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forced an answer past the lump of fear in her throat. "No, thank you. It appears I know where I am after all." "You do?"
    She felt his skeptical gaze on the expensive rubberized wool gossamer that protected her from the cold wind and driving rain, and the tiny, fashionable hat that perched just so on her perfectly coiffed hair. She licked

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    Kristin Hannah
    her dry lips, then said softly, "I grew up in Rosare Court."
    An odd silence stretched between them, as if he no longer knew what to make of the unfamiliar creature standing so primly before him. "Oh, well, then," he finally said. "Good-bye. Keep your eyes open this time."
    "I will," Emma answered to his retreating back. She clutched the collar of her woolen cape and stared dully into the hissing, smoking gloom. The soft hum of the streets vibrated beneath her feet. She stood frozen, her gaze glued to the sidewalk stretched out before her. The slums seemed to be calling to her, beckoning in the same sly, taunting voice that had haunted her nights for as long as she could remember.
    They were ready, these pathetic, dirty streets, to welcome her back as one of their own.
    The buildings melted into a gray, swirling layer of fog. Out of the colorless mist came the high, keening cry of a fishwife hawking her wares. Whitefish, day-old whitefish . . .
    Emma shuddered. Above her head the elevated railway sputtered and rattled, sending a cascade of sparks to the wet pavement below. All around her, people scurried to and fro like ants, their pale, careworn faces turned in to the ragged collars of hand-me-down coats. The rain had stopped, but the air remained sour, thickened by the stench of long-forgotten garbage, darkened by the outpouring of smoke from too many chimneys. She heard a high-pitched giggle and glanced toward the noise. Beside a rickety horse-drawn cab, a dozen or so dirty, half-clothed children chased an equally dirty mongrel down the streets. The noisy pack dashed between broken-down stalls and overfilled pushcarts, their THE ENCHANTMENT
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    bare feet splashing through the dirty puddles that pocked the cobblestone road. Everywhere they went, the sound of angry hollering and childish giggles followed.
    Behind the children, a group of stoop-shouldered women was huddled around a broken hydrant. White water spewed over their feet and splashed across the cobblestone street. They hurried to fill anything they could find—shoes, hands, buckets—with the fresh water.
    Emma bit down on her lower lip to keep it from trembling. Even now, after all these years, she remembered what it had felt like to stand at the hydrant, waiting, praying, to get even a cupful of water before the policemen arrived and shooed her away. Her hands had been dirty then, and cold. Always cold. And it had hurt like Hades to plunge her tiny fingers in the freezing cold water, but she had done it, and gladly. The poisoned, filthy water in the tenement's broken-down communal sinks had been undrinkable.
    Emma wrenched her gaze away from the women clustered around the hydrant and slowly turned, knowing what she'd see: the alley's entrance.
    She allowed herself only a moment of doubt, then squared her shoulders and forced her chin up.
    Clutching her umbrella in shaking fingers, she turned down the twisting, dirty walkway that was no more than three steps wide.

    Gritting her teeth, she walked past one broken-down building after another until she came to the building that had haunted her dreams for years: Rosare Court.
    The tenement's red-brown face was as blank as a dead man's eyes. No windows relieved the stark, straight pattern of the bricks, no flowers bloomed from boxes be-42 Kristin Hannah
    side the closed door. The only ornamentation on the building was the crisscrossed ironwork of the fire escape.
    Fire escape. What a cruel joke to call those useless ladders escapes. Emma still had nightmares about the night dozens of men, women, and babies had burned to death in a building exactly like this one.