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needles in the sore Paul Junior’s dramatic exit had left behind. She’d sat there with eyes too wide and shiny as my father had nodded toward Grandpa Samuel, his way of telling me I had to let Grandpa Samuel know what I intended to do. I’d assumed they had already done that, but as I looked at my grandpa I could see fear heightening, his normally sallow eyes prickling automatically against this thing that had always made him cower. I told him then. I told him with all the optimism and promise I believed, but as I spoke, every word looked like a knife slicing into him, his face whitening as the gashes drained the blood of life right out of him. “Grandpa,” I said, my voice taking on the brittleness of dried leaves. I wanted to take his hand and hold it, but I knew he wouldn’t let me. “I’ll make her house nice. Let me do this for her, for you, for all of us. Let’s be proud instead of ashamed.”
    He looked like someone whose heart had stopped, like a mummy instead of a man. I felt my parents’ eyes on me like Trevor’s had been, casting doubts I didn’t want. Doubts that weren’t mine and would destroy me, just like they had destroyed Julianne.
    “It’s like a boil, Grandpa.” I spoke louder. “If it just sits there and festers, it’s going to kill us. Let’s break it open so we can heal.” I wanted to say it was killing me, killing this only chance for a great husband they thought I had. I also wanted to tell them it wasn’t just Julianne’s house. It really was her, just as they feared. It was who she was, what she’d left behind, that I wanted to uncover, the truth about her that might redeem her, redeem them, redeem women from men like my brother.
    Grandpa Samuel turned toward my father, the two of them saying something without speaking. They hurt, they thought this was going to hurt them more, and they didn’t know what to do now that their fears had become a reality in the form of their daughter and granddaughter.
    “No one who reads the newspaper articles will know where this house is or who we are.” I interrupted their silent conversation, leaning forward so they would listen to me, the edge of the table pressed into my ribs. “No one here will ever read them, not even you. My editor promised to keep the stories anonymous and only printed in Cincinnati. It will be okay, Grandpa. It will be good for us.” As I looked at them my heart pounded in my ears, creating a voice that sounded like Trevor’s, like my mother’s, telling me I was wrong.
    Grandpa Samuel had turned at the mention of an article, an invisible nod, a resigned burden of despair in his movement. No one said anything after he was gone. Mama looked at me with a face too white, while my father finished his breakfast. Then I had gathered my things and driven to Julianne’s house.
    I set the image of my grandfather’s back aside, right next to my guilt, as I stepped into the main room of Julianne’s home, the wood floor creaking beneath my feet. It was hard to see in the dull light with Simon’s boards still covering the windows. As my eyes adjusted, I looked around at what the room contained, what had been left behind when she’d gone, sitting just as she last saw it before she closed the door. A sofa sat to my right along one wall, a rocking chair at a right angle to its far end, a small table cornered between them with a basket of thread and sewing items on its top. Cobwebs strung them together, their tiny strands laden by beads of dust, blankets of the fine powder muting the colors in the room. A daybed ran along the opposite wall, with a thin quilt across its top and two embroidered pillows at one end. There was a stove near the back of this room, a wood-burning stove, a small desk with a straight-back chair at it, and a simple set of narrow steps to the upper floor, plain boards making up those and the fragile railing that lined them.
    I cleared more cobwebs from a doorway to my left and entered her kitchen, which