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One month ago, Elma had been alive.

It seemed impossible that time should stretch on and Elma should be gone. Buried. A name on a marker in the graveyard. Not even their own graveyard in Cornwall, but the Friends burial ground here in the city, a place of strangers.

Perhaps Elma might prefer being buried among strangers—although not among Friends. She had never wanted to be a Friend. It had been a source of ongoing frustration to Caty’s father that he could convert the heathen of Rhode Island and Connecticut, but not his own niece.

Caty had thought that living with her and Elias, Elma might change. Elma could live in the city, the teeming, exciting metropolis for which she’d always yearned. Under Caty’s loving guidance, she’d free herself of her frivolous desires, meet a nice boy at meeting, and set her mind to a life of happy industry.

But it hadn’t worked out that way. By the time Elma had been under her roof a year, Caty would have been happy for Elma to have married anyone, just so long as she was out of her house.

That night, Caty had stood by this stair and heard their whispered voices: Levi and Elma. She had retreated hastily to her room, so they wouldn’t catch her listening. From her room, she’d heard the front door open and close. The relief of it, the incredible relief of it, knowing Elma was gone . . .

Caty jerked back as steps clattered down the stair. Not Elma’s tread, never Elma’s tread again, but Elias’s heavy clump and the mincing click of the heels of their lodger Croucher. They opened the door, nearly walking right into Caty in their absorption.

They made such an ill-assorted pair: her husband in his homespun, his baggy trousers and loose shirt; their lodger in a tightly fitted bottle-green frock coat over a waistcoat of cream brocade embroidered with birds of paradise.

“Mrs. Ring.” Croucher tipped his hat to her. He contrived, as he always did, to make her feel like a scullery maid in her own home.

“Mr. Croucher. Does thee plan to do us the honor of gracing our table?”

“I’ve other arrangements,” said Mr. Croucher vaguely, by which, Caty knew, he meant he would call on acquaintances at the dinner hour and wrangle an invitation to eat, rather than paying the highly reasonable rate she charged to feed her boarders. “It’s such a busy season.”

“Catherine.” Elias cleared his throat, looking somewhere past her rather than at her. “Mr. Croucher was just telling me that he is to be married—to the Widow Stackhaver.”

“I wish thee happy. I suppose that means thee will be not much longer with us?”

“Oh, there are affairs to set in order,” Croucher said airily, waving one of his long, thin hands. Dull red glinted from a ring on his finger, not a gem, but polished stone. He looked meaningfully at Elias, raising all of Caty’s worst suspicions. “We shan’t be married for some weeks. You needn’t fear. I don’t mean to leave you without a lodger quite yet, Mrs. Ring.”

That wasn’t what she feared.

Swirling himself in a greatcoat with no fewer than five capes, Mr. Croucher took himself off, undoubtedly to batten at someone else’s table. Five capes! Caty could make breeches for David and cloaks for all three girls out of that material.

Elias would have gone too, turning toward their room on the other side of the stair, but Caty stepped in front of him, trying to put words to her misgivings. “That Croucher—thee are constantly in company together.”

Elias hunched his shoulders. “Is it so strange a man would want for companionship in this house of women?”

Most of their boarders were men. But that wasn’t what Elias was talking about, she knew. It was the millinery. He deeply resented the millinery, and the dozen girls who came and went, trimming hats, dropping bits of ribbon, and making more money for them than any of his projects had in a year.

Caty stepped up to him, tilting her head to look up into his face. She could see the stubble on his chin, where he hadn’t shaved since yesterday, the brown tinged with gray. “He has not persuaded thee to anything, has he?”

Elias’s expression went blank. “I don’t know what thee might mean.”

He was a terrible liar, her Elias.

“It’s the store, isn’t it?” Caty doggedly kept pace with him as Elias strode toward the bedroom, trying to avoid her.

She wouldn’t let him avoid her any longer, not if he meant to embark on another of his ill-fated business ventures, with Croucher as a partner. When they’d first come to the city, Elias had opened a dry goods store in the space that Catherine now used for the millinery. It had failed miserably.

Caty caught up with Elias as he fumbled with the lock of their door. “If he wants thee to go into partnership for his frivolities . . .”

He dropped the key, lurching inelegantly for it. “If I did, that would be my business, not thine.”

Caty looked at him, thinking how different he looked from the man she’d married, the first marriage in the new meetinghouse. She’d been so proud. So proud to be a harbinger of future joy. So proud of the man she’d married, so sure he was destined for great things, that they were destined for great things together. She’d been seventeen, and he’d been thirty-one, and it had seemed wonderful to her that a man of his industry and vigor and obvious powers could take an interest in a girl like her.

Her father had blessed the match; her mother had made the fruitcake. The whole community had garlanded them with flowers.

She would always remember Elias like that, standing in the sunshine outside the new meetinghouse, the light bringing out the glints of red in his brown hair, standing tall and sure, his hand extended to her—to her—as they started their life together.

But that had been before the mill that failed . . . and the dry goods store that failed . . . and the patent waterwheel that Elias had sworn and sworn would make their fortunes, bringing clean water to the city . . . until the Manhattan Company had passed his plan over, the same way every other investor he’d approached had passed his plan over.