she could understand, at least, that she wanted no part in it.

Gazing out at it all without surprise, champagne in hand, Delia seemed so certifiably at ease. She leaned elegantly against the archway which separated them from the whirling core beyond and ushered for Sadie to step nearer.

“The funny thing is,” Delia murmured, her words more tangible to grasp than the extravagant surroundings, “all the young people are here to dance and brush shoulders with some hope of permanence. All the older ones just come to scrutinize anyone who isn’t of their set.”

“What is their set, exactly?”

She laughed. “Excellent question. Somehow, we’ve all ended up as victims of social propriety; poor, desperate creatures.”

Sadie snickered. “No one here looks poor. Though maybe a little desperate.”

Delia hesitated a moment, considering Sadie’s observation, that unchecked honesty tickling something at the nape of her neck with an illuminating candor. For a moment she could not reply. Suddenly, that definitive current of life in the foothills pulled her under, and she saw the murky shadows below its silken tides. Beneath the surface, things whirled and roiled with a violent force. She struggled back to the calm, clear veneer and gasped as she breached its fragility.

Suddenly all the rules and graces didn’t seem to matter. Suddenly, any notions of a life defined by prerequisites seemed transcendable. Suddenly, the fact of being there to search for a husband filled her with unease, and she could no longer imagine that half-hazed future for herself. Nothing seemed evident in the chaos beyond the rules. She wanted to laugh with how repressive and liberating it felt all at once, but people would only find that laughter flirtatious. Perhaps things did not need to be as everyone expected. But because she had been groomed to follow the expected, she refrained from showing any sign of her realizations and sipped her champagne demurely.

“You’ve come across the greatest secret this side of the Rockies,” Delia smiled at Sadie with a glimmering appreciation. “They can all glide across the room pretending they belong to this mythic idea of the ‘elite,’ but they all got lucky with their fortunes. They simply struck it rich with random ideas that took off.”

“Such as?” Sadie didn’t really care to know, but she enjoyed the newly fixed intensity with which Delia regarded her. She wanted to keep its reassuring warmth fixated on her for as long as possible. She pretended to be intrigued as Delia nodded towards a portly man in a waistcoat, his beard elegantly askew, his moustache politely curled. “That’s Adolphus Busch, who winters in the ivy-covered house down the street from us. His money’s in beer. Woe to the sons and daughters of Temprance!”

Delia then scanned the crowd until she stopped at a demurely bejeweled woman topped with a greying pompadour coiffure. “That’s Anna Sutherland Bissell, who’s father made his millions with a carpet sweeper.”

Then she gestured to a bespectacled woman with dark hair and good posture. “That’s Margaret Fowler. Her brother invented the reaper, that machine for tilling fields. Her husband just died last year and left the entire fortune to her. She’s spending it more wisely than most of the other millionaires who thought velvet and mahogany were a good cause.”

Curiosity nudged Sadie. “What about the Monroe fortune?”

“Anyone here will tell you Father has no right to his money. He simply saw an opportunity and succeeded.”

“It wasn’t illegal?”

“Not at first.” Delia harumphed. “But it defies social modesty to discuss such a thing in public.”

That air of mystery surfaced again, the elusive notion of scandal, or the brink of it, anyway. Sadie silently berated the stirring depths as everyone glided along the surface.

By the time her champagne glass was empty, she felt dizzy and afraid. She told Delia as much, and got only laughter and no empathy. Laughter was Delia’s answer to everything, but no more reassuring for its consistency. “You’re supposed to feel that way,” she insisted. “If you let it trickle down into your worries, you might find that they matter a bit less.”

Sadie tried to concentrate on achieving this effect, but found that she couldn’t concentrate much at all. She had lost any hold on her own logic, and it frightened her even more to realize that she couldn’t even make sense of her own place in the room while standing still. This confusion transformed into panic as some vaguely familiar young man came towards them.

“Ah,” Delia whispered, frustrated with how reassured she felt by a familiar expectation approaching. “It must be time for another waltz. The boys are coming to claim their dances.”

“I thought I was supposed to be a scandal.”

“I think they prefer to see you as someone fresh,” Delia deduced. “We’ve all grown up with each other. In some ways, the boys must think that making eyes at the other girls would be like flirting with their sisters. You’ve got the magical allure of being from out of town.”

“I don’t want to dance with anyone over there. I don’t think I could do it anyway.”

Delia finally seemed to register Sadie’s panic. In it, she recognized an opportunity. Something delicious came over her features, melding with the blush from the champagne. Here was a chance to do something different, to show that they had looked past the façade and announce that they would not stitch themselves into the seamlessness. “We could scandalize them all,” she decided. “Would you dance with me instead?”

Sadie looked at Delia strangely. The last thing she wanted was more attention. But she could think of nothing more pleasant than dancing with the only person in the room she trusted. She wasn’t given the chance to object, anyway. Before Sadie had the time to reconsider, Delia put a hand to her waist—confident, unfettered—and urged her through the periphery. In a few steps she’d swished them into the throng of dancers.

It was daring, unusual—some might even have said cruel. If Sadie hadn’t been so charmed by Delia’s momentum, if she had hesitated one second, or if Delia had given her the time to, Sadie would have stopped dead on the dancefloor and caused a commotion. But instead, she found herself more than capable of following Delia’s smooth indications, no different navigating couples on that dancefloor than it had been navigating the furniture in her bedroom. They danced, all eyes on them, and Sadie felt tickled, not by the staring eyes around them but by the sparkling gaze right in front of her as they spun until the room around them was a blur. Light-headed, she focused on the blue eyes before her, grateful for this opportunity to admire them up close. They were all warmth and delight, a promise of clear skies and calm waters. A promise strengthened by the warm sureness of Delia’s hand at her waist.

“We’re making them all jealous,” Delia grinned, her eyes brimming even brighter. “Why did we ever care before about not dancing without a care?”

Strangely, despite the myriad turns about the room, whatever dizziness or fear Sadie felt before had disappeared. She didn’t know if it was the champagne or Delia’s nearness, but she felt the pleasant confidence of inebriation settle over her. She felt giddy and certain, and suddenly as though she might burst with pleasure as the waltz’s melody swelled with bravado. There was some secret which unfurled with their nearness, which made Sadie feel bereft when the waltz swelled to a close, over before she could reconcile where exactly her delight had sprung from. She felt a yearning when Delia tore herself away, and yet the nearness they had shared—and the complicity when Delia whispered to her “you know exactly what to do”—gave her a heady conviction when the golden girl squeezed her hand encouragingly and handed her off to one of the anonymous young men who had been watching their spectacle with frustrated awe.

As he took her hand, his height and breadth felt foreign after Delia’s familiar form, so near her own size. The conspiracy of Delia’s nearness, the certainty that they did not need anyone else to make their evening a success, suddenly filled Sadie with an exhilarating arrogance. She became almost as cavalier as Delia in responding to the benign questions that perforated waltz after waltz.

She enjoyed being evasive. She saw that they enjoyed the game of her mystery, but that was of little importance to her. She did not realize it then, but she had the rare privilege of being able to construct her own self myth, to define herself however she wanted, to be whomever she liked. She came from an old California family and described how her life might have been if her grandfather hadn’t drowned the rancho in debt to compensate for the drought. She very well might have grown up to become an heiress of oranges, overseeing a corner of the land that had been stolen from her great grandmother’s people. Her ties to the land were deeper than any of those from this soi-disant elite waltzing along in the froth on the surface.

She didn’t speak about the bindery, and later she came to regret how easy it had been to erase those years. As though all that hard toil had been a failure, to some degree, erasable and written over as soon as she received a serendipitous invitation to step onto this elaborate playground. She feared that she had been, unwittingly, someone who put their life on hold for a notion of what was to come. The truth was that she had never much considered where things might take her beyond the bindery, if ever they might take her anywhere else. And now that it had, she lusted after reachable horizons with a startling immediacy. And so, yes, she did erase her past. She rewrote it. Changed the facts. Embellished a bit. She did not know if it was good or bad to do so, but it was such an intoxicating magic to decide who she was when before this had always seemed preordained.

As she talked about her imagined upbringing in the marigolden poppy covered hills near the coast, she did not spare a thought for her mother. Carried away in the tide of taffeta, she was swept further into the swirling mass of dancers on the floor by each partner who came to claim his dance.

The music swelled, and Sadie tried in vain to keep up with the footwork and conversation, but she couldn’t quite keep afloat. She felt the strangest sensation of drowning without being underwater, pushed deeper and deeper into a sea of silks and satins.

That was when she saw Lenora. She was standing on the edge of the dancefloor, wearing a dress in one of those bustled styles twenty years out of fashion, looking at ease and yet disapproving. Sadie realized that she had, in fact, described her mother’s past in embellishing her own origin tale. Lenora’s life was that romantic mystery, and anything which had happened before they relocated Downtown and worked at the bindery remained largely unknown to Sadie. She was rewriting her own story, but reviving her mother’s, and there was something all at once haunting and comforting about the fact that she could fulfill a future that might have been open to Lenora if things had turned out differently. Sadie figured she had conjured her mother’s ghost for that moment, and then assumed this ghost’s identity as strangers whisked across a reimagined version of the land she came from. The polished oak dancefloor had been harvested from the same trees that belonged to the foothills, and yet, chopped into pieces and waxed over, they had become foreign terrain.

The foreignness eventually took hold of her, and after more waltzes than she could count, Sadie fled the dancefloor, scanning the crowd for that ghost of her mother. Then she scanned the crowd desperately for any sign of Delia, or any of the Monroes, but none of them were in sight. For a moment, she feared that they had left without her—and maybe they had. Life was capable of casting cruel tricks to remind its victims of where they belonged. Stranded in the opulent throng, the panic which had been put aside seized Sadie again, suffocating her with the weight of all the diamond-encrusted, lace-trimmed politesse.

She stumbled out into the corridor, realizing that the champagne’s spell had worn off. She found her way back to the table laden with sparkling coupes and drank another one down far too quickly, which had an immediate and slightly nauseating effect.

Her head felt heavy, and her panic squeezed even tighter. Even away from the dancefloor, there were still too many people. People who, as soon as they saw her, started to whisper, or began to approach. It was an alienating thing to have lost her anonymity so completely. She wanted to blend into the crowd and remain unremarkable, safe from this pointed observation. She fled through corridor after corridor, room after room.

Eventually, she found herself in a room off the edge of the ballroom. It had a door which led out to the lilac-scented night. Sadie stopped herself on the threshold. Peering out into the darkness, towards the shadowed silhouettes of the hotel grounds, she could hear muffled laughter. If she stepped outside, she feared she would walk off the edge of something within her. So she stepped back into the room.

Resigned, she turned back to the door leading to the ballroom, and caught a glimpse of Delia’s rose gold splendor on the dancefloor beyond. Relieved, Sadie felt a sudden longing for all afternoons to be like the one she had spent in Delia’s company. An easy intimacy, a soft breeze, languid laughter and lemonade and fanciful talk of a future that would never come. She felt a brief pang of jealousy, too. That Delia was actively trying to bring this future upon herself. And that she had been deprived of Delia’s company for her entire girlhood. Jealousy, too, for the assumption from all hearts in that room that two girls could not simply enjoy each other’s company forever and have no other life designs interrupt this.

Sadie flopped down onto one of the vacant chairs along the wall, breathless and disoriented. Perhaps it was easy for her to decry Delia’s fancies, as she had seen into the depths of a man’s intentions and never intended to return there. Delia still saw only the potential riled by all the great fairytale fantasies of what magic a good match could strike between a man and a woman. And maybe, for someone else, magic could be found there. But Sadie had felt it, instead, in the easy comfort of Delia’s quick intimacy.

“Not much excitement in being a wallflower, is there,” a nearby voice from her periphery began, bringing Sadie back to full coherence. It continued, rapid and slightly erratic: “I don’t know why I bother showing up to these things. Well, actually, I do know why I bother, but it’s hard to seek prospects when none of them will deign to dance with you.”

As the voice rambled on, Sadie turned towards its source: a gangly, bespectacled young man seated a few chairs away, hands tightly clutching a book in his lap. He looked lost and uncomfortable. Though immaculately dressed, he appeared just as out of place as she felt. Even though this babbler was staring straight ahead and possibly avoiding eye contact, he appeared to be addressing Sadie.

“It’s not a fair means of meeting people anyways,” he continued. “Here we’re forced to judge solely on what one looks like, and for people like myself who don’t cut a sporting figure, it’s positively impossible to make a good impression. And have you heard that a first impression is how you’ll always be remembered?”

Sadie leaned forward slightly to catch his attention. “Your stream-of-consciousness is in excellent shape.”

He turned to her for the first time and straightened his spectacles. “Pardon me?”

Before she could answer, his face contorted with concern.

“Oh dear, was I rambling again? A thousand apologies. It’s just that, when I meet people for the first time, I never know quite what to say, so I can’t help but speak the first thing that comes to mind, and then I can’t stop once I get started. I think it’s because I’m deathly afraid of those silences that sometimes fall in between conversations, so I try to avoid them at all costs and—” he paused, “Oh, dear, I’m doing it again, aren’t I?”

Sadie laughed, shifted over a seat, and extended her hand across the single chair that remained between them. “I’m Sadie. Sadie... Monroe.”

He looked surprised. “I didn’t know there was a Sadie Monroe.”

“She’s a new addition.”

“Adopted?”

“Illegitimate.”

“I see,” the young man mused, though did not sound particularly concerned. “The rules are all just made up, anyway. They only say ‘illegitimate’ because for some reason everything centers around the father. If we only considered mothers in the same way… Sometimes it feels like we’ve got the whole thing rather backwards.”

Sadie had been smiling politely along with his words, but at the mention of mothers, her smile faded.

“Have I said something to upset you?” Her companion frowned. “A thousand apologies. I really can’t stop talking once I’ve started and I—”

“I lost my mother recently.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” he responded, perhaps a little too quickly. After that, he didn’t say anything further (not knowing what ought to be said), which prompted one of the dreaded silences he’d previously mentioned.

After a few excruciating moments, Sadie’s downward gaze drifted towards the book in his lap. “Reading? At an event like this?”

“I find the music sets a good pace,” he said. “I never dance anyway. Might as well be productive.”

He handed the book to her and Sadie set it in her lap. She ran her fingers carefully over the leather binding. It had been rare indeed that she’d had the chance to hold a finished book in her hands. The spine felt so tidy and important, as did the title embossed on the front cover: Persuasion, a Novel by Jane Austen.

“I find I can very much relate to the protagonist,” her companion offered a sheepish smile. “Do you enjoy novels, Miss Monroe?”

“I haven’t read very many,” Sadie admitted. “But I should like to read as many as I can.”

“You can borrow this one if you’d like.”

Her eyes gleamed. “Really?”

“Sure. I’ve got a whole library of novels. It’s somewhat renowned in these parts. But so is your father’s. As it happens, we’re neighbors.”

“Are we?” Sadie frowned. “I’m sorry, I’m afraid I still don’t know your name.”

“Oh dear,” he muttered. “A thousand apologies. I’m so very bad at introductions. I’m Everett. Everett Wakefield.”

“And how did the Wakefields get to be here?” Sadie asked, pleased by the effervescent-tinged nonchalance that fell into her tone. “Another innovation that brought you great wealth?”

“The Wakefields aren’t among the rest of these nouveau riche, actually. It’s some ancient family name. Which means we did absolutely nothing admirable to acquire any wealth.” His expression sobered. “We’re here for the climate. Mother’s health is rather poorly and the air is good for her lungs.”

