Her interior, however, was a creek swollen with spring melt and each time Ida quit the apartment to instruct him in yet more English, or to host him for another meal at the Widow Allen’s table, it was all Lucy could do to keep herself from expelling a brief cry. Ida had spent over three years tending to her in large and small ways, and didn’t that imply something about what Lucy could expect from her best friend? Although she had in many respects overcome the horrors of the attack, and had been for some time making her own modest living in the world by sewing ladies’ underclothes of the type sold in the best shops of New York and Boston, she felt most of the time, and knew that Ida understood this, that her life was a waiting life, lived in the antechamber to life’s vast central hall. Her assailant was, the sheriff had assured her with impatience, likely to be long gone and never to return. The sheriff wasn’t an unkind man. He had done his best, but his best had proved to be not good enough, and his impatience was born of shame at his failure.
