Page 111 of The Widow and the Wanted

I look at Lula then, and shame burns through me.

Boone leans forward. “Maybe the question ain’t whether she bewitched us. Maybe the question is whether we’re brave enough to trust whatever force brought her here.”

Lula’s eyes shine, though her jaw tightens.

Perhaps I wanted Lula to be a witch. That would be simpler than admitting how quickly she has become necessary to me. Simpler than admitting every force, natural or supernatural, seems to be thrusting us together, as if our bond is as fated as what Boone and I share.

“I am sorry,” I say. “Intelligence offers little protection against fear.”

She looks down at herself.

At the gown. The muddied hem. The lace. The tight bodice. The gloves limp against her wrists like shed skin.

“I hate this dress,” she says. “I hate this room. I hate this paint on my face. I hate these pins in my hair.” She reaches up and tears one free with enough violence to make me wince. “And I hate that I let her put me in any of it.”

The words leave her sharp, but something underneath them trembles.

Boone’s expression changes first. His easy humor fades into a softness I know well enough to recognize.

“There’s a basin,” I say, and gesture toward the little washstand where a porcelain bowl waits beside a pitcher and folded cloths. “There.”

For a moment I think she will refuse the offer simply because I made it. Then she turns, strides to the washstand, and begins worrying at the buttons down her bodice with quick and clumsy fingers.

The first button slips. The second catches.

She hisses through her teeth.

“Here,” I say quietly.

“I can undress myself.”

“I know. But may I help you?”

Her hands still. “Fine.”

I step behind her slowly enough that she may step away if she wishes. She does not. In the mirror, her eyes find mine and hold there, wary and bright beneath the kohl her mother painted around them.

I lower my hands to the row of tiny buttons.

They are absurd things. Pearl buttons, no larger than teeth, fastened through loops made to punish the human hand. My fingers are not as steady as I would like, but I manage them one by one. With each loosened button, the gown gives a little, surrendering its grip on her ribs.

Lula exhales.

It is such a small, ordinary sound, but the relief in it undoes me.

I work the last button free. “Arms.”

She obeys without comment, letting me ease the gown from her shoulders. The silk slides down with a whisper, catching briefly at her hips before falling in a heap around her feet.

Beneath it, she wears a chemise of fine white cotton, trimmed with lace at the neckline and sleeves. It is modest by every practical measure, but after all that armor of silk and paint and borrowed grandeur, the simplicity of it feels more intimate than nakedness. Her shoulders are bare above the lace. Her throat unadorned. Her hair, half fallen from its pins, curls loose around her face.

There she is. Our Lula.

She bends to step out of the gown, but I catch it first, lifting the ruined hem away from her ankles. Mud has dried along the edge in stiff brown stars.

“You were miserable,” I say. “And still you brought us here.”

Her expression stills.