“I’m sorry,” Sadie murmured distractedly.

“She’s even joined the Valley Hunt Club,” Everett continued. “Looking at her now, you’d never think she was ill at all. She might even be cured.”

“What is this club, exactly?” Sadie asked. “They were talking about it before...”

“The hunt club is just equestrians who need some extra thrill. They go chasing coyotes mostly. But sometimes there’s still a wildcat lurking.”

“Ah, yes, Nathaniel mentioned something about a cat this afternoon. I didn’t realize what he meant.”

“I think they chase it until it leaps up a tree, and then they shoot it down.”

“What?”

“The cat would hurt someone if they just let it prowl the streets.”

“But this is its home.”

“Therein lie the laws of civilization,” Everett sighed, then spiraled into a diatribe about the cruelty of man, or of destiny, or of pure pleasure in sport. He rambled about all these things together, but Sadie couldn’t listen fully. She was caught thinking of the wildcat hunted for fun, shot down after being terrorized into enough of a rage to justify the shooting and have the whole game called good, clean sport. As she considered this, her gaze drifted back towards the dancefloor, where a pair of piercing blue eyes seemed to be watching her, even as they spun in the midst of a dance.

“Do you know who that is?” She turned back to Everett. He stopped dead in the middle of a sentence to squint into the crowd. His eyes landed on the same blue pair across the floor, but he quickly looked away.

“Oh, him?” Everett shrugged, failing miserably in his attempt to sound casual. “Just Jasper Lennox. Of the Lennox Cycling Empire.”

“I see,” Sadie murmured. She could feel those penetrating eyes still watching her from afar, but she forced herself not to give in to curiosity by resisting the urge to look again. She recalled the name—both Delia and Nathaniel had talked about him that afternoon. Though he was a complete stranger, she knew that gaze, that hunger proposition, the unevolved need that accompanied its concentration. Part of the reason she could look away was because she knew there was no what if in the paltry game of mislabeled romance, because she was resolved never to see a man’s piercing gaze through to its desires ever again.

“I seem to recall he and I were boyhood friends,” Everett said suddenly. “Until we weren’t. I’m not very partial to the Lennoxes, in all honesty.”

“Why’s that?” Sadie finally chanced another glance towards the tall Lennoxed figure on the dancefloor. She wondered what it was about him that had attracted Delia. He was tall and clean-cut and as blue-eyed as she was.

“How shall I put this? They’re just...” He paused. “Valley Hunt people.”

Sadie pictured the tall Lennox on a horse, tearing through the sagebrush after a mountain lion. She wondered where the distinction between the myth and truth of glory and romance began.

“He would never approach the likes of me anymore,” Everett continued, “and might in fact believe himself to be so far above us all that he probably wouldn’t dare to mingle with anyone connected to me even by association.”

As part of avoiding looking at the dancefloor, Sadie stared at Everett perhaps a little too intensely while he talked. Everett held her gaze, delighting in a confusion as to why this pleasant newcomer would suddenly be so interested in him. And though neither of them was interpreting their shared eye contact correctly, the fact that they were caught up in their own conversation to avoid the figure on the dancefloor meant that they were equally startled when that very figure suddenly appeared before them and spoke in a velvety smooth voice with a deep gravel beneath it, like a river flowing over smooth stones.

“Evening friends.”

Up close, Jasper Lennox was immaculate, and dashing as all get out. From where he stood, his figure blocked the light of the nearest chandelier, which cast an ethereal glow around his silhouette. Sadie figured a girl was supposed to find him handsome, but there was something aloof in his manner which clashed strangely with his eager tone.

“Everett, Old Pal,” he grinned, “won’t you introduce us?”

Everett gaped in disbelief, but quickly came to his senses. “Of course, of course!” He floundered in a great flailing of limbs that was required to rise from his seat and cleared his throat, which became a brief coughing episode, which prompted him to clear his throat again. “Jasper Lennox,” he wheezed, “This is Miss Sadie Monroe.”

His voice caught at the end of his sentence when Jasper extended a hand to Sadie. “May I have this dance?”

“Well,” Sadie stuttered, then recollected the small bound booklet attached to her wrist, “My dance card is full.”

“Has this town been spreading rumors about me already?”

“Of course not!” Sadie hurried to say. “I just don’t know how to dance.”

“How refreshingly modest.” He grinned again. “People around here tend to exaggerate their abilities, not undermine them. I saw you on the floor already.”

His insistence wasn’t seductive, but somehow Sadie couldn’t find any other reason to decline. With a glance towards Everett, who failed to hide his disappointment beneath a polite smile, she accepted Jasper’s arm and followed him back onto the dancefloor, where they arrived just in time for another waltz.

In the opening measures, Jasper took Sadie’s right hand in his left and placed his right hand at her back. He led her into the tide of dancers with silent cues.

“Miss Monroe,” he finally broke his rhythmic repetition, “you’re the talk of the town.”

She gasped with the force of a spin. “Am I?”

“Of course, it’s not good talk,” Jasper clarified. “I’ve heard some terrible whispers this evening. But I’ve also heard from reputable sources that there’s no such thing as bad publicity.”

Sadie let a nervous laugh escape her lips.

“Are you always this bashful?”

“On the contrary,” she smiled, emboldened after she successfully navigated a twirl and returned to his arms, “I merely find myself a little breathless.”

He pulled her closer. “Is it on account of the waltz?”

She smirked. “Not entirely.”

Their waltz ended, and another piece began. Jasper did not let go of her.

“Isn’t it improper to have more than one dance in a row?”

“They’re already talking, Miss Monroe. Why don’t we give them something better to talk about?”

So she smiled and twirled and laughed and possibly even flirted—though admittedly she wasn’t quite sure what that was. All the while she remained completely oblivious to the loathsome looks from the other faces in the room.

“Listen,” Jasper lowered his voice again. “I have a proposition for you.”

“I’m not interested in courting anyone,” Sadie protested hurriedly, panic rising to her chest.

“That’s convenient,” Jasper’s grin broadened. “I was going to suggest we become friends.”

“Friends?”

Friendship was not something Sadie had expected to hear from the mustachioed man in front of her. Friendship—equality and good humor between two people—was a strange proposition coming from this stranger. Sadie sensed something burbling beneath it. She was surprised by her own candor. “I imagine you just want to use me to get close to Delia.”

“Correct.” Jasper smirked. “You see, Miss Monroe, I’m no longer permitted to call on your sister. But if I were permitted to call on you, I might be able to change things.”

“If she said she wasn’t interested, why bother?”

“It’s not that simple,” Jasper insisted. “She didn’t want to rush things. And for that matter, neither do I.”

“Are you in love with her?”

“Delia knows where my heart lies,” Jasper said. “I have been nothing but abundantly clear with the Monroes. I’d just like to tempt a second chance, to have the chance to talk.”

“Let me talk with her, then,” Sadie decided. “I want what’s in her best interest.”

“How very sisterly of you,” Jasper said, mockingly gracious. “You seem remarkably close for a sister who’s just appeared out of thin air.”

“It’s not very friendly to be suggesting threats.”

“That was nothing of the sort.” His voice lowered, “And if you really don’t want anyone else propositioning you, then no one else would dare come calling if I started hanging around the Monroe house again.”

“I don’t think they’ll be calling on me anyway.”

“Oh, they will,” Jasper urged. “In case you haven’t noticed, you’re new. And rich.”

Sadie laughed. If only he knew where she’d come from that very morning. Leland Monroe had been generous enough to invite her into his home and suggest she was welcome to stay, but it seemed naively hopeful to start considering herself a member of the Monroe household already. She might not have grown up in polite society, but it was no secret that illegitimate children were not regarded in the same way as their legitimate counterparts. Furthermore, she still suspected there was no legitimacy—ill or not—to speak of.

“We really could be friends,” Jasper concluded. Suddenly he was looking far away from her, towards someone behind Sadie’s view. She turned quickly to find Nathaniel rushing politely towards them. That is, the look in his eyes was urgent, but he begged the pardon of anyone he accidentally brushed in making his way over.

“Evening,” Jasper said, that voice rippling over cool stones once again.

“I’m sorry,” Nathaniel exhaled, revealing he was more breathless than he looked. “But we have to go.”

Sadie hesitated, not entirely sure whom he was speaking to.

“It’s Father,” he insisted. The panic she felt at the news seemed as unjustifiably intense as her confusion at Nathaniel’s coming to find her—a far cry from his animosity that afternoon.

“Is everything alright?” Jasper was closer than he had been before.

“Father’s not well,” Nathaniel said, but the calm in his voice was precisely what betrayed his unease. “We have to go now.”

There was no question, no goodbye, no time to say anything further. Sadie hurried after Nathaniel, who’s long stride, though seemingly unhurried, made her rush to keep up.

By the time they’d left the flurry of dancers and drinkers and gallantry, the sumptuously decorated rooms and the lily-scented dancing for the dusty night beyond, it became clear that the truth was much worse than anything Nathaniel had suggested. The Monroes’ carriage was once again parked in front of the Hotel Green and Delia was already inside, leaning over a prostrate Leland. He was unconscious, or barely conscious, murmuring low and unintelligibly in a profuse sweat.

“Drive!” Nathaniel commanded once he and Sadie had squeezed in, all composure falling away. Up in the driver’s seat, Beasley slapped the reins. It was not a long distance back to Millionaire’s Row, but the seconds dragged out with Leland’s shallow breaths.

Sadie felt as alarmed as the other two Monroe children appeared, but there was some deep, horrible feeling inside her which was not surprised by the threat of tragedy. She berated herself for all previous suspicions that forever would not last long. She had watched one parent succumb to stillness only a few days before. She knew how possible it was, how sudden it seemed despite the great inevitability looming over anyone, in sickness or in health.

And she felt terribly selfish in her sense of tragedy. A father was dying. Faux or not, he was a father she’d only just met, and she could think only of her own imminent rejection from the world and household into which he’d invited her. It had taken only an afternoon’s worth of daydreaming to get her hopes up. They clung fiercely as the source of her burgeoning sorrow. She could hope for Leland to live longer. And she did. But she could see in the pallor of his cheeks, hear in the timbre of his cough, that there was not much time left.

After much combing and twisting, curling and heaping, Delia had artfully arranged her golden locks. She was satisfied with the brimming, mountainous effect made possible by her faithful rat—a halo of repurposed gold curls added as a crowning extension on top of her own hair swept into the requisite bouffant. Updos à la mode had to suggest lush abundance, a carefully curated excess like the lackadaisical Gibson Girl’s characteristic coiffure. In the year since she’d had her debut, Delia had become a master architect of elaborate scaffoldings to achieve special occasion hair that was all at once à la mode and de rigueur.

She turned away form her reflection when she heard the parrot, Envy, twitter from her golden cage nearby. Approaching the bird, she reached through the bars. Before, Envy had been partial to pecking at any fingers that came too close, but she had more recently taken a liking to gentle caresses over her soft feathers. Delia ran her index finger over the eternal spring green that brightened to a shock of red at the base of the bird’s neck. She considered letting Envy out, as she did on occasion, but did not want to risk the bird’s habit of flying towards people’s heads. The last thing she needed was a live parrot mistaking her newly piled hair for a nest. Though the notion might be a stupendous pastiche someday, she smirked to herself, as feathers and entire taxidermized birds atop hats had been the fashion as long as Delia had been old enough to start wearing her hair up.

Laughing away the fancy, and feeling deliciously capricious, Delia sat back down in front of her vanity. She was pleasantly surprised to require a few blinks in order to recognize herself. Father and Nathaniel never gave anything more encouraging than approving harumphs, but she felt certain that Sadie, with her wide-eyed admiration for everything, would notice the effort, the detail. It occurred to Delia, as she rose to seek Sadie down the hall, that she had not often been seen down to the details. To her father and brother and everyone else in the foothills, she was merely the daughter, the sister, the troublemaker, or the beauty. There was something new and powerful about being regarded the way Sadie had done it—with admiration untainted by possession or envy.

In a thrill of morbid irony, Delia recognized that it was entirely possible Sadie had a greater likelihood of being Leland’s daughter than she did. She supposed that some other more covetous girl swayed by blood’s influence might have felt threatened. But she knew Leland was not like most fathers. Irrespective of his wealth, Delia had long since resolved that she would rather be the daughter of a man who wanted a daughter, finding more confidence in a promise than the usual elusive biological authority.

But whatever Delia might have felt was missing from her silvered upbringing was nothing whatsoever to do with paternity. It had been there in the ticklish comraderie she’d shared with Sadie that afternoon. Delia had never been unpopular, but there was something of the inchoate in her schoolgirl friendships—associations of time and place that blotted out any hopes of true affinity. Since last fall, all the other graduates from Miss Orton’s Classic School for Girls had spent the previous nine months at sister colleges back east. Newly returned, they seemed to be biding their time with Ivy-entwined boasts, and there was a new condescension to their intimacies. They had started to regard the foothill sage as rather quaint compared to the east’s cobbled prestige. Suddenly the west was heathen and dusty and they were all grown up, feeling pompously superior to the childhood they’d shed less than a year ago.

Delia knew Leland did not approve of her decision not to attend university. He had indulged her one year of coming out into society as a compromise to call her bluff of matrimonial conviction. A part of her knew that she might, in fact, like to head east and go to school, which might have been why she had curtailed all other suitors’ advances since last summer to accept something fruitless with Jasper Lennox. If she did not find herself with an engagement by the end of the summer this time around, Father would expect her to head east in the fall—any of the Seven Sisters’ schools were open to her. But the real live sister newly settling into the room down the hall had her rethinking this secret resignation to resume her studies. She could imagine many languid evenings of late-night confidences with Sadie as being far more agreeable than the tepid secrecy exchanged with some old nouveau riche girls in a shared dormitory at Vassar or Bryn Mawr. She knew that determined forbears had fought for the merits of further education, which her mother had seized and her grandmother could never have imagined. And yet, she still could not help seeing past all the revolutionary cries to the futile and inevitable. Despite all their new arrogance, the girls she’d grown up with were still going to come back from university and marry anyway—or marry into New England so they wouldn’t have to come back.

Delia had been quick to share with Sadie that she knew precisely what she wanted, but looking that dolled up verison of herself in the eyes while seated in front of her vanity, she could recognize that this conviction was a shield against a roiling uncertainty. It had occurred to her, in spending the afternoon with Sadie, that what she really desired more than anything else was a confidante. She’d fretted over disintegrating comraderies and hypothetical husbands, but a sister was the unexpected answer to all that emptiness. Sometimes a girl needed things to be outside of herself, given for safekeeping to someone else. The rosebud within her—to which Delia was so often compared—could not bloom without a rooted trust in someone who wouldn’t betray her with judgement. Most pleasantly, Sadie had not batted an eye after hearing Delia’s blue-eyed hypothesis.

It took all her restraint not to knock on Sadie’s door before the time she’d promised to do so. It became suddenly, bewilderingly apparent that there was a lifetime of confidences broiling within her. These threatened to spill over with the irresistible new urge to share things—everything. Sadie seemed willing enough to listen but it would do no good to bewilder the girl too quickly. Delia forbid herself from subjects other than the awaiting evening once it finally seemed enough time had passed that she could knock on the door down the hall.

The poor dark-haired girl was seated on the bed staring out the window towards the mountains when Delia came to find her. “Is everything alright?”

“It’s just so strange to be alone.”

Delia joined her on the edge of the bed and clasped Sadie’s hands between her own. It seemed odd that she could have such doubts when Delia felt so certain. “You don’t ever have to worry about being alone ever again.”

