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“The attorneys for the defense will try to discomfit you. They’ll question your words, your memories. They’ll twist what you say. They’ll try to make you doubt yourself and the evidence of your own eyes. They are,” Mr. Colden said ruefully, “very good at that sort of thing.”

They weren’t the only ones who were good at that sort of thing. Hope could see Levi leaning against the fence, his eyes fixed on her, compelling, so compelling, making her doubt herself, making her doubt Caty—Caty! It was absurd.

Mr. Colden was right. It was nothing more than an attempt to create mysteries where there were none. And she was as simple as Mr. Colden seemed to think them for heeding Levi even for a moment.

“What do we do when they do that?” Hope asked.

Mr. Colden beamed at her. “Don’t let them shake you. Hold firm and tell the truth as you know it. We know they mean to claim that Elma was melancholy, that she threatened to take her own life.”

“She was only melancholy after her illness,” said Caty tightly. “I don’t even know that I’d call it melancholy. Being ill would make anyone low. She was right again by the middle of December.”

Ask her about Elma’s illness—her cramping of the stomach. Ask her why she wouldn’t let me go for the doctor.

“Anyone will tell thee Elma was of a cheerful disposition,” Hope said loudly, as if she could drown out the sound of Levi’s voice in her head.

“Yes, her illness.” Mr. Colden perked up, looking meaningfully at Caty. “I gather Levi was very, er, solicitous of Elma in her illness?”

Caty poked at the hotchpot on the hearth. “He was always very attentive to anyone who was sick.”

“But especially to Elma—when she had the cramps in her stomach?”

“She was much troubled by cramps in her stomach,” said Caty, concentrating forcibly on the stew pot. “She’d been troubled by cramps for nearly a year.”

But that wasn’t true at all.

Hope should know. They’d been bedfellows most of their youth; they’d had their courses together; they’d washed their linens together. There were times, when the boardinghouse was too full to hold everyone, when they’d shared a bed as they had as children. If Elma had suffered from cramps in the stomach, Hope would have known. Elma would have told her. In great detail.

A wave of fierce grief shook Hope. It always surprised her, the grief. Hating Levi tended to distract her, but then, out of nowhere, something would come that reminded her of the old Elma, the Elma from before Levi had divided them, and Hope would be left gasping, like the time she’d let Elma talk her into jumping into the pond in their shifts and been submerged in freezing water.

Elma had bobbed up laughing, shaking the water out of her face.

“Don’t you like it? Don’t you want to do it again?”

“Never,” Hope had shot back.

Never, never, never. This time Elma hadn’t come up laughing. She was gone, gone forever, and Hope would have given anything to have her back, in all her moods.

You shouldn’t have jumped in that pond, Elma, she wanted to say. You shouldn’t have gone off that night to meet Levi.

Hope couldn’t shake the feeling that she had helped cause this; that if she’d been nicer to Elma those past months, she never would have felt she had to run off. But her feelings had been hurt at coming back from the country and finding Levi so intimate with Elma. And so she’d turned her back on Elma, pointedly focused on Caty and the children, made it clear who her family was and wasn’t.

She would give anything to take it all back.

“Did Levi come to breakfast as usual the next morning?” The lawyer was still talking, taking Caty through the events of that night, the night Elma disappeared. Caty’s voice was stilted, hesitant, not like herself at all.

“Yes.”

“Was anything said about Elma at breakfast?”

“No, nobody mentioned her.” Poor Caty looked utterly crushed, miserable at the clear imputation that she had failed in her duty.

“About ten or eleven o’clock the day after Elma went missing, I met Levi alone upstairs and attacked him about Elma,” Hope broke in. “He denied knowing anything of her, although from his looks I was confident he did.”

Mr. Colden coughed slightly. “When it comes time for trial, Miss Sands, you must wait until called to give your testimony. You may discover things you wish to add to your sister’s testimony, or there may be statements other witnesses make that you know to be frankly untrue, but you may not answer unless you yourself are on the stand, and then only to reply to the questions that are put to you. That is why it is so important to think now of everything you might wish to say—and every possible question the defense might put to you—so you may answer clearly and not regret anything left unsaid.”

Statements one knew to be false, like Elma having suffered from recurring cramps in the stomach for a year, when it had only begun in early December.

Hope glanced at Caty, who had her hands twisted together at her waist, her entire form stiff with tension.