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question unraveled her. She sat in her mother’s chair in the dark. Her foot grazed a stack of books, and it slid, tumbled. She reached down to straighten them, recognizing the bookbinder’s signature gold leaf. The smell of calfskin. She touched a spine and brought it to her nose, thinking of the days she’d spent working with him in the bindery.
    â€œLet me get them.”
    She had not known her father was awake. He kneeled beside her, handling the books gently as he squared them off and pushed them into a corner. The shelves were full. They lined the walls. He sat in the chair across from her. She considered going back to bed, but instead she lit a second candle. Even in the dim light, she could make out little half-moons of exhaustion puckering beneath his eyes. He looked intently at her. Once, that look would have withered her.
    â€œI barely knew him.”
    â€œYou were safer with him.”
    â€œYou married me to the first soldier who came knocking.”
    â€œNot the first.”
    Something landed on the back of her hand.
    â€œThe wealthiest.”
    â€œHis money had nothing to do with it.”
    â€œYou sold me.”
    He laughed. “I thought marriage would strengthen you.”
    â€œI—” She coughed. He rose to touch her back. His shadow fell over her. She willed the coughing away. He sat back down.
    â€œI hear a voice.”
    He stared.
    â€œA spirit’s voice. From the other side. I speak to the dead, Father.”
    â€œDear God.”
    â€œI’m afraid of him. I’m afraid of everything.” She began to cry.
    â€œSadie, Sadie.” He rose up a little, sat again. “If you can’t forgive me, then at least honor the memory of your mother. Don’t try to punish me with this exaggerated talk.”
    â€œI barely knew the man, yet you married me to him.”
    â€œThere was a war.”
    â€œSo you washed your hands.”
    A ship passed over his face. “Sadie, you must marry again. You must come home.”
    For a moment, she was suspended, a spider extending its web to an object it can barely see. It was not just that she was an abandoned widow in a foreign city. It was more than that. The opposite, even. Within that space, a brightening, an assembling of desires. She did not say it, but she knew the sensation was simply this: she preferred her new life to her old one, a dead man over a living one.
    She listened to the sounds of night, the whirr of nature’s hum outside the window, and she found it easy to recall how large this house had once seemed, how vast even this chair had been. She held on to her arms, sitting in the dark long after her father had retired.
    S ADIE NO LONGER HAD to go on carriage rides to hear the voice. Now he visited her right there in the parlor beneath the portrait of her dead husband. One night, when she entered the room and sat at the smallround table, he did the unthinkable. He brought forth her mother as she sat fixed in a spell.
    Word spread that soldiers were pouring in. Lice-infested, bloody, malodorous, the men were deposited one after another in beds, and when there were no more beds, they lay on the floor, curled like snails beneath thin blankets. I volunteered three days after the battle at Gettysburg ended, virtually moving into the building for female nurses. At night, their haunted voices echoed as they called out the names of loved ones. My dear, it was something no mother should witness. So little of their youth remained. I was happy to do what I could to help: salving open wounds, holding down a man while his leg was sawed. Needless to say, it took its toll. Soon I found something I could do better than the others. I took men’s halting words and transformed them. Your father always said a word, properly spoken, could save a life, but those men taught me the power of poetry. It felt so good to be useful. I even read your letters to them, my dear daughter, though I did not, for a