Sadie marveled at Delia’s honeysuckle nearness, but felt a bit colder and emptier when she eventually retracted her hands, leaving the phantom trace of her fingertips.

“You’ve done your hair,” Sadie observed, admiring the golden strands burgeoning into a soft, voluminous tower that spilled over with curls.

“Do you like it?”

“You look quite majestically beautiful.”

“No need for hyperbole,” Delia tutted, though she was unable to fully hide her delight. “I’ll make you something just as grand.”

She admired that everything Sadie said had a startled honesty to it, which the girl could not seem to hide. This was something the university girls had lost, and which Delia herself was losing. Because it was à la mode to tell people what they expected or were most afraid of not hearing. Reassurance was a woman’s crowning accessory, but even when given too often as paltry insistence, her ensembles began to feel incomplete without it.

After relocating to Delia’s room, the golden girl perched Sadie on the stool in front of her vanity and procured an arsenal of necessary tools—brushes, combs and perfumes. She admired the thick tresses as she brushed through Sadie’s hair. “I would love to have locks as thick as yours.”

Sadie, in turn, marveled at the delicate thoroughness of Delia’s brushstrokes. When not kept up in a working girl’s chignon, her hair fell down to her waist in thick waves. She enjoyed the soft gust as Delia’s sighed behind her, “And dark hair is so fashionable, besides.”

“Why does the color of my hair make a difference?” Sadie asked. “Yours is lovely too.”

“You might come to find it all so tedious,” Delia sighed again, this time languidly, “but don’t we always seem to want that we don’t have? It’s funny how you and I are such opposites. But that’s what’s most delightful.”

Sadie felt tickled by the gentle pull of each brushstroke as much as the careful consideration Delia took into artfully gathering her long, dark tresses to poof them out into a wide-brimmed pompadour. Delia’s nearness was the consolation to all the perplexing mystery that had unfolded throughout the course of the afternoon, but something sharp beneath it all kept Sadie in bated suspense. “I have no idea how to live here.”

“Your humility is charming, really,” Delia smirked, “but don’t get the idea that you need to put on airs. You’re just what we need, just as you are.”

“But there are codes,” Sadie protested. The last volume she had contributed to binding was Marion Harland and Virginia Van De Water’s Everyday Etiquette. The book’s insistence on the latest proprieties—calling, courting, chaperones—had seemed far beyond Sadie’s reach when she skimmed the opening chapters between needle and thread. These had, since then, become newly temerous threats. A woman could no longer imagine such social intricacies with amusement from afar when they had swooped close enough to pounce.

“You’re right, of course,” Delia mused. “But there’s too much to explain all at once. How about we go to Vroman’s this week? He’s the bookseller in town. He’ll have the latest on etiquette and escapism. At least one of those will fill my head with useful information if I end up going back east in the fall.”

“You’re leaving?” Sadie’s pointed disappointment pleased Delia, though she silently berated herself for having let the idea slip. Nevertheless, it was a relief to say the east out loud. There was a quiet desperation within her to know how others would react if she were to up and leave after all.

“Well, not necessarily,” Delia admitted, wilting slightly. “I’ve just been thinking about how we’ll see all my old school friends tonight, and they’re just going to remind us of how great life is in New England dormitories and how worldly they think they’ve become. Sometimes I wish a party could just be a party, without all the pomp and preening.”

“Do we have to do something just because everyone else is?”

Delia laughed. Sadie’s observation surprised and delighted her. “You make a silver spoon girl’s problems seem simple, really. Maybe we could just forget all the rules for an evening. That way you don’t have to worry about any of it.”

Her shy smile met Delia’s in the mirror. “I’ll be lost no matter what.”

Without extensions the color of Sadie’s own dark hair, Delia had opted to sweep everything into a formation of curls and waves that bloomed like an unfurling blossom at the back of Sadie’s head. With a few sparkling combs holding the hair in place, she had transformed that morning’s factory girl into a debutante.

As for their dresses, each girl required the other’s help to be properly laced into their pastel-colored silks. Admiring their reflections side-by-side in the iridescent evening hues—one green, the other pink—the two looked very much like sisters indeed.

“You’ll be catching glances from every corner of the room,” Delia beamed.

“But how do I say no, if someone comes up asking anything? A dance, for example.”

“‘I must politely decline your request,’” Delia decided. “But you could also just dance. It’s really not too difficult, and some people are so inadept that you couldn’t possibly be the worst on the floor anyway.”

With the confident ease of someone who knew the inner-workings of this separate universe, Delia stepped closer, taking one of Sadie’s hands in her own and placing the other at Sadie’s upper back. With a surge of that velocity that had propelled her through the afternoon, she whisked Sadie into movement, humming a 1-2-3 Danube tune as blue as her merry irises, which startled the green parrot in her nearby cage into a bit of chirping. Sadie fumbled a bit trying to keep up with the waltz’s tempo, but with Delia’s steady pressure at her back indicating which direction to step, she quickly found that she could follow along with minimal injury to either party.

“See?” Delia grinned once they had succeeded with a few fluid turns in the floorspace between the bed and the dresser. “The waltz is nothing too complicated. You’re readier than you know.”

“Are you sure?” Sadie asked, feeling oddly bereft once Delia stopped their momentum. And yet, her entire body trilled with a vague sort of certainty that made it impossible not to keep smiling.

Delia returned to the vanity to retrieve a bottle of perfume and daintily rationed out a drop or two, which she dabbed just below each of her earlobes. Then she gestured for Sadie to come nearer and anointed her with the same scent. Sadie couldn’t tell if it was jasmine or citrus or violet or honey. All the sweetness of the afternoon brimmed together into one delicious bouquet.

**********

The afternoon itself had simmered slowly into evening. With sundown, the sky peeled back a fuchsia eveningtide. After their sumptuous lunch there was no room for dinner, but no time for it either. There would be ample provisions at the ball for whenever they got peckish, or so Delia insisted in her brimming excitement as she and Sadie descended back downstairs. Nathaniel was already waiting in the parlor off the foyer which Sadie had not yet been through. He wore crisp black evening finery and skimmed a book distractedly, no trace of the dusty dishevelment from earlier. His animosity had cooled, but he also curtailed any outward admiration as the two girls swept into the room.

“Shall we be off?” Delia propositioned once Nathaniel had risen to his feet.

“Not quite,” Nathaniel said. “Father said he’d join us after all.”

The dull thud of Leland’s cane in the hall upstairs announced his presence before he, too, appeared in the entry. His achromatic suit was as crisp as Nathaniel’s, and contrasted splendourously with the blue parrot who was, once again, perched on his shoulder. Dressed in his evening finery, Leland looked more well than he had in weeks, but beneath the bow tie and the pallid smile he felt faint and far away. He had taken an extra dose of blue mass, hoping the mercury would revive him, somehow, and another spoonful of the cough syrup Wheatley had left him that morning. His throat burned and yet felt soothed all at once. His entire body felt that way. That brinkside sensation hadn’t left him, but no concern was worth upending his daughter—daughters’—delight in that moment. He only wanted to see them both smiling of an evening, filled with hope and pride and promise, before he faded back into his memories of those old days in the west and let them carry him off to oblivion.

“Echo’s not really coming with us, is he?” Delia frowned.

“He didn’t want to be left alone.” Leland’s merry tone came out all to easily to stifle the melancholy simmering beneath it. “He didn’t want to miss the party.”

“I suppose he’s more original than a boutonnière.”

“As you well know,” Leland proclaimed, gathering all the strength left in him to lead the way out of the house, “there’s so much more to huff about than forks and spoons.”

Once they stepped out the door, there was a glossy chestnut mare hitched to a spotless barouche in front of the Monroe home. A sporting young man in livery perched in the driver’s seat, waiting.

“You have a chauffeur?” Sadie asked, hesitating on the threshold to behold the elegant carriage up close. She wondered why she sounded surprised. Everything in view glinted in earnest wealth under the twilight haze.

“I know,” Delia sighed. “It’s quaint. Everyone else on the block is getting an automobile, but Father insists we don’t hop off the cliff of modernity straight away. Lemmings and all that.”

“I don’t want to put Beasley out of the job,” Leland said. Echo fluttered briefly to regain his shoulder perch as Nathaniel helped Leland make the high step up into the open-back carriage.

“Beasley could learn to drive a car,” Delia suggested.

Beasley—the chauffeur—turned back from his perch up front, smiling wide. “I’d drive whatever you need, wherever you want to go.” As he spoke, he addressed all the passengers, but his eyes—after passing curiously over Sadie—hovered admiringly in Delia’s direction.

If the reader would permit an aside:

Beasley was a gallant-looking chap, but too ardent a fellow to make a secret of his admiration for his employer’s daughter. He was handsome enough to please Delia from a distance, and she liked to entertain the idea of such a predictable kind of forbidden melodrama. But it wasn’t cosmopolitan enough, and her visions of romance remained too sure and demure to stray from the fantasmes of a more princely nature. Besides, she had grown up with Beasley, whose origins were even more secret than her own. He had been in Ms. Havescott’s arms on that day many years ago when the housekeeper had first shown up on the Monroe doorstep looking for a position. But we are at risk of a major digression…

To return to the present events of the past:

The Monroes’ carriage clopped down Orange Grove Boulevard, its passengers all silently ponderous. Leland breathed in the cool night air with a wistful finality. Nathaniel pondered how to keep himself at a distance that evening. Echo considered flying away for the upteenth time, but could not fathom leaving Envy behind. Delia envisioned a myriad of possible futures and recoiled from each one. Beasley imagined only one hypothetical future and reveled in it.

Meanwhile, Sadie marveled at the swift, steady trot which brought them past a mile’s row of millionaires’ estates. In the gloaming, the wide boulevard’s gas lamps shimmered, a line of lunar luminescence lighting the way. The houses were darker, set back from the street, looming geometric monsters against the bruised sky. But darker still, further away but not far at all, the mountains were another silhouette, such permanent ink in their evening density that the sky lost its vividness, diluting to a mere watercolored darkness against their peaks.

Sadie herself had experienced too much new and differentness over the course of the afternoon to comprehend herself seated next to Delia in that carriage. There was still an underlying momentum which had swept her into this unfathomable existence with no time to realize how it worked. She was so far outside of herself on the short drive to Castle Green that she did not feel any fear or uncertainty. That is, until they reached the line-up of carriages and automobiles on Raymond Avenue.

The Castle—a lavish hotel of Victorian proportions with an arch Moorish flair—was lit up far more magnificently than the subtle luster of Orange Grove’s residential streetlamps. The structure spanned a city block, swallowing anyone who approached its illuminated depths. The entry echoing the laughter cascades and muddled conversation from the stream of glimmering guests who disappeared inside.

Once the Monroes’ carriage stopped directly in front, someone in a hotel uniform approached, helping first Delia out of the carriage, then Sadie. Nathaniel took Delia’s arm and Leland offered Sadie his. There was nothing left but to ascend the front steps into the maw of light and music.

Inside, vaulted ceilings and intricate paneling greeted them, leaving Sadie too stunned by the surroundings to realize that people were staring in her direction. She recognized the string music’s faint ternery coming from another room, and the melody, sumptuous, trembling, afflicted her with enough eagerness to combat her disbelief. It all felt so lavish popping up out of the sagebrush like a mirage. All but the music blurred into a glittering mass of curiosity and judgement.

Stepping through a series of corridors, all of them filled with staring, glamorous people, the Monroes entered the ballroom, the enormous, whirling core. At the far end of the room, a stage was adorned with enough cascading, flowering plants to partially obscure the musicians in the middle. Their waltz, nevertheless, proliferated into the room as melodiously as the flowers’ perfume.

“Oh the roses and the lilies!” Delia turned towards Sadie. “Isn’t it all simply divine?” She shimmered in her satin, and the light of a chandelier up above cast a sparkling sheen on her golden hair. Sadie focused on the top of Delia’s coiffure, something which kept her rooted in place as the music and the faces and the synchronous tide of dancers swept her into a strange vertigo. She was glad to have Leland’s arm to cling to. She did not realize that he was just as glad for the steady pressure of her weight against his, the only thing giving him enough strength to stay upright.

It was strange to be so close to a faux father she’d met only that morning, and yet his pressing presence—even if misinterpreted as reassuring—reassured her. For a moment, Sadie’s thoughts leapt back to the bindery she’d left that morning. If the day had gone like any of the others before it, she would have just finished work and been off to the dim apartment Downtown. Except there was no work day anymore. No dim apartment. No Lenora, pale and coughing in bed waiting for her to come home. If her mother could have seen her then, Sadie thought, there was no telling whether she would have approved. Already, Lenora’s daughter had been absorbed into a different life, one that had been withheld from her, dripping with diamonds and lace and beauty and ease. Sadie felt, in that moment, the iridescent trill of opportunity. Without knowing a thing about the people in that elegant labyrinth, she was an anonymous mystery. Rather than looking beyond luck’s precarious brink, she gazed down into its thrumming potential.

She wondered why Leland still held her arm, why they were still standing in place while everyone else in the room—the dancers on the floor and the guests mingling along the periphery—seemed to be in motion. She realized, then, that they were still lined up, waiting for another man in uniform who was announcing names, the cue for newly-arrived guests to descend into the tide. Shrinking under the probing gazes of those in the room, Sadie clung tigher to Leland’s arm, keeping her gaze trained on Delia’s golden halo, until they were the group standing on the edge of the ballroom next to the man in livery.

Delia handed him an embossed invitation, which he read out with an imposing timbre: “Mr. Leland, Mr. Nathaniel, and Ms. Cordelia Monroe.” He gave their party a puzzled glance when his eyes found Sadie, unmentioned on the card in his hands. Before he could ask, Delia leaned in and whispered something. The waltz’s lush crescendo swallowed the words from her lips. The man in livery raised his eyebrows, but made no secret of her hushed decree.

He cleared his throat and announced again: “And Miss Sadie Monroe.”

Leland had skulked back to bed as soon as the girls went out to the garden, the macaw close behind. Echo resumed his usual perch on the foot of the bed, as was customary in the afternoons, and watched the old man with worry. These days, Leland never looked particularly well, but something different, a new sadness, contorted his features as he sprawled atop the covers. Echo recognized it as the melancholy he sometimes felt when the wind twanged through the oaks like a choro mandolins’ cry.

Unable to move under the weight of his remorse, Leland retreated further into his memories, cursing hindsight’s kaleidoscope shimmering in on the woman who’d haunted him for decades. Indeed, there had been hints about her dwindling circumstances the last time he’d seen Lenora. That had been twenty years since, and she declared that it would be the last time. He remembered, vaguely, that she mentioned the debts on her mother’s estate—her father’s doing. Leland would have paid them, if only so that she could live without worry.

But she said she was haunted by that house, and good riddens to it anyway. She would not accept money and was embarrassed by the suggestion, even when Leland asserted that she had a right to it. It was, after all, her idea which had made him rich. And as for her illness, she hadn’t seemed sick at the time. But he supposed her disease was like his. Both could insidiously lay siege for years before their victims realized they’d been attacked.

Strangely, that last time they’d seen each other was harder to recollect than everything else about Lenora, perhaps because it was not the part he wanted to remember. Those early days in Virginia City overwhelmed the denouement that would follow many years later. The Lenora he had first known had been conjured from the image of her daughter.

From the open window, with its view of the rose garden below, a fountain of laughter burbled into muffled conversation. Though he couldn’t make out the words, Leland could hear the beatitude in Delia’s tone, the quiet joy in Sadie’s. But as an insistent, gnawing regret plunged him into an exhausted stupor, the memories returned, and he could feel himself on a precarious brink.

