Her father and older brother were attending the morning service near Harvard and would be gone for hours if they went to lunch after church. She finally had time to take the first steps toward her utter ruination, and she would be damned if something as ridiculous as a squeaky door would stand in her way. But all was quiet as she stepped down into the room that had once belonged to her younger sister Sarah. It still made her heart ache a bit to see the tiny bed in its place by the wall, the toys in their positions, covered in dust. Over a decade had passed since they put four-year-old Sarah and, soon after, her beloved mother in the ground during the winter of 1886, but Lillian still felt the sorrow living in the room. The emotion was not for the dead; Lillian had come to peace with their passing long ago. Her sadness was for her father, a man who had never recovered from the loss of his youngest child and the woman he loved more than anything else in the world. “And now you would wound him again, perhaps as mortally as he was wounded the first time,”
