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tightly that she frightened them so much they cried and tried to pull away. No one knew what to do with her. She didn’t care; she just wanted everyone to leave her alone.
    After ten days Celia slowly began to pull herself together. She looked into the mirror, and was upset at the sight of her drawn and grieving face. She forced herself to go into Alfred’s bedroom for the first time since he had died, and realized with a kind of sick shock that without any instructions to the contrary Hugh would have been sleeping there—since it was his room, too—ever since they had taken her son away. But Hugh’s bed was untouched.
    And Alfred’s bed had been slept in—the sheets wrinkled, defiled by someone who had tried to take his place, for what selfish and morbid purpose she had no idea.
    Hugh had been sleeping in his dead stepbrother’s bed. Was he crazy?
    “You must stay in Rose’s room—just for now,” Celia told him. “I’m closing off this room for a while. Until I feel better.”
    “I loved him,” Hugh said softly.
    “We all did,” Celia said, with no kindness in her tone.
    William watched helplessly, quite concerned, when she turned Alfred’s room into an untouchable shrine. Her implacable mourning went on and on. He didn’t know how to deal with Celia’s seemingly endless grief.
    “But it was you who always said that the past is the past and life must go on,” William said.
    “When did I say that?” Celia snapped.
    “A boy of eleven should not sleep in a bedroom with his sister,” William said. “Hugh is too much with women as it is.”
    “All right, he can stay in my sewing room.”
    “Celia . . .”
    “Then let him go away to military school,” Celia said. “It will be good for him. He
is
too much with women.” She simply wanted Hugh out of her sight, but she wasn’t sure why.
    “No military school,” William said, appalled. “He’s just a child.”
    “You said he wasn’t.”
    “I won’t discuss it,” William said. “He’s my son.”
    Celia burst into tears.
    It had been her hubris, she knew, that had killed her own son. She had taken too much pride in him, and loved him too much, and had been too confident that she had made her life a success. And while she tormented herself for her flaws, Celia began to realize something else. She realized that she resented Hugh because he was alive, when Alfred was dead, and because Alfred had been perfect while Hugh was so lacking in all the masculine qualities she had admired in her son. Yes, she resented him, even though he was a little boy.
    And after a while she almost began to hate him. Everything he did annoyed her. She had to hide this feeling from her husband, and from the others in the family. When the girls fussed over Hugh, too much she thought, Celia had to bite her tongue. It had never bothered her that she didn’t love her stepson. No one knew or cared, and she had always been scrupulous in treating the two brothers alike. But she now realized something flawed but unavoidable about her own character, and the future of the household’s only surviving boy.
    Even if she never did anything about it, she realized she had become his enemy.

Chapter Four
    Rose was sixteen now, and the boys she had known in the neighborhood as simply friends, or sometimes just as pests, were starting to look at her differently. The older ones, who had thought
she
was a pest, were coming to call on her. She liked the attention, but she didn’t like any of them, because she couldn’t help comparing each one to her longtime secret love, Tom Sainsbury, and it was perfectly obvious that none of those boys was as good-looking, or as charming, or as nice as he was. When she was with them she felt nothing at all. She was sure that in some way her soul and Tom’s were joined, and that was why she wanted him and nobody else.
    He had asked her to dance at Maude’s wedding reception, and when she was in his arms for the first time, unbelieving, nervous,