In the void of half-sleep, he remembered, for the first time in decades, that while working in Baltimore’s shipyard as a young man, he had aspired to be a philosopher or an artist. His family did not come from the same wealth as their neighbors, and so the young man’s interest in literature and natural science fell to mere amusements when a living had to be made. He’d had a good head for figures and quickly worked his way up the ranks in the shipping business. He might have gone far if he hadn’t been plagued by the Comstock nightmare that one fateful night. Later, he would come to consider it more of a premonition. It had whispered through his dreams as though it were the answer to everything. There was no knowing, at first, whether it would save him or kill him, but it seemed to have done both.

Back in that summer of 1859, the silver rush for the Comstock Lode in Virginia City teased those men west who hadn’t already been tempted by the gold at Sutter’s Mill. Leland, however, had no interest in quick riches or arduous journeys. It was simply the name that beckoned him.

The destination: a frontier façade, a boomtown attracting dreamers with its precious metal ore. There was bonanza and bust, and very little in-between. Mostly men, of course, who lusted after riches as much as the few women who had the good or unfortunate fortune of finding themselves in that living purgatory. The ladies conducted surer business—desire was a lucrative commodity. And though they were all propositioned, there were a handful who provided other services, namely a hot meal which was worth its weight in gold or silver to any famished miner, whether he’d had a successful day or not.

That was where the dark-eyed girl in a pinafore and petticoat served three squares daily and coffee in between. One might have mistaken her for someone shy, but she simply had no tolerance for miners soliciting favors. She served them all formally, wordlessly, and they kept coming back, thinking someday they’d get her to crack a smile. She addressed Leland with the same indifferent politeness for a month straight before he was able to ask her where she’d come from, and where she was going.

This gave her pause. A boomtown was a place of nows, not laters, as most people there had upended any semblance of prospects to prospect them all out west. Luck had become a characteristic attribute of success, the local religion, and an all-encompassing force that blighted out any concrete outlines of the future. The miners all worked so hard every day to try and strike it rich, coming up with nothing, that they might as well have spent more comfortable days as working men and earned more for their trouble. But wealth was not the only temptation. So many of them sought an escape into that desert void known as “the west.”

Lenora had come from further west than the others had ever known. She’d come from the edge of the world to Virginia City through happenstance, really. She had hoped to head east, to escape her mother’s ranch and the bandits terrorizing the valley to see the civilization that was slowly creeping towards the coast. She would have given anything for the kind of job all the eastern silver-seekers left behind. Something urban. In a factory. With fixed hours instead of the long, aching days of citrus trees and grape vineyards and cows. The rancho had been a gift to Lenora’s father, a Yanqui soldier who earned his land after fighting Mexico for it. But it was her mother, Selestina, who ran the property after her husband’s early demise and told her daughter tales of the land from both sides of her Californio ties.

Selestina had merged stories into one history of the valley, starting with when it was called Tovaangar, built upon the backs of seven turtles whose temerous agreement to stay in one place kept the land together. Sometimes these creatures considered going separate directions, and that was when the land trembled violently and threatened to break apart. This threat came from beneath the land itself, until the Spanish came, conquered, and called Tovaangar California in their own threat of violent myth about a warrior queen.

Califia hailed from Africa, some said, but her dominion was an isolated island called California. Pagan and valiant, she raised an army of women warriors to fight against the encroaching Christianity attempting to take over their land. Airborne griffins supplemented their fierce warriors’ ranks, but the queen, unarmed in hand-to-hand combat, ultimately ceded to the conquerors and their religion.

That Spanish story was written before they’d ever discovered Tovaangar along the Pacific coast. And yet this fiction sizzled with prophecy, determining the same fate for that quaking land as had happened to the mythical island of warrior women in golden armor. The new California had seemed another kind of El Dorado before the conquerors razed its ancient beauty. What the conquerors and converters did not recognize, however, were the griffins lying in wait. For those who didn’t look close enough, their great sleeping masses seemed to resemble mere mountains. And even among those who might have been prepared to fight the mythic beasts, nothing could be done to stop the turtles holding everything up from dispersing and tearing the land to pieces. Lenora had come to her own conclusion that, one day, before the paved civilization could take over, what lay beneath would finally break apart.

These concentric schemes for vengeance had converged, in Lenora’s imagination, into the name of the warrior queen, Califia, burbling menacingly as more and more people came west to establish their notion of civilization and revel in its dearth. Settlers, new and seasoned, were plagued by bandits thriving in the lawlessness. The land, in those days, was neither fully wild nor completely free.

But it lay in wait. And after so many years of this perpetual bated breath, Lenora had to leave. Her escape brought her somewhere between gold and silver to the boomtown, heading the way everyone else had come. It had helped her to admit this to the eager, not-quite-miner named Leland Monroe. His story reassured her that she was not the only one who’d ended up in Virginia City because of a name.

After the first night of their acquaintance, during which they talked for hours on either side of one of the rough-hewn wooden tables upon which Lenora served miners’ meals, they continued to talk every night thereafter. For months on end. This attention and understanding and gradual knowing seemed to express something that their actions never reflected. The only time their hands so much as brushed was the last night they saw each other in Virginia City, before Leland was to leave the mostly fruitless attempts at silver and head back east.

Still unable to move with the weight of memories bearing down, Leland wanted to believe he was helping Lenora’s daughter all these years later out of the goodness of his heart. But the truth was that he owed Lenora that much. And he knew Lenora knew that he owed her, even if she never would have admitted it. And so it was, in fact, out of guilt and not generosity, that he intended to declare Sadie Reyes his daughter.

The girls’ laughter outside pulled him out of the past, and his half-slumbering stupor. With the last reserves of strength he could muster, Leland rose from the bed and hobbled to the window. From there, he had a view of the backyard and the valley and the mountains beyond. Down amongst the roses, half-hidden by the trellis, Sadie and Delia in their pastel-hued dresses were just like roses themselves. He hoped Sadie would find lasting happiness in their home, but he wondered how much he should tell her, whether it would do any good if she knew.

***********

Meanwhile, in the rose garden, Delia did not get the chance to share her family’s brimming secrets. They were summoned with a call from Scottie, who appeared on the wraparound veranda with a pitcher of lemonade. Sadie was glad to come in out of the sun, though couldn’t help feeling as though everything about Delia left her in suspense.

After ushering Sadie towards a wicker table and chairs, Scottie poured each of the girls a glass of lemonade. The offering was a coup for information. She hungrily eyed the newcomer clad in Delia’s clothes.

“Seems like you’ll be staying for a little while?” She pried, hoping to gorge herself on something secret, resenting that she did not have the faintest idea of why or how Mr. Monroe could have accepted this girl’s far-fetched story.

“For a little while,” Sadie affirmed modestly.

“For good.” Delia beamed. “Thank you, Scottie.”

Thusly dismissed, the housekeeper returned to the house, soured by her roiling curiosity.

“The lemons are from our tree,” Delia explained proudly, once the two were alone again and Sadie had taken a sip. She pointed towards a ring of emerald-leaved citrus trees hovering beyond the rose garden. “There’s oranges too. And limes.”

“It’s a paradise here.” Sadie drank back her glass, feeling revived by the cloying sour sweetness, but it only just began to quench some greater thirst. Through a break in the trees, she could see the mountains, looming near. Up close, their bends and creases looked even more like the folded limbs and tails and wings of slumbering griffins from that story her mother used to tell. Lenora had reimagined the details in the haze of memory and the onslaught of her illness, changing the glory bestowed upon the hard-headed conquistadors and zealous priests who came upon this valley. Lenora recounted, instead, a new ending—a reckoning—which would come to uproot all those who had taken the valley by force. But in the sunshine, Sadie preferred to consider the beginning of Leonora’s mixed-up tale. Seated across from Delia’s golden radiance, she imagined the queendom of women in their private paradise from the old Spanish myth and thought that it would be a most lovely thing to have such a place—anywhere.

“It’s so wonderful to have someone to talk to,” Delia confessed, an air of secrecy coming over her again. “There’s some things I just can’t talk about with Father and Nathaniel. And it’s not just little things. It’s the important stuff too.”

“What is the important stuff?”

“Why, the future, of course.”

The future? For Sadie this prevailed, vaguely and abstractly, as much of a ghost as the past. Because one day the future might be waking up to do the same job that had started every previous day. And the next, it might be waking to find a mother breathing her last words about a benevolent madman up by the mountains who would invite her to live in his sumptuous house full of parrots.

“My future is rather conventional,” Delia sighed contentedly. “I want that thing that girls are supposed to want.”

“What’s that?”

“A family.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Oh, you know these modern times. Women are supposed to want other things. You should know that neither mother nor father approve of my plans. They blame themselves for being eccentric. They think I’m rebelling against their way of life. They think I’ll be wasting mine. But not everyone is some romantic heroine fueled by passion and rage. Sometimes I wonder if they’re secretly fearful that all an unconventional life path leads to is syphilis. That’s what’s making father insane, by the way. Though he doesn’t know where he got it.”

“Is he very ill?” Sadie asked, not entirely sure what she was asking about.

“His doctor’s hopeful tone is more troubling than reassuring.”

“My mother was very ill too.”

“You don’t think...?”

“She had a problem with her lungs.”

“I’m really sorry about your mother.” But Delia’s thoughts pranced back to the previous intrigue. “It’s all a little ironic, though.”

“What is?”

“Well, if Comstock hadn’t banned father’s prophylactics, he wouldn’t have any of this to worry about. Venereal disease, illegitimate children, stuff like that. But then, neither of us would be here, would we?” Delia’s eyes sparkled while saying so many curious things in one breath. “You think I don’t know why my eyes are blue?”

“Perhaps you take after your mother?”

“No. Mr. Cawston’s eyes are blue.”

Sadie saw a relief in that blue as Delia said the words, the fear of a secret diminished through speaking its truth.

“Then why aren’t you living with them?”

“Mother didn’t want children. Father did. Practical for everyone, really, if you think about it. Had he known about you, I’m sure he would not have hesitated to take you in sooner.” Delia finished the pulpy dregs at the bottom of her glass and pursed her lips, though this didn’t last long before she grinned again. “Shall we go in for some lunch?”

When they returned to the dining room, a dusky haze had overtaken the afternoon light. Gold glinted off of everything outside, which reflected on everything within. Time passed through the Monroe house in a liquid manner, flowing and ambient, softly surging forward with a gentle conviction. Before, it had been insistent, nipping at Sadie’s heels, taunting her, all of a day gone before she’d reached its end.

As the day surged gently onward, they were served many courses, something Delia awaited expectantly, but which surprised Sadie each time a new tray came out. Cold soup, roast meats, and salads, with the promise of custard for dessert. The rich foods tasted more expensive than sumptuous, but filled Sadie up with a satiety she had not known for a very long time.

Halfway through lunch, Nathaniel came in, his face and clothes a shade paler under a layer of dust. Delia didn’t seem to be bothered by his appearance—disheveled or not—but Sadie felt uneasy beneath the young man’s half-hidden scowl.

“We didn’t know if you’d be joining,” Delia announced.

“I didn’t realize we would have company.”

“Sadie’s not a guest.”

Nathaniel gritted his teeth. “Then I shall not excuse my tardiness. We nearly caught the cat.”

“They’ve been after her for a while now,” Delia informed. “She doesn’t come around very often.”

“We’ve chased most of them out of the valley.”

“He spends many of his mornings out riding,” Delia explained, attempting fruitlessly to address Sadie’s confusion while Nathaniel served himself an ample plate. “With the Valley Hunt Club. And Jasper Lennox.”

Nathaniel shot her a look. But noticing Sadie had noticed, he hid his reaction by attacking the food in front of him. The mention of this name summoned nothing from Sadie except a recollection that Delia had mentioned it earlier.

“They’re the ones hosting the ball, by the way,” Delia went on, gracefully arcing the subject towards a different trajectory, something she was deft at doing whether she intended to or not. “Sadie will be joining us tonight, Nathaniel. I hope you’ll reserve her a dance.”

“Do you know how to dance?” It was an innocent question, but a bit of animosity brewing beneath.

“No.” Sadie confessed. “But don’t worry. You don’t have to associate with me.”

“Of course he does!” Delia proclaimed. “You’re his sister!”

Nathaniel put down his fork, a crack in his forced calm. “You’ve fallen for this farce too?”

She batted her lashes over those suspiciously blue eyes. “Who am I to judge?”

“Fair point.”

“You’re being cruel, Nathaniel.” Delia knew something in her brother would darken when she turned to Sadie with a conspiratorial air. “We generally get along well in this house. We’re not unhappy. But no one under this roof yet has what they would have liked out of this life. Sadly, some of us never will.”

“That’s enough, Delia.” Nathaniel champed out his floundering authority. “I’ll not stick around if we can’t all play nice.”

“You started it.”

He stood up abruptly and made for the door. “If a man cannot enjoy his lunch in peace...”

“Where are you going?” Something was fairly taunting in her tone.

“To wash this all off.”

Once he had gone, Sadie’s unease settled but did not dissipate.

“Don’t worry,” Delia said. “He doesn’t mean to be mean.”

But Sadie thought she could understand Nathaniel’s guardedness better than Delia’s determined camaraderie. His suspicion, in a way, was the only reaction that she trusted. For all intents and purposes, she was an intruder. He didn’t need some secret underlying reason to be suspicious, and his reticence only further solidified Sadie’s conviction that she would not stay long in the Monroe house.

They finished their lunch less jovially than they’d started, whereupon Delia interpreted suddenly, “You must be very tired. Here I’ve been whisking you around when what you could probably use most is a bit of rest.”

“Maybe that would be good,” Sadie agreed. In the glorious golden stasis of that honeyed afternoon, she had finally stopped herself long enough to feel all the weight of the long days she’d just left behind.

Delia brought her back upstairs to one of the doors they hadn’t opened before. The room on the other side was simple and tidy, the walls a calm sage green. It had been made up for guests, Delia explained, but they never seemed to have anyone stay with them. Naturally, it would be Sadie’s room. She declared that she would let Sadie rest awhile, then come and find her when it was time to get ready for the evening.

“Don’t worry about Nathaniel,” she concluded before closing the door behind her. “One day, I hope, we can tell you everything.”

Then she was gone, basking a little in her cryptic melodrama. And just like that, after the roundabout whirlwind of smiles and roses and impossible things, all spiraled into an eerily peaceful solitude. Sadie couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a room to herself. Nor the last time she’d been truly alone.

It made the events of that morning seem all the more unreal. She wanted to believe in human kindness and boundless generosity, but Nathaniel’s skepticism affirmed her own doubts. It was true that Leland saw legacy within her. But he had not taken her in because of any suspicion, evidence, or even proof of who her father might be. It was only because of who her mother was. The circumstances had revealed, to Sadie, the depths of a half-interred myth. A myth as vivid as Lenora’s old tales passed down from Selestina. Lenora, too, had become a part of the myth, and her daughter had inherited its mystery.

As Mr. Monroe and the hyacinth macaw both peered at Sadie across the table with the same curiosity, she wondered if she had stepped into one of those mythic rags to riches tales. The kind in which a bit of bad luck could transform into quite the opposite by being in the right place at the right time. The brink of hindsight was still a precarious place to be, and Sadie knew all too well that not all endurance of bad things earned something good for the trouble. But nothing dark could overwhelm her in that illuminated dining room across from a parrot the brightest shade of blue she’d ever seen.

