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her shoes or her clothes so she couldn’t leave the house? No, Harold wasn’t that imaginative. She chuckled at the thought.
    “What’s so funny?” he asked.
    “Nothing.” But he studied her for a long moment before picking up his book and his reading glasses from the nightstand.
    Did she look different to him? Had her singular act of bravery—or was it injudicious -ness—changed her in some barely perceptible way, like the difference between a properly starched shirt and one that wasn’t? But it hadn’t been courage that had made Ginny hang her apron on the kitchen doorknob this morning and abandon her laundry in the middle of a washday and take coins from her jar of egg money for bus fare. It had been a matter of survival. No one noticed her anymore. And Harold had two ticket stubs in his pocket.
    He began to snore. The book he’d been reading dropped to his chest. Ginny loved him, and she wanted him to love her in return, but she also wanted him to respect her, to need her for more than simply cooking his meals and finding the soap and starching his shirts. She reached over to gently remove the book from Harold’s hands. He awoke with a snort.
    “Huh? What did you say?”
    “Nothing,” she replied, smoothing his hair off his forehead. “You fell asleep. Why don’t you turn off your light?”
    He did, and as Ginny lay in the darkness, excitement mingled with fear as she thought about tomorrow and her first day of work.

 
    CHAPTER 2
    *    Helen    *
    Miss Helen Kimball glanced up at the factory’s ugly brick walls as she steered her bicycle into the parking lot. Goodness, how this place had grown. In a mere nine months’ time, the modestly sized Stockton Boat Works, which had manufactured motorboats in the drowsy village of Stockton, Michigan, for years and years, had transformed into the gargantuan Stockton Shipyard, producing landing craft for the war effort. The air around the building had a greasy, electric smell to it, and she could almost sense the throbbing of machinery, hissing and clanging inside.
    What on earth was she doing here? A woman from her station in life had no business working here. She considered turning around and pedaling home again, but she was too winded at the moment to make the return trip. It had been farther than she’d bargained for. And there were more hills on this side of town than she had recalled. The trip would be impossible by bicycle in the wintertime, especially for a fifty-year-old woman such as herself.
    The brakes squealed as she halted her bicycle in front of the factory. She wasted several minutes searching for a place to park, but the factory didn’t seem to have a bicycle rack. Helen would have to speak to someone about that. She hopped off and smoothed her skirt, then poked at her graying brown hair to rearrange it. The plant manager had advised her to wear slacks, but Helen Kimball had never worn men’s clothing in all her born days and didn’t own a pair. Wearing the drab, shapeless coveralls they’d promised to give her would be horrid enough.
    What am I doing working at a factory? she asked herself again. Then she remembered: trying to stop the walls of the huge Victorian mansion on River Street from closing in on her. She couldn’t bear to remain in that house one more day now that her parents had passed away. She could have applied to teach as a substitute, she knew that. But it wasn’t the same as having her own students, doing things her own way. After twenty years, Helen Kimball knew a thing or two about how to teach. She wouldn’t go back to Lincoln Elementary School until she could have her own class and teach them proper behavior from the very first day. There was just no telling how these younger teachers ran their classes, and Helen wouldn’t put up with wild behavior or slipshod teaching, even if she were a mere substitute.
    The last time she had substituted, she’d begun the day by reading from the Psalms, as she used to do