Scottie, the housekeeper, as Sadie had come to understand, prepared her a plate for breakfast and served her a dainty cup of coffee. Her eyes lingered as she set these things before Sadie, hoping to catch some snippet of what she had missed while out of the room. But Mr. Monroe dismissed her politely. “That will be all, Scottie. Thank you.”

She was not accustomed to being kept at a distance, nor to being unprivvy to any of the household secrets. With a nod, she left the room, but lingered on the other side of the door once she’d closed it.

The starved pique of curiosity seized Sadie as she ate through a plate of eggs and toast, realizing she had, at least, one definite conclusion to be drawn from Mr. Monroe’s merry invitation to join the family. It was clear that he had once known Lenora Reyes, and that her memory had been transformed into a secret, one which started to tug hauntingly at the shadow of Sadie’s thoughts. She realized she knew very little about where she had come from. But did a girl need to know that in order to understand who she was? How much of a person’s life, Sadie mused, was defined by the circumstances that preceded their existence?

“I’m very sorry to hear about your mother’s passing.” Leland finally spoke as Sadie took a gulp of cooled coffee.

“She was sick for a very long time. I’m sure it was tuberculosis but we never had a doctor confirm it.”

Leland hesitated for a moment, finding it imprudent, just then, to speak the greater tragedy that had become apparent. The foothills and their mild climate had been advertised far and wide as a prescribed cure for all the affluent consumptives of the east. State of the art facilities dedicated to managing the disease were just a short drive away. Of course, the treatments were expensive and not entirely preventative, but he would have paid anything to prevent Lenora from suffering more than she had to. It pained him to realize how certainly she had suffered, and how he had never known. “Where were you two these last twenty years?”

Sadie could see her own hunger for answers reflected back in the misty-eyed man before her. Though wary, she couldn’t think of a reason to withhold the truth. She and her mother had shared a cramped little apartment Downtown. It was a far cry from the earlier memories too old to recollect beyond a haze, of the rancho where Lenora’s mother, Selestina, had let them stay during Sadie’s youngest years. There had been too many debts to keep the property after Selestina’s death, that same old story of men and money running everything as dry as the dust that could never be kept off the porch. Those days were so unreachably far away in half-forgotten memories that Sadie did not know how to describe them. The bindery had been her reality for most of her life, which she could conclude quite succinctly: “For the last thirteen years, we worked for a book binder in Los Angeles. My mother worked for awhile, then I did after she was too sick to continue.”

“How long did you work there?”

“About ten years, I’d say.”

Leland coughed up his disbelief. “Ten years?”

“I must have been about ten years old when I started.”

“Gracious,” he gasped, ruffling the macaw who had returned to his shoulder. The bird echoed him in mocking empathy: “Gracious.”

Leland succumbed, instantly and painfully, to a shame which smothered the last forty years of romantic imaginings, the comfort of his fantasy. “She made it clear she wanted nothing to do with me, otherwise I would not have kept my distance all these years.”

“Did you know my mother well?”

“I would have liked to,” he admitted. “I wanted that more than anything.” He wiped at his eyes with the corner of the napkin that had been spread across his lap. “She’s been so vibrantly alive in my memories all these years. I suppose that’s all there ever really was, with a lot of wondering in between. Was it hard work, at the bindery?”

“Long days.” She’d spent dawn until dusk among a line of women and other girls hunched over printed paper, all of them squinting in the dim light to stitch pages neatly together.

“Were you at least taught to read?”

Sadie nodded. In the early days of living Downtown, her mother had snuck unbound chapters from the bindery to teach her the alphabet. Sadie had quickly hungered after the written word, and when it came time to take over Lenora’s job, the supervisor cast the switch across her knuckles more times than she could count when he caught her skimming a page. For this reason, she had never read a book in its entirety, but she had stitched together books of all kinds, picking up all manner of strange facts from volumes about botany, philosophy, and etiquette. She knew that peaches and pears belonged to the rose family, that Plato was renowned equally for his brawn and his brain, and that a lady should never have more than one glass of champagne.

The bindery specialized in instructional and nonfiction topics, which, gleaned in fragments, and in lieu of a formal education, had given Sadie a patchwork knowledge of the way of things. But she knew that there was an entirely different universe of books which she’d never been able to get her hands on. Fiction had remained elusive, and so she clung to the myths her mother made out of the old family stories. She longed to read things with color and texture and melodrama, to have something that reached a conclusion, be it happy or sad, so that it might give her some notion of what to imagine for her own life story.

“You’d be most welcome to read anything from the library.” Leland hoped to cheer the lost look that had overtaken Sadie’s features. “I’ve got books on just about any subject you could imagine, but not much willpower to read them.”

“You have a library?”

“I have almost everything a person could possibly want or need,” Leland said, neither pride nor joy in his tone. “Why did your mother never reach out before? She really didn’t mention me?”

“She never spoke about you, Mr. Monroe. Not until she gave me that letter.”

“I see,” Leland sighed. “But I’ll have none of this ‘Mr. Monroe.’ If ‘Father’ doesn’t suit you, then you may call me Leland.”

While they were the only two in the room, Sadie intended to ask Leland what Lenora’s letter really said. But a familiar young woman’s voice interrupted them, calling excitedly down the stairs.

“Father! I thought you didn’t believe in secrets!”

“That would be your sister.” Leland smiled. It was difficult to frown when Cordelia Monroe entered a room.

Sadie felt her heart lurch strangely as a whirl of golden locks and lacey trim hurried towards them, stopping at the sight of a girl in tatters seated at the table.

“Delia,” Leland said, “this is your sister, Sadie.”

Delia extended a hand. The pure cream of her palm—milky, soft, and smooth—felt all the smoother up against Sadie’s calloused fingertips as they shook. Though brief, the contact was charged with Delia’s excitement, tangible enough that Sadie began to feel a brimming new sensation, too. It spread from her palm all the way to her chest and sat there, cloying but delicious. In her golden exuberance, Delia proclaimed, “You’re just like a little Cinderella! You’ll come to the ball with us, won’t you?”

Freshly bewildered, Sadie didn’t know how to respond, but it turned out Delia wasn’t looking for an answer. “Your timing is impeccable,” she went on, “tonight’s the first of the summer.”

“I don’t know how to dance,” Sadie mumbled, reality replacing the fairytale.

“Most of the boys will simply ask you for a waltz. Nothing out of the ordinary.” Delia’s blue eyes glimmered. “You’ll let me do your hair, won’t you? You’ve got so much of it. I can give you something out of a dream!”

“Surely you also have a dress you could lend Sadie for this evening?” Leland queried.

“Pastels wouldn’t suit her complexion.”

“Then perhaps there’s something among your mother’s old things?”

“I thought I didn’t have permission to go through those.”

“Nothing in this house is forbidden, Delia.”

“Then we’ve got much to sort through!” Delia reached for Sadie’s hand again in an attempt to pull her away. Her sheer momentum was contagious, leaving Sadie breathless even before she was on her feet.

“Let the poor girl finish her breakfast,” Leland said. “Have you had enough to eat, Sadie?”

“I think so.” That starving growl had succumbed to a burgeoning effervescence building off of Delia’s elation. “Thank you.”

“I see Delia’s eager to commandeer your company, but we’ll chat more soon, I’m sure. We must catch up on all the years we never knew each other.”

“I would like that too,” Sadie admitted, breathless again once Delia pulled her out of the dining room. Sadie glanced back at Leland one last time, recognizing how sick he looked in the wake of his daughter’s vivid luster. Though his expression warmed with his smile, his face had an impossible pallor for someone who lived in such a sunny place. Distracted by fragile memories just then, he seemed all the more the ghost of a man.

“Where on earth did you come from?” Delia asked, leading Sadie through the grand foyer and up the stairs towards that previously unimaginable beyond.

“Los Angeles.”

“You mean all this time you were just down the hill?”

“I suppose so.” Sadie’s voice caught in the same dreaminess that had stolen her expression as she admired the grandeur again on her way up the stairs.

“It’s gaudy, isn’t it?” Delia sighed. “But that’s the Victorians for you.”

“What do you mean?”

“This is a new century. A new era. What greater reason could there be to redecorate?”

“But everything is magnificent.” Her words were lost in Delia’s whisking, which brought them to the end of the hall. The golden-haired girl thrust open a pair of French doors, revealing a pristine ladies’ chamber within. The walls were papered with a pattern of roses, as was the untouched bedding on the four-poster bed. Delia trudged over to a chest at the foot of the bed and pried it open. Sadie, meanwhile, couldn’t help but stare at the height of the ceiling.

“This is a palace.” She was hardly aware of breathing the words aloud.

“This was my mother’s room.” Delia rummaged around the chest and pulled out a few colorful bundles of fabric. “People talk about her like she’s gone, but she only lives down Fair Oaks.”

“Right.” Sadie peered at the lace and pleats protruding from each bundle. “Something about birds?”

“Raising ostriches on Mr. Cawston’s farm. They breed them for their feathers, and for the races in Santa Fe.”

The aviary component paled to the freshly tender mother subject. Sadie asked, “Do you ever miss her?”

Delia shrugged. “I can go see her whenever I want. And she comes here sometimes for tea. She and Leland are still friends. Your mother’s really gone?”

Sadie rather liked how direct the question was, but she couldn’t bring herself to do more than nod.

“Well, my mother’s kinda like a ghost.” Delia smiled reassuringly, altogether too romantic and exuberant to have ever known anything properly ghostly.

Sadie preferred to change the subject. “What do they do with all those feathers?”

“You are a bit quaint, aren’t you? I bet you’ve never owned a proper hat. We’ll have to take you shopping in town soon. I can do much better than Mother’s old things!”

Delia laid the colorful bundles of fabric on the bed, revealing them to be an assortment of gowns in bright jewel shades—burgundy, burnt orange, and emerald green.

Sadie ran her hands across the satiny surface of one of the skirts, smiling at the smooth rippling fabric beneath her fingers. “They’re lovely.”

“They won’t do.”

“What’s wrong with them?”

Delia frowned haughtily, but even that was charming. “They’re at least twenty years out of fashion.” She picked at the burgundy one. “Look at all those frills!” She tugged at the orange. “Those pleats!” She grabbed a fistful of the green. “This was meant to have a bustle! I can’t believe my mother went out in these things! We’ve come a long way since the eighties.”

“I don’t mind if I’m not with the fashion.”

“Even if you wouldn’t mind,” Delia proclaimed, “you can’t have your first society introduction while dressed like all the matronly chaperones who stick to the sidelines. It won’t do to have people thinking the members of this household aren’t viable.”

“Viable?”

“The whole town will be there tonight. Everyone eligible.” Her words rang with a somber note of gravity, that conviction in still-stoic beliefs unfettered in the throes of youth. “It’s the best chance to make a first impression, and a good first impression is just about the only way to secure a good match.”

And there it was. That thing Sadie had gotten hints of in the matchmaking chapters of the etiquette books she’d once stitched together. The widespread and uncontested notion—that human attempt to transcend biology—that people were not complete on their own. Knowing it shouldn’t have been surprising, Sadie tried to hide her surprise. “You want to be married?”

“You’re catching on.” Delia smirked. “But you’ll have to wear one of my dresses after all. You haven’t had a debut yet?” She stopped herself. “I’m sorry. I’m sure I met all the debutantes last year. How old are you?”

“Twenty.”

“Just a year older than me!”

“And a bit old to be a debutante.”

“A debut is a debut. And yours will be something alright.” She sighed contentedly. “You’ll be the down-and-out heroine of the foothills.”

“This won’t be too much of a scandal?”

“Oh definitely. But you know why people make such a fuss don’t you?” Delia grinned. “Jealousy, Sadie. Something’s happened to you.”

Something else happened to Sadie as soon as Delia said her name. Hearing it from the golden girl’s bowed lips sent a glimmer through her. The way Delia said it, with perfect nonchalance, as though she had said it a thousand times before, gave Sadie a glittering, saccharine taste of belonging.

After shutting the outdated dresses back in the chest at the foot of the bed, Delia led Sadie back down the hall to another door, behind which was a room trimmed in lace and varying shades of cream. The most colorful thing in the room was a small green parrot sitting on a perch in a gold cage next to the window. The bird trilled, unprompted, “Ball tonight?”

“That’s Envy. Echo’s in love with her.” Delia approached the bird in its cage. “Sadie’s coming tonight too. What color do you think would suit her? Green?”

“Green,” the parrot agreed.

“You would say that.” Delia pulled out a pale green gown from the back of her wardrobe and held it up to Sadie’s form. She nodded approvingly, then deposited the garment into Sadie’s arms. “This will have to do for your debut.”

“Thank you,” Sadie smiled. “I’ve never worn anything so nice.”

Delia waved away the modesty. “I had my debut last year. There were a few suitors. I had something that seemed fairly promising with Jasper Lennox, but I don’t know. I’m not rushing like everyone else. I want to be sure I find someone who I know I’ll get along with forever.”

“No reason to rush into forever,” Sadie agreed sagely.

“That’s very wise.” Delia’s approval morphed into a frown as she turned to find Sadie still clutching the green dress as though it might come alive in her arms. “Ah, that’s right. You’ll need the right layers before you can try it on.”

Hesitant, Sadie removed her tattered clothing while Delia rifled through drawers to procure some fresh undergarments. She made no sign of having noticed that Sadie was naked as she helped her into a chemise and a pair of drawers, then fastened her into a corset, helped her slide on a petticoat, and buttoned the corset cover over top. Then came the complex process of fastening Sadie into the outermost layer—the gown itself.

“I’m going to introduce you to all the best boys...” Delia said somewhere in the middle of myriad pearl buttons. But Sadie wasn’t entirely listening. The lace and calm in the room gave way to something more sensual as Delia’s dress, pure silk, settled over her. The undergarments beneath it were finer than the coarser weaves of cotton she’d always worn, and the silk itself was a new sensation on her skin. Light but insistent, cool to the touch, it evoked a mythic rustle with the slightest movement. There was something that felt quite profound about wearing another woman’s tailored clothes—the dress fit, but hung looser in some places and tighter in others, transposing the phantom shape of the girl right in front of her. Seeing herself in the nearby full-length mirror, hair cascading in dark waves, the rest all curves and edges, Sadie felt she had stepped into someone else’s life.

“...and of course Walter Mittling and Amory Bates and Howard Huntington,” Delia concluded, eyes as bright as Sadie felt just then. “We’ll find you an excellent match.”

But that was the caveat to all this bewildering pleasantness. The truth of the fairytale settled around Sadie. There would be a limit to the duration of her stay no matter the circumstances. If she couldn’t find a new position somewhere, or a reason to leave of her own accord, then marrying her off was the discreet solution to getting her out of the house. She made a pact with herself, then, that she would find a reason to leave before that happened. She admitted the truth before she realized what she was saying: “I’ve never really been interested in boys.”

“Probably because you don’t realize what you want yet,” Delia reasoned, nothing pedantic about the observation. She had a resoluteness about her that Sadie would never know, something beyond the assurance of a silver spoon. It occurred to Sadie that it must be very comfortable indeed to go about life knowing what one wanted. She hadn’t entirely given the matter much thought. Her previous day to day had been more about needs than wants, and wanting anything, just then, felt like too much after all she had just been granted. Nevertheless, the silk on her skin stirred up some sense of indiscernable longing.

“Not bad at all,” Delia smiled, taking a step back from buttoning to admire Sadie’s silhouette. Her eyes moved up from the dress’s hem to the bodice until they met Sadie’s in the mirror.

“This is all a little overwhelming for me,” Sadie admitted. “I never imagined Mr. Monroe would invite me to stay.”

“But you are going to stay, aren’t you?” The hope in Delia’s tone stirred something even sweeter under Sadie’s skin.

“Just until I can find a new position somewhere.”

“Working?” Delia’s laughter was a sleighbell cascade of delighted disbelief. “Is that what you were doing before?”

“I worked sixteen hours a day until I got fired this morning.”

“Oh dear.” Delia smiled empathetically. Sadie doubted that her dainty hands could fathom the bruised fingertips from the persnickety task of maneuvering stubborn needles day after day. “You don’t have to worry about finding anything else. You’re here now.”

“But…” Sadie hesitated. Despite Delia’s easy intimacy, she figured it was, in fact, the reality of how little they knew each other which permitted her to voice her concern. “I don’t think Mr. Monroe is actually my father.”

“Facts and acts don’t always align,” Delia mused, unfazed. “I hope you won’t leave!”

“But what will we do with sixteen hours every day? I’ve never had that much time to spend.”

“I’ve been waiting all my life for someone to spend my time with.” Delia surprised Sadie just then by stepping forward and wrapping her in an embrace. It was more delicious and intimate than the cool silk, too warm and familiar in its immortal humanness to suggest they had only just met. “I’m so glad you’re here. And that we can share all this with you.”

“Where did it all come from?” Sadie regretted the question as soon as it made Delia pull away.

“Now that’s a story for the rose garden. If I tell it to you here the parrot might repeat things to someone else.”

“Is it that much of a secret?”

Such a delighted flush rose to Delia’s cheeks that Sadie felt a new heat reddening her own. She’d never seen more romance than in those azure eyes, and beauty, in that moment, seemed to suggest ultimate wisdom. This blue and gold girl was tickled by life, a rosebud laughing into bloom. She bit more pink into her lips as she leaned in close again and whispered, “Do you know about sex?”

All fancies got caught in Sadie’s throat. She coughed them up. “I beg your pardon?”

She had encountered the word at the bindery a few times, in a manual about marriage and child-rearing that kept repeating those three letters as though they were an essential element of the human condition.

“It’s how Leland made his money,” Delia went on. “Sort of. But not in any way you might be thinking. I can’t explain the story if you don’t know the logistics.”

But mechanically, Sadie understood. The manuals on the subject—at least the segments of chapters she had stitched together—suggested instinct and desire merged to inspire this great three letter word when a woman and a man saw each other stripped of all social decorum. Sadie could admit that this ancient mysticism had, at least, inspired a curiosity within her. But she could also admit that it was more scientific than anything else. She was confronted, once again, with those none-too-distant memories that were supposed to be forgotten. The supervisor at the bindery had been the only man with whom she had daily communication, and so he was the only one with whom she could conduct her experiment. Having sated this curiosity, she felt strangely ashamed admitting to Delia, “I know how it works.”

He had done nothing to lure her, just as she had made no indication of being lured. It had happened one night when she was the last to leave the bindery, only half-admitting that she had left herself alone with him. She had only wanted to understand the physiognomy of the act, and in the weeks afterwards, when the other bindery girls took notice of the supervisor’s pointed looks towards Sadie, laughed to herself when they warned her against his taking advantage. Her apparent disinterest in repeating the act a second time stirred a deep humiliation within him. Feeling angry and inadequate and powerless, he wanted to repeat the act with her even more. This desire being unrequited, it festered into an uncomfortable regret, a helplessness which left him in a strange grey realm between villain and victim. He found this unbearable, and so he fired Sadie publicly—that very morning—in front of all the other bindery girls. Little did he know, Sadie was quite content never to engage in such an act with any man again.

“You’re all flushed,” Delia remarked. “But I’m sure this gown isn’t helping. Let’s get you changed out of it. I’ll give you a different dress to wear before we get ready for tonight.”

The second dress was made of linen and lavender-colored, but it had a honeysuckle musk, the same as Delia herself—fresh, floral, and full of life. Wearing someone else’s scent, let alone their own delicate clothing, succeeded in keeping Sadie from thinking too much of all the unsavory circumstances that had brought her to the Monroe doorstep that morning.

Delia had forgotten the reason she’d suggested the rose garden by the time she led Sadie back downstairs to the backyard, which she described, in her youthful grandiloquence, as “the grounds.” Laughing with pure, uninhibited glee, she pulled Sadie towards a profusion of rose bushes, through the lush blooming peaches and pinks, to a bench nestled in a trellised alcove with a climbing rose offering shade from the sun.

Lost in her own exuberance, the blue and gold girl hopped from subject to subject like the nectar-seeking hummingbirds that circled around them. She trilled about the ball, the house, the ins and outs of town, the who’s who and the what’s what. But most of this passed through Sadie, as she was seeing things from a distance, as though she were spying on someone else in a lavender dress who couldn’t stop smiling at the flaxen girl among the roses.

It was all so beautiful and the heat so suffocating that Sadie forgot, for a moment, how she came to be sitting there in the baby blue haze of a lovely summer afternoon. It had been rare, when she was working, to be out during the day, and she could see now that the periwinkle skies up in the foothills erased everything that came before them. Bewildered by this amnesia of grief and confusion and delight—and change—she started to cry.

“Oh, Sadie, don’t do that.” Delia crooned. “Daytime tears don’t belong on a day like this.”

“This is the happiest day of my life,” Sadie blubbered, ashamed to say so when it had started as something so sad. She was crying, she realized, because it was a beautiful day. Because they had all been beautiful days and she had never given much notice. Because the beautiful days ahead meant forgetting the dimmer days that lay behind. Already, she could feel her life—her entire life up until that morning—slipping away, getting lost or erased or forgotten in the blue as it cast down its comforting oblivion. “How could my mother have met your father? He seems very upset about her too.”

“I think he must have loved her,” Delia decided. “His past is full of untamed landscapes. He never had much of an interest in women. I’ve always suspected it’s because he was pining after someone far away. It must have been your mother.”

“You think so?” Something tantalizingly forbidden trailed after that hypothesis, the same sage secret that hushed the rose’s perfume in the heating shade of oranges and fortunes drinking up the golden light.

“I read a lot of novels,” Delia clarified, “but life can be even more thrilling sometimes.”

“There’s no way they could have been in love. My mother never came up this way.”

“Leland wasn’t always so rich, and he didn’t always live here. He’s one of those self-made men. I don’t know the whole story, but I know some of it. Which brings me to what we came down to the rose garden for. This is my place for sharing secrets.”

“So it is a secret, then?”

“It didn’t used to be.” Delia laughed. “None of this family’s secrets are secrets, really. It’s everyone else that’s made them so. But don’t worry. I’ll tell you everything. I hope we can tell each other everything all the time.”

“I’d like that,” Sadie agreed, wiping away her tears. But, feeling woozy in Delia’s dress and beneath the stark daytime sun, she knew there might be some things she couldn’t tell. Nevertheless, it was difficult to sort the secrets from the rest as Delia squeezed her hand reassuringly. Her smile was so full of warmth and roses that Sadie couldn’t feel anything other than happiness while basking in its glow.

The Monroe house was more than a house, as was the case with all residences on Millionaire’s Row. The street was home to many-roomed mansions on sprawling estates, housing old money and new millionaires who’d carved out monopolies from the growing mine of human potential (or the dregs of industry). First it was railroads, beer, and carpet sweepers. Later it would be chewing gum and ivory soap. The homes constructed from this wealth came in styles as diverse as the sources of their funding—some stuccoed, some shingled, some borrowing Moorish spires, others the eaves and shingles of the Victorian east. These imposing houses peered out of private oases and crowned sweeping lawns, beacons of tamed wilderness wreathed with roses, honeysuckle, and fruit trees. But their views from third story windows revealed that the land beyond the heart of the city was still engaged in a silent war of gentle sage against raging roses. The humbly-perfumed brush was losing out to the other’s thorns, just as the live oaks had fallen to the oranges.

The street’s real name was Orange Grove, a harkening to the emerald-trimmed citrus trees planted by the latest generation of settlers who had succeeded in constructing a town from the dust. They had hoped to make their fortune from the very soil they settled upon, and the oranges took quickly to the earth. But once harvested, these delicate fruits rarely survived the long journey to ship them north or east. Thus, the local marmalade remained their most lucrative form.

The grandeur of Millionaire’s Row seemed out of place in the valley of surrounding sagebrush, curving out a hubristic mile in that cradle of the mountains. Beyond, the Sierra Madre range—the Mother Mountains—dwarfed all civilization peeking out of their foothills and humbled human extravagance to shame. They had their own ancient story, but had withstood such a long chain of conquerors that they’d lost the courage to tell their tale. So they hid it in the sage and dust, faded into the background, and waited for the chance to speak again.

Sadie Reyes felt a similar anticipation on her way to the Monroe home that morning. On the northbound streetcar from Los Angeles, the mountains beckoned, and she found herself remembering her great grandmother’s stories, the ones her mother had repeated into belief in the midst of her fevers. They were only ever fantasies, kingdoms of women warriors who rode bloodthirsty griffins into battle. These tales made for the imaginary vengeance, Sadie assumed, of a superstitous old woman who’d known conquerors firsthand. Her great-grandmother was a Tongva woman who wed a Spanish soldier and raised her daughter under the zeal of the adobe shrine to higher power that she, while being converted, was enlisted to help construct.

The valley had been gradually converted too, Sadie figured, as the streetcar passed through miles of wires and iron rails on its northward path. There was something almost cruel in the land’s giving nature. The ground had accepted the gashes, the tears, and the razed plains of brush for the plowed, straight lines of agriculture and industry. It was called virgin soil, fertile, fecund, and ever-obliging even after the violation of the plow. Yielding new species—deciduous, fruit-bearing—she convinced the settlers, with her innocent, unwavering generosity, that they belonged. The Eden that rose up by force and cultivation made them all forget the mountain’s shadow, that still greater forces lay beneath and beyond.

There would be war and conversion many times over before the valley became, bureaucratically, a town. This story was in Sadie’s veins even if not detailed in these pages. A girl inherited her past, and Sadie had started to feel it, for the first time, on that neroli morning in 1905 while gazing up at the looming mountains. She stuck her head out the streetcar’s open window, marveled at the morning air’s coolness through the electric speed, and felt the power of her own personal mystery, a cumulative heritage which had fought to claim this dust-strewn paradise. The mystery became even more tangible once she was standing in front of the Monroe residence at the bend in Millionaire’s Row.

Of all the houses on this wide, curving street designated for the richest in the region, the Monroe home was among the gaudiest. Steeply gabled and ringed by a lacy veranda, its three stories towered over a front lawn in an echo of Queen Anne splendor. Trimmed in cream, the rest was painted a green reminiscent of the live oaks’ leaves at dusk. The beautiful monstrosity left Sadie speechless on the front steps well before the glowering housekeeper opened the front door to demand an explanation:

“All servants, present and prospective, use the side door. What gives you the right to do any differently?”

By then, Sadie had lost all concept of nouns and adjectives, let alone rhetorical questions. She had knocked on the door with one intention, and that was not to find a job. But glancing down at her threadbare hemline, she might only have looked fit enough to scrub the front steps she was standing on. An unreachable world separated her garments from the housekeeper’s pristine starched apron. She stared at its unwrinkled expanse as Scottie continued her doorstep denigration.

“I told Talulah none of her friends were welcome here, but do any of them listen? You’re all a bunch of tactless, unprofessional, abhorrent—”

“I... I’m sorry,” Sadie stammered. “I’m...”

“You got this far running on the fumes of audacity, didn’t you?” Scottie seethed. “No need to hold your tongue now.”

The why suddenly surfaced, just in time to explain Sadie standing in the where. She choked out one whole sentence: “I’m looking for Mr. Monroe.”

“We don’t have any available positions. You can go back to where you came from. And don’t you go telling any of your other little friends about us either.”

Sadie could see perfectly well that this gatekeeper assumed she was a servant girl. Left with no choice, she blurted out her one saving hypothesis: “I believe he’s my father.”

It was her last hope, but it did not sound particularly convincing because she could not yet bring herself to believe it. Sudden, strange, and unfathomable news, it had as much a chance of being true as not. But Scottie upended all Sadie’s disoriented hope with a long sigh. “I’ve heard that one before too. Just because he’s the most unconventional millionaire on the block does not mean he’s willing to take in every stray who—”

Sadie struggled in vain to find the words that might explain her terror on the streetcar that morning. The looming mountains seemed to grow limbs and scales as they drew nearer, transforming into sleeping griffins, the bloodthirsty beasts from her great-grandmother’s tales. Perhaps she saw these mythic threats to ignore the bleakness of the facts. She was out of the job, and penniless, the last of her meager savings spent on the streetcar ticket after her mother’s funeral expenses. With her she carried only Lenora Reyes’ last wishes, tucked into a sealed envelope in her pocket.

It was naturally difficult for a girl to imagine the circumstances which preceded her own existence, but all Sadie could feel at present was an aching absence, an impossible thing to grasp. She had started the day recognizing her life as the continuation of another woman’s, newly overwhelmed with all the questions she had never known to ask. All she could do was pursue them, if only to reconstruct her mother out of the mysteries she’d left behind. Everything had come down to this one dying wish, that Sadie deliver a letter to a man named Leland Monroe who lived up in the foothills, and who, Lenora insisted, would help her. But if this Mr. Monroe was as obliging as Lenora implied, then it seemed only a crueler fate that she should have died without the help she was convinced he would offer her daughter.

Lenora had been sick for a very long time. As long as Sadie could remember. It should not have come as a surprise that one day she would succumb to the daily struggle for breath and stop breathing altogether. Sadie had cared for her mother for well over a decade, taking over her job at the bindery downtown when she became too sick to continue, and finding little time for anything else beyond these two occupations. Left with neither, she decided that she would not seek charity on behalf of someone else’s guilt. She was simply seeking answers. This simplified quest gave her the courage to interrupt the houseekeeper’s scolding. She pulled out the faded calling card nestled next to the envelope in the folds of her skirt and thrust it into Scottie’s hands.

Scottie frowned at the thick square of paper. Though the edges were bent and smudged, the name in the center was still printed clearly in an elaborate scrawl. It was one of Mr. Monroe’s calling cards, sure enough. But Scottie’s initial surprise at the artifact quickly settled back into something more accusatory. “Where did you get this?”

“My mother gave it to me.”

“Is that so?”

“I understand if I am not a welcome visitor,” Sadie said quietly, her gaze falling to the floor. She would imagine, later, that she had felt some degree of injustice in these circumstances. But in that moment, she was driven mostly by curiosity and unacknowledged desperation, both mingling into something couragous and dissociating. It suddenly occurred to Sadie that there might be a reason she had never met or known Mr. Monroe before. And then all she could feel was a renewed sense of terror for the possibility that this man might be even more ruthless than his gatekeeper.

But in Sadie’s fear, Scottie recognized humility, as well as a degree of pride holding her shoulders from slumping entirely with defeat. If there was one thing Scottie respected, it was these two traits subsisting in harmony. For the briefest of moments, she wondered how it was that she had gotten to be such a ruthless and principled gatekeeper, when all those years ago she, too, had started out as a desperate girl on a doorstep.

“Your name?” Scottie asked, finding it a little less effortless to be so mercilessly impatient.

“Sadie,” the girl said. “Sadie Reyes.”

The surname rang a dim but not quite rusted bell somewhere in the recesses of Scottie’s memories. She supposed, but did not let on, that she might have heard some part of it before, during one of the long nights of Mr. Monroe’s sweats and terrors. He got lost in memories during these feverish overhauls, but they were so entwined in silver and mercury that it was never quite clear whether he was spewing truths or fiction. Perhaps some missing element of clarity lay in this girl’s story. Her timid conviction won Scottie over. And the calling card was, after all, authentic. Scottie bid the girl over the doorstep and into the foyer.

The entry remedied Sadie’s unease by swathing it in awe. Leaving the girl to gape at the home’s interior, Scottie disappeared behind a double door that led to the dining room, setting off a chain of concerned murmurs on the other side. Unable to decipher the verdict through the voices muffled behind the door, Sadie stared at the gleaming mahogany paneling in the entry, and the staircase’s carved balustrade leading up to some unknown and unfathomable beyond. Stained glass windows filtered in a rainbowed translation of the sheen outside, some of the red and blue hues reflecting off a chandelier suspended in the middle of the ceiling, glinting with sunlight.

“Reyes?” Sadie heard a man’s voice ask from beyond the doors closed off to her. She only heard—or imagined she heard—accusation in his tone. She could not know the man behind the voice was currently being reminded of the Comstock whisper which had awoken him that morning. Nor could she know that the last time he’d heard one name was the first time he’d heard the other. “Forks and spoons, Scottie! Bring her in!”

When Scottie reappeared, she found Sadie smaller and more out of place than she had seemed on the doorstep. The entry’s elegance discouraged Sadie, as did all the potential truths suggesting how Lenora, from the dust and sweat of the valley, could have known such a foothill man of means.

“Mr. Monroe will see you,” Scottie said, regretting the tonal formality that had become a housekeeper’s habit. She led Sadie beyond the mahogany doors into a room bursting with the full light of day. Windows towered up to the ceiling, letting in the sunshine from outside. Another chandelier hung above a long and imposing table with room and chairs enough for twelve people. Two men were seated at either end—one young and one old. The latter had a large blue parrot perched on his shoulder, something Sadie would have contemplated in more detail if the man himself hadn’t been staring as though he knew her. But she had never before seen his bearded, bespectacled face. He looked kinder than the accusation she’d thought she’d heard from the other side of the door.

Leland smiled at the girl before him, the picture of Lenora all those years ago when he had first met her on the brink of silver in Virginia City. In recognizing this young face, he was too delighted, then, to recognize that she would be the harbinger of his death. Comstock always preceded what turned out to be bad news, and there was nothing else left for a rich old regretful man.

“Mr. Monroe and Mr. Monroe,” Scottie announced, nodding first towards Leland and then Nathaniel, who set down his newspaper, “this is—”

“Sadie Reyes,” Leland spoke softly, “you are the image of your mother.”

Sadie stood there, eyes darting around the room’s grandeur, while the young man at the other end of the table raised his eyebrows over a delicate sip of coffee.

“But I haven’t seen her in...” Leland trailed off, something almost insulting in his tone of merry disbelief, “well it must be nearly two decades. Tell me, how is the lovely Lenora?”

All wonder amidst her surroundings spiraled back to truth. The fresh, poorly-marked grave, the dark, stale apartment that could no longer be paid for, the dim warehouse down in Los Angeles where she’d come from that morning having been denied the wages for the half a week she’d already worked, not realizing it would be her last.

Sadie’s voice squeaked barely above a whisper. “She’s dead.”

A moment of confused silence rang through the room. It seemed blasphemous to say such a thing of a woman who had been so recently alive, and who remained so very alive in Leland’s own memories. Sadie thought she saw a sheen overtake his eyes. Suddenly, she pined for something even fresher than this tragedy—the realization less than an hour old which began on the streetcar up to Orange Grove. She had no idea of the world beyond the small, dim one she’d come from only ten miles south.

“I don’t want any charity,” Sadie hurried to explain. “I would never have had any reason to come at all. But it was her dying wish that I deliver this to you.”

As she reached into the folds of her skirt to produce a rumpled envelope, Leland felt dread seize his heart. At least, he thought it was dread, and he thought it was seizing, but in fact it was forty years of longing released in one excruciating whoosh.

His hands shook as much as Sadie’s when she handed him the envelope. He felt newly feeble knowing, now, that he had been waking up daily to a false hope, waiting for a moment that would never come. His memories were where Lenora ought to have faded from, not the reality which now settled over him like a despondent dream.

As Leland opened the letter folded inside the envelope, the other two witnesses in the room spoke up. Scottie took an anxious step forward. “Mr. Monroe, no matter how you might have felt about the woman in the past, I implore you to consider her words carefully.”

“Indeed, Father,” Nathaniel agreed, “it’s worth consideration.”

Leland ushered for Sadie to take the nearest chair at the dining table and carefully pulled a rumpled piece of paper from the envelope. Sadie stared nervously at the parrot on his shoulder as he squinted over the page before him. The bird stared right back.

Leland could only hold back a surge of emotion via the strangely misplaced joy of recognizing Lenora’s handwriting, the proud formality of her words. The letter detailed vaguely that, in the two decades since they’d last spoken, she had ended up alone with a daughter.

“It’s a letter,” he said, unwilling to divulge any more than the obvious. He brought the page closer to his near-sighted eyes. Addressing Sadie once more, he asked, “Do you know what it says?”

Sadie shook her head, afraid that if she were to speak now, the tears she’d been holding back might spill over. Leland glanced indifferently at Nathaniel’s disapproving expression before turning back to the page in his hands. He squinted again over the hastily scrawled lines. The room remained still—bated—while everyone waited for him to read to the end.

He only glanced over the rest of Lenora’s words quickly. He would savor them later. He mostly stared at the page in contemplation. It seemed the girl had been kept in the dark about the details if she had misinterpreted her mother’s incentive. Lenora and Leland were thus the only people in that room—because she was there in the image of her daughter—who knew that there was no possible instance in which Sadie Reyes could be a Monroe.

But if there was one thing Leland had wanted in his life, it had been to share it with Lenora Reyes. Surely she’d had her own reasons for rejecting his propositions, and in his earlier days he might have wanted to be angry with her for it. Yet no amount of bitterness could triumph over the warmth he felt for that girl he’d met in Virginia City. In another life, they might have had a daughter. It seemed only natural, in the swirling reminiscence of his own delusions, that Lenora had thought of him in her last days, while contemplating her own daughter’s fate.

After a brief eternity, Leland cleared his throat. “Scottie, would you mind making us some more coffee?”

“Of course,” Scottie replied, finding the benign request unusually difficult to oblige while her curiosity remained unsated. Restraining herself from huffing, she left the room with a swish.

Leland folded the letter back into the envelope and studied Sadie intently. He had made a decision, and there had been no difficulty in making it. “It would appear you do have the Monroe eyes. Black as coal.”

“What did the letter say?” Nathaniel demanded.

Leland ignored him, instead lowering his voice in Sadie’s direction. “Matches our black souls.”

“This is no time for jokes!” Nathaniel exclaimed. “Does this girl really claim you’re her father?”

“This girl’s mother does.”

“I don’t know what she wrote,” Sadie floundered, confused by Leland’s conspiratorial air. “I only came here because it was her dying wish—”

“And I would be remiss,” Leland interrupted, “if I did not see that wish through. Do you have anywhere to go? A place to live? A means of employment?” He paused when Sadie’s gaze dropped to the floor.

“Not anymore.”

She might have succumbed to grief sooner if her mother’s death had not come shortly after her employer’s wrath. It was clear the overseer considered her responsible for losing her place at the bindery—or at the very least, complicit. But that was not something Sadie wanted to think about just then. She had let all that happen, in fact, so that she would never have to think about it again. And if it hadn’t happened, she realized, she would not have found the courage to make the trek up to Orange Grove and ask after her own personal mystery.

“Can you really be so naive?” Nathaniel’s disbelief echoed Sadie’s own brief descent into the recent past. “Her father could be anyone! She probably only picked you because you’re less of a bastard than the rest of them. Or the richest bastard of them all! What a desperate, stupendous joke!”

Sadie jerked to her feet, seething with all the pent-up animosity her frail frame was capable of. But Leland spoke the words she couldn’t find the strength to say. “Do not speak about her mother like that.”

Nathaniel’s laughter caught short in a nervous gulp, granting Sadie a confusing complicity in this strange old man’s defense. Nathaniel could see Leland’s conviction too. “You’re not really thinking of giving refuge to this girl, are you?”

“Of course I am.” Leland gestured for Sadie to sit back down. She obliged.

Sadie felt her own mouth reflect Nathaniel’s gaping disbelief. She had thought maybe Leland would offer something trite, paltry, and commiserate out of some mild guilt or remorse, nothing as surprising as an offer to stay in his home. Evidently, Nathaniel was just as surprised. “What does the letter say exactly?”

“Enough for me to decide that I may yet be graced with a child less ungrateful than the others,” Leland said merrily. He grinned at Sadie. “You’ll live here with us, of course. You’re a Monroe, now. Sadie Reyes Monroe.”

“That’s very kind, Mr. Monroe,” Sadie stuttered, her voice barely audible, “but—”

“Do you have any other options?” Leland asked. “I’m sure you wouldn’t have come all this way if you didn’t have a reason yourself.”

Sadie was surprised by her own honesty when she admitted, “I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

Sadie could feel the coating begin to chip away from a keening sadness lodged in her chest, which left her winded and breathless. But some of her breathlessness was anger, too. Anger at Mr. Monroe for not knowing, anger for not having known anything herself, and a greater rage against pride, principle, and any other manmade excuse for secrecy.

“I’d always hoped to help Lenora,” Leland said, “and here the opportunity has come knocking at my door.”

Suddenly a narrow path of escape let some of Sadie’s hushed anger burst forth. “Why didn’t you help sooner?”

Leland sighed. “I didn’t know Lenora had a child. I had no idea where she was.”

“You could have asked. Looked for her!”

“She made it very clear the last time we spoke that she did not wish to be found.”

Sadie’s anger shriveled into confusion. She had wanted there to be a villain to this story, a reason to explain the circumstances in which she and her mother had found themselves, a choicelessness that could be rectified. But clearly, somewhere, a choice had been made; within it was not a storybook’s clarity of good against evil.

“How did you know my mother?”

“Indeed,” Nathaniel found the courage to speak up again, “I’ve never heard the name Lenora before this morning.”

“I’ve never told you, Nathaniel, because I always figured you wouldn’t like what I had to say.” Leland’s good spirits had gone morose. “I’m sure you’re man enough to accept it, now, if I tell you that it was never a love story between your mother and I.”

“If you think I could be offended by fairytales—” Nathaniel started to say, but Leland succumbed to another coughing fit just then, the shock of the morning catching in his throat. As he gasped and heaved, the parrot skittered off of his shoulder to land on the back of an empty dining chair. Noticing a nearby glass of water, Sadie handed it to Leland, though half of it spilled as he struggled to bring it to his lips. After managing a few gulps, he coughed again into his glass. When he set it down on the table, the water swirled with red droplets, gradually transforming into a pale shade of pink.

Noticing Sadie’s eyes on the glass, Leland resumed his placid jocularity. “I am a bit unwell.”

Sadie found herself intrigued by the morbid poetry that Leland might be dying from a familiar, violent disease. “My mother was sick too.”

“It’s not what you think.” He took a deep exhale to settle himself. “It’s not contagious.”

“His is a moral disease, and the cure is poison.” Nathaniel smirked. “Just so you know, Ms. Reyes, he’s probably only helping you because he’s losing his mind. These erratic decisions, Father, are only further evidence of your own insanity.”

“Don’t listen to his pestering,” Leland mumbled. “I’m well enough in my right mind to invite you to stay with us. Had I known about Lenora’s whereabouts, had I known anything sooner, I would have offered long before.”

The remorse in this confession seemed genuine, but Sadie maintained a degree of disbelief. “It’s a very generous offer, Mr. Monroe, but—”

“You could simply accept for now,” he insisted. “Just until you’re able to right yourself again. Get back on your feet.”

Beneath an unshakeable suspicion of this solution’s simplicity, Sadie was overcome by a swift gust of relief. It would be such a welcome change to have a bit of rest and kindness.

“Alright Mr. Monroe,” she said, though remained wary. “Thank you. Just until I can figure things out.”

“As long as you like.” Leland grinned. “Long enough, at least, to tell me what you and Lenora have been up to these last twenty years. And in the meantime, we better tell Delia the news. Would you, Nathaniel?”

Sadie inquired timidly, “Would that be your wife?”

“Ha!” Nathaniel guffawed. He rose from his seat and stalked towards the door. “That would be my sister.”

Leland leaned in closer once Nathaniel was gone, but made no effort to lower his voice. “My wife has long-since moved across town to live with an ostrich farmer down Fair Oaks Avenue.”

“Why would she do that?”

Leland shrugged. “She wanted to.”

“She wanted to,” the macaw on the neighboring chairback squawked back, startling them both.

“I’m sorry,” Leland chuckled. “It’s not very polite to have skipped an introduction. This is Echo. He flew down from the mountain one morning and has also moved in. He’s in love with Delia’s parrot.”

“Hello, Echo,” Sadie smiled. The bird squawked again, descended onto the table, and approached her. She caressed his vibrant indigo feathers to the murmur of something approving in birdspeak, grateful for a distraction from her bewilderment.

She saw only more mystery in the misty-eyed old man who’d invited her to take a seat at the table. Sadie was grateful, in that moment, that he had not hesitated to declare her a long-lost daughter. But she also did not believe this was the truth.

When Echo Mountain burned, only the hyacinth macaw could escape. He had come to town after the ostriches and before the peacocks, with a brief career greeting consumptives and reformed gold-diggers at the summit before the century turned so quick the whole place caught fire. He spoke a fair bit of Portuguese, decent Tongva, and passible Spanish. English he learned from a yellow-naped amazon who lived on Millionaire’s Row.

Through the bars of the amazon’s gilded cage, the macaw often told her about when he’d seen the live oaks felled and citrus groves planted, watching the valley grow from oranges to empires that stretched all the way to the edge of the continent. Sometimes, he talked about that world beyond the ocean, where the blue stretched into a wilder green thrumming with Choro mandolins. The macaw proposed helping the yellow-naped amazon escape so they might reach this faraway world together, but she could not fathom what lay beyond the limits of her imagination.

So the macaw stayed. He was given a perch in the big house where the yellow-naped amazon remained caged and became acquainted with the family who lived there—they were called the Monroes. The macaw stayed up late with the father, and sometimes they would have discussions in the dim light about mountains and jungles and the present fashion for feathers. The father, Leland Monroe, told the macaw things he didn’t dare tell anyone else, perhaps because he didn’t think a bird could really understand.

But the macaw knew straight away that the Monroe family wasn’t like all the old moneyed lace, diamonds, and sealskin that had ascended Echo Mountain in a funicular just to look down at everyone else through the soft desert haze destined to seduce onlookers into the mirage. The thick trees lining the boulevards at the base of the mountains were the start of this mirage, suggesting verdant Edens and a land without without. They had been planted there from faraway seeds, turning the valley below the mountains into an accumulation of transplants. These belonged there by sheer force of belief in rights signed onto paper made from wiser trees that had been chopped down in an earlier name of destiny.

To people, the macaw could only repeat what he had heard, which was why they called him Echo, like the place he’d flown down from. His new home beneath the mountain was not a place of pasts. The people there seemed to have short memories, but sometimes the macaw liked to think like them, content with the rose and citrus, wealth and promise. Even false Edens were beautiful, so Echo settled in and came to understand three secrets that defined his new family’s fate: where the money had come from, why the father was dying, and how a new addition to the household would soon set everything ablaze.

**********

It all started that early morning in 1905 when the brisk sunrise air carried the usual perfume of rose and neroli through the open windows. It had been the same kind of morning five years prior when Echo Mountain’s cloud hotel disintegrated into ash. As Echo, the macaw, flew through the high up smoke and down into the clear, he’d seen the clouds burning and watched the whole sky swallowed up by the blazing orange. This morning’s sky, however, was pale pink as a rose, a color so gentle no one realized it would be the harbinger of great change. That could merely have meant the season, as spring was blooming into summer. But this was also the day that Sadie Reyes would knock at the front door.

On this neroli morning, Leland Monroe had woken to the name Comstock again. It had come, soft and swift as a whisper through the tide pulling him out of that morning’s slumber. This was precisely the third time in his life that he had heard that word whispered through a dream. This time, there was nothing left for Comstock to take except the life slowly fizzling out of Leland’s veins.

Death, however, was an inevitable fact of his near future, and Leland’s children had developed a peculiar anesthetic to the grief and worry that accompanied the degradation of their father’s health. Nathaniel and Cordelia Monroe, ages twenty-seven and nineteen, had been resigned to the inevitable for so long that they’d forgotten it was coming, and sooner than they might expect. Which was why it was still going to surprise them. They would recognize only too late how much they had relied on their father, as children are wont to do. And they would realize, in the cool dusky mornings which would not change post death, that they knew very little about where they had come from. False forevers thrived in that verdant valley of their upbringing, peeking through the timeless haze which obscured anything that might have come before. Nathaniel and Cordelia Monroe had never heard the name Comstock, and would never know their father’s curse.

They had risen peacefully with the morning glories while Leland awoke panicked in his bed. Panicked with such certainty that it quickly became resignation. The beginning of the end was surprisingly easy to accept. Leland pushed himself upright against the pillows, benumbed in his awe of the patterns of life.

Echo was at the foot of the bedframe, dozing on his habitual perch. He had one eye closed and one eye open, a disconcerting posture suggesting the bird was asleep, but simultaneously on guard.

“You didn’t say anything, did you?” Leland asked the bird.

Echo blinked awake and shook out his feathers. He muttered or grumbled but said nothing more. Leland was assured, then, that Comstock had been his own nightmare.

Oh, how strange it all had been, and how normal it all became—or was it the other way around? It didn’t seem so long ago that Leland had been unwrinkled and beardless, waking to that name whispered for the first time over his plank bed near the shipyard on the Chesapeake Bay. His memories, lately, were older than they had ever been, of the earlier days when hard work had been the only way to make his living.

When Leland first heard that whisper, he’d been a young man of five-and-twenty. For weeks, the name Comstock taunted from lips to ears with visions of easy riches. It heckled silver promises from the newspapers beckoning from a boom town out west called Virginia City. But Leland’s was not a quicksilver scheme like the others. The name had been whispered in his dream before it was on everyone’s lips. Despite his promising sheer merit career managing Transatlantic imports, he left everything to seek Nevada’s Comstock Lode with all the other aspiring miners, simply because the name ringing in his ears sounded like destiny. 1859 had been a time when destiny and all its false pomp was not to be taken lightly.

And destiny found him there, in a way. Except that her name was Lenora and she had stolen happiness from the unlusted wealth that was to follow. Not that he hadn’t been happy since. He had simply lost all idealism to become a man of business. He feared the only recognizable feature of that young dreamer headed west on a hunch in that river of certainty were his brown eyes, the only things about him that remained as dark and beseeching as they had always been.

Just then, a mental elegy of all woes and grievances would have been morbidly nostalgic, and it seemed trite to detail how unlucky he felt despite having settled onto Millionaire’s Row. Nothing, Leland concluded, was ever enough. That was the true curse beyond all Comstock delusions. It was, after all, another day in paradise in the crowning jewel of the valley. The poppies in the foothills were blooming into a golden veil, the air was rich with roses and—

A knock at the door pulled Leland out of his contemplation and startled Echo on his bedframe perch.

“Are you awake, Mr. Monroe?” A muffled voice queried on the other side of the door. “Dr. Wheatley’s here.”

The word “doctor” was enough to send Leland into a sudden coughing spasm, but that was typical for ten in the morning. Wheatley was right on schedule. And wasn’t it all just a game of time?

“Come in, Scottie.” Leland wheezed. If he were a man of greater decorum, he might have referred to the housekeeper more formally as Ms. Havescott. But since she was a humorless employee with not a stitch out of place, he took great satisfaction in a more congenial appellation, especially on the occasions when it prompted her to break her characteristic no-nonsense façade.

Scottie entered the room, her familiar tidiness a comfort against the terror that had startled Leland awake. “Shall I send him up?”

“Who?” Leland rasped, a sudden chill thrilling up his spine.

“Dr. Wheatley, of course.”

“Of course.” Leland reached for the ever-present glass of water on his bedside table. He gulped down his worry and felt his throat soothed. He’d been afraid Scottie might say Comstock, but he was also still half asleep. “Very well.”

After the housekeeper disappeared from the room, a long stride coming up the stairs soon replaced her rapid scuffling down the hall. The polite knock on the door left ajar announced Dr. John Wheatley a moment before he entered. Despite being a man no more than forty, his brow was permanently creased with something between concentration and worry.

“Good morning,” he said as he pulled a stethoscope from his handbag.

“Good morning,” the macaw grumbled back in his warbly imitation of the human voice.

“Good morning, Echo,” Wheatley muttered. “Why do you keep that blasted parrot around, Mr. Monroe?”

“At least he’s polite.” Leland winced with the effort to sit up straighter in bed so that Wheatley could listen to his heart and lungs, a choreography they’d rehearsed daily for the last decade. “And I maintain the conviction that any man who’s seen me in my underclothes reserves the right to call me Leland.”

“Old habits, I suppose.” Wheatley put his stethoscope away. “How is everything?”

“No need to go down the checklist, Doc. We both know what’s coming. I’d like to be lucid enough to confront my demons before giving in.”

“You’re too prosperous a man to be living with that kind of regret.”

“You think peace begets prosperity? Or prosperity peace?”

“I suppose I simply hoped,” Wheatley parried as he rummaged through his bag again, “that achieving great wealth would bring a man some form of happiness.”

“Money is curing the symptoms, not the cause.”

“Well, if you’ve resigned yourself to dying, there’s nothing more I can do for you. But we can try upping the mercury dose. It does seem to be having a positive effect.”

Dr. Wheatley seized what had been eluding him at the bottom of his bag and pulled out a small glass bottle full of pills glimmering the same indigo blue as Echo’s plumage. The macaw torqued his neck curiously to watch the doctor skirt around to Leland’s bedside table and place the bottle beside an identical, half-empty one. “You can continue with three blue mass tablets daily, but perhaps an injection every now and then would calm things even more.”

“I think you’re more interested in killing than curing me.”

“As you know, there is no cure.”

“Nay!” Leland scoffed playfully. “I know the cure. I made my millions off it.”

“Orange juice won’t do you much good,” Wheatley smirked, “but it won’t do any harm either.”

“Is that what you’ve been told?” Leland’s laughter incited another round of hoarse, hacking coughs. “Anyone who knows what’s good for them in this town cries orange when they’re talking gold. But the citrus here is the only gold in abundance that’s made no one rich.”

He might have gone on, but more coughs stole the words from his throat.

“I think you’re entering another one of your deliriums,” Wheatley said coolly. “And I don’t like the sound of that cough.” For the third time, he plunged a hand into his bag. “I think I’ve still got some Heroin syrup in here. That should keep your coughing to a minimum.”

“Whatever you say, Doctor.”

“Whatever you say,” the macaw echoed.

Leland’s eyes followed Wheatley as he placed another bottle next to the blue pills. “You’re not proffering me more snake oil?”

“This is a certified cough suppressant,” Wheatley assured him. From the folds of his coat, he produced a spoon and poured a dose of the syrup into its basin. He offered it to Leland, who opened his mouth obligingly.

After a wince, he swallowed. “I never thought it would be my deathbed that had me feeling like a little boy again.”

“Have you enough youth and vigor to head downstairs to breakfast?”

“I suppose.” Leland pushed away the covers. “Would you help me up?”

Wheatley carefully eased Leland upright and steadied him onto his feet, but he was neither small nor light. It took a great flurry of balance and precision to get him wrapped in the paisley, silken housecoat draped over a nearby chair and fitted with a walking stick propped near the door.

“That’s new,” Wheatley observed.

“I usually keep it downstairs.” Leland brandished the stick, fine mahogany with a sterling handle. “This isn’t for walking at all. A man must have style.”

At that moment, Echo took off from the bed frame and descended onto Leland’s shoulder, forming the crowning accessory to his ensemble.

Wheatley chuckled good-humoredly as Leland crooned at the macaw and made a show of exiting the room. But the doctor could not help noticing that his patient leaned a little heavily on the cane as he shuffled down the hall.

They parted ways in the foyer, where Scottie escorted Wheatley out as Leland made his own way into the paneled dining room. There he found his son, Nathaniel, stretched out leisurely at the head of the table, his face obscured by the morning paper.

At the sound of approaching footsteps, Nathaniel lowered the paper to the table, revealing his dark, furrowed brows and eyes a shade still darker. He was the image Leland had in his memories of the young man he’d once been, back in those westward days of silver more than forty years prior.

“Morning, Father.” Nathaniel spoke in his usual cool indifference with a glance towards the indigo bird on Leland’s shoulder. “I wasn’t expecting either of you.”

“I refuse to be bedridden,” Leland proclaimed, though it required a great effort to struggle into the chair at the opposite end of the table. “Where’s your sister?”

“Delia’s getting ready, I presume.”

“For that big to-do at the Hotel Green? I don’t see much point in her going.”

His words were proceeded by footsteps from the floor above, heavy enough to rattle the chandelier over the table.

“You can’t stop me!” A young woman’s voice wailed, stomping down the stairs.

Cordelia Monroe entered the room in a huff of lace-trimmed animosity, an unusual detour from her typically cheery disposition. Unlike her brother, she possessed flaxen hair and eyes of a bright cornflower blue. This blue was a sort of rhetorical question that had stalked after her all her life, the same blue as the oblivion skies that hovered hazily over the nearby foothills and surrounding valley. This blue was what convinced her she had a stake in belonging, even though she knew it came with a catch. But it would be unjust to define Delia, from the start, by the origins of this hue. She will reveal her own suspicions in due course.

For now, back to the breakfast table, where Leland is about to say:

“I just don’t see why you maintain this desire to partake in such frivolous conformity.”

“I don’t think you understand,” Delia tried to sound patient. “I’m nineteen.”

“You’re still a child.”

“Not legally.”

“Well, you still act like one.”

Delia crossed her arms and pouted, perhaps not realizing she was proving his point. “This is my chance to go out into society, Father.”

“I had rather hoped last year’s season would be enough to whet your appetite and quell all curiosity.”

“But I intend to secure my future.”

“And what will that future be? A dowry-bought lifetime of obedience? These events are ridiculous. Dressing girls up like prized turkeys is like sending you off to auction. The men at these things are out for one thing and one thing only—” Leland let his conclusion resonate with an air of gravity: “Marriage.”

“Precisely!” Delia squeaked. “Isn’t that what you want for me? Something respectable?”

“I’ll be damned if you have to spend your golden years holed up in some other man’s house, hiding away from the world simply because you’ve been convinced it’s the thing to do. I’ve made enough money to keep you both comfortable for the rest of your lives. You don’t need to be dependent on anyone else.”

“But what if it was for love?”

“Damnit, Delia, do you really want to get into this again?”

“Just because it didn’t last between you and mother doesn’t mean I can’t have something better.”

“You think it’s going to last between her and that ostrich farmer?”

“You’re just jealous...”

“On the contrary. I didn’t want to keep her somewhere she didn’t want to be. The concept of forever, Delia, is no romance. Feelings fade. Perspectives evolve. People change. We’re meant to. Your mother and I decided very early on in our acquaintance that we would never hold the other hostage to our own personal history.”

“What I don’t understand, Father,” Delia frowned, “is why everyone’s after marriage if you say it’s such a problem.”

“Lemmings, Delia,” Leland sighed. “What have I always told you?”

“Not to be one,” she muttered. “But I always thought that was a joke about me wanting to be a Lennox.”

“Jasper was just a fleeting fancy, wasn’t he?”

“Yes.” Delia’s cheeks turned a little pink.

Finally seeing an opportunity for requisite brotherly heckling, Nathaniel cut in: “She realized that as soon as he grew a moustache.”

“Let’s all stop talking about love now,” Leland huffed. “It will spoil my appetite.”

But Delia couldn’t let the subject shift so abruptly. “Do you really think I’m going to abide by your strange platitudes when Dr. Wheatley has confirmed your brain’s slowly addling away?” She turned to Nathaniel, pleading, “He can’t really stop me from going tonight, can he?”

Before Nathaniel could respond, Leland grinned. “Who said I was stopping you?”

“What?”

“I’ve said nothing of the sort.” Leland succumbed to another fit of coughing. He hacked and wheezed and gasped. Worried, Delia lunged for the pitcher among the breakfast provisions on the table and poured him a glass of water. He drank it gratefully, then hacked a few more coughs before regaining his breath. “Just because I disapprove doesn’t mean you have to listen. I trust that you will make the right decisions for yourself.”

Delia frowned. “Was this a test?”

“I don’t know anymore,” Leland sighed. “And I’m afraid I won’t be able to accompany you tonight. I feel most unwell.”

“I had rather hoped you’d be there.” Delia frowned. “It’s tradition, anyway.”

“Your brother can lead you in.” Leland turned to Nathaniel. “He doesn’t mind going, does he?”

“It would be an honor,” Nathaniel assented in a mocking tone of gallantry. That was enough to satisfy Delia.

“Good.” Leland smiled. “Now join us for breakfast, will you?”

“I’m too excited to eat!” Delia trilled. “I’ve got to got ready!”

“The ball doesn’t start until this evening.” Leland protested. But Delia had already scampered back up the stairs. “It’s only ten in the morning!”

Nathaniel shrugged. “She’ll come down when she’s ready.”

While the arguments were taking place at the table, Scottie had her ear pressed against the other side of the dining room door. Focused on the conversation, she was startled when the doorbell chimed in the entry.

“That must be Dr. Wheatley come back,” she announced to the empty foyer, hoping her vocalized diligence in the esteemed task of answering the door would hide the fact that she had been listening intently to the conversation in the dining room. Though a woman of strict principle, Ms. Havescott did not take issue with eavesdropping. She found nosiness to be an essential attribute of any diligent housekeeper. Only the best housekeepers (she included herself among such an elite) were never found out.

Nevertheless, the Monroes were too engrossed in their bickering to hear her announcement. She answered the front door with a smile, expecting to find the charming Dr. Wheatley waiting for her with his equally charming grin.

Scottie’s smile, however, upended into a frown when she found herself staring at a perfect stranger on the doorstep. The haggard looking young woman had threadbare clothes, disheveled dark hair, and cheeks streaked with recently faded tears. Such a miserable figure might have been a strange enough sight to shock Scottie if it were the first time the Monroes’ housekeeper had ever greeted a wretch at the doorstep. Alas, this was a more common occurrence than Scottie might have liked to admit. It was without hesitation that she absconded with a greeting to spew: “How dare you come to the front door!”