“So,” Alice had said, “what is it you think I really want?”

  Charlotte had picked up Marie’s hair and begun to loop it again.

  The words she’d spoken would be the last she would ever say to her daughters. By morning, she would be gone.

  “The impossible,” she said.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Marie shook her head. Her mouth felt like it was stuffed with cotton. Surely she was looking at Emma and was delusional with the painkillers she had been given.

  But Emma was on her other side, taking hold of her other hand. Emma’s eyes shone with tears, emotional in a way that Marie had never seen before. Probably in a way that Emma had never let herself be before.

  “You were right, Marie,” Emma whispered. “You were so, so right.”

  The hand from the other woman, impossibly her mother, cupped Marie’s cheek. Marie dared to let herself believe that she had done it. That she had been right. She sighed, and let herself gaze.

  Their mother somehow looked like she hadn’t aged a day from the last time they’d seen her. Had she had surgery to remove the years from her face? Or had she just looked older than her age when Marie was a child? Marie remembered the fights, the humiliations, the repeated pregnancies that had ended in one sort of failure or another. The stress of managing a large household staff, the constant pressure to look beautiful; how so many of her father’s accomplishments had been made possible only by her mother’s hard work, though she’d never taken an ounce of credit for it. Marie closed her eyes briefly, exhausted just thinking about it. She’d experienced but a fraction of the horrors her mother had, and she knew the pain they caused. Yes. That was enough to take years off anyone’s life. In “death,” her mother had regained her life.

  Marie briefly wondered how close her mother had actually come to ending her life, rather than just faking it. And what had driven her to survive.

  She opened her mouth to speak, but all she could croak out was, “How?”

  How did you find us? How did you survive? How did you convince everyone you were gone?

  A breath. And the deeper questions came.

  How could you bring yourself to walk away from us? How did you sleep at night knowing we were left behind? How long would you have waited if we had never come to find you? How could you have resisted contacting us for so many years?

  And finally, how much did any of that matter anymore? They were all here, all together, at long last. It was greater than Marie had ever dared to hope.

  Charlotte brushed her hand through Marie’s long-unwashed hair. The fingernails were no longer perfect crescent moons. The skin was no longer soft; these fingers had known daily labor for many years. They felt unfamiliar. Marie flinched, but Charlotte did not.

  “You’re fine,” Charlotte said, answering the one question Marie had not meant to ask. “And your baby’s fine.”

  Marie blew out a breath in relief.

  “And the chip is out,” Emma said.

  Charlotte smiled. “You’re free. We’re free.”

  Marie nodded. All of them. Free.

  Free.

  What a concept.

  No more men watching her from afar. No more being tracked by people who treated her as a wayward piece of property. No more being branded like a piece of livestock, no longer carrying within her what was effectively the receipt for her purchase. No longer being nothing more than the property of a man who wanted to dispose of her. She could leave if she wished, without looking over her shoulder. To be sure, she was far from safe. An unmarried woman from England was not truly free—no woman in a country governed by Church Law was. And France was quite possibly the most dangerous place they could be.

  And yet Marie felt as if a too-tight belt wrapped around her midsection had finally been loosened, and she inhaled shakily with what felt like the first deep breath of her life. Full of oxygen, she felt each cell within her perk up just a little bit more. And though she knew it was too soon, she would have sworn on anything that the baby within her did a little flip in celebration.

  She wondered if it was a son or a daughter.

  She knew which one, in her old life, would have conferred value upon her, and which one would have condemned her to ridicule. But here, in this new life, this new world, she knew which one she preferred.

  Marie looked to her mother and her sister.

  “You’re so beautiful,” Charlotte said. She brushed her hand through Marie’s hair again with her ragged fingernails and looked at Emma. “You both are.”

  Emma nodded, but looked away.

  Charlotte cleared her throat. “I owe you an explanation, and an apology. I’m not sure which one I should give you first.”

  Emma shook her head, saying what Marie wished she could. “Jane told us,” she said. “And Marie figured out the rest.”

  “Jane doesn’t know the full story,” Charlotte said. “She protected me, helped me land on my feet. She urged me to truly disappear, to go deeper into the continent, but I needed to stay as close to England as possible to be near you two, and near Alice.”

  Marie saw Emma stiffen at the sound of their eldest sister’s name. “We saw her,” Emma said.

  Charlotte nodded, her jaw tense.

  “She doesn’t believe you’re alive.”

  “Good. It’s safer if she doesn’t. Safer for all of you.” Charlotte sounded like she was trying to convince someone, and it wasn’t her other two daughters.

  “You’re the least of our worries,” Emma said. “We have more to fear. Marie’s mother-in-law. Her lackeys.”

  “They teach you to fear the men,” Charlotte said. “What they don’t warn you about is the women who do their bidding.”

  “I think he’s doing hers,” said Emma.

  “That may be true, but a woman without a man is a being without value. Her greatest power, creating life inside of her, is her greatest weakness if she has no man with her to legitimize that life. Most women internalize this. I did. I’m sure you did. I was raised not just to be a wife and a mother, but to conceive that I could only be a wife and a mother. And I raised you to believe the same.”

  “And then you walked away from it,” Emma said. “You walked away from us.”

  Charlotte nodded, obviously conceding that she could not argue the point. “I did.”

  “Do you regret it?”

  The question hung in the air, making it thick with tension. Charlotte’s silence was answer enough, but they waited for her to speak anyway.

  “I’m not sure how to answer that.”

  Emma’s response was the stab of an icicle, cold and sharp.

  “Try.”

  “I don’t think you’ll like it.”

  “I’m sure I won’t.”

  “And this is not the time or place for it.”

  “Don’t make us wait any longer than you already have.”

  “You have to understand, it wasn’t about you.”

  “Jane already told us that.”

  “And I did what I could to protect you all these years.”

  “She told us that as well.”

  “Then I don’t know what more I can say.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “No.” Charlotte’s voice was a shard of glass.

  “No, you won’t answer it?” Emma asked.

  “No is my answer.”

  Silence.

  “So,” Emma said. “You don’t regret it. You don’t regret leaving us.”

  “I don’t regret saving you.”

  “Saved us?”

  “Yes.”

  “No one saved us. No one saved me. I had to run away. Be disowned by my father. Leave behind my sisters.” Marie heard the years of fear that Emma had suppressed start to rise to the surface. Now that Marie’s immediate safety was assured, now that there was no way for anyone to continue to track them, Emma had the luxury of dealing with these fears. “To be a fallen woman on the streets of London; do you have any idea what I had to do to survive?”

  Charlotte nodded her head. “I came to you,” she whispered. “Didn’t Jane tell you? Risked it all, just to see you breathing.”

  “You didn’t wake me up,” Emma said. Marie swore she could see the light reflect off a tear in Emma’s eye that danced on the edge of her eye, peeking out to her eyelashes, but not daring to step out over the precipice.

  “I wanted nothing more than to wake you up,” Charlotte said. “To gather you into my arms and carry you out of there, carry you with me across the channel and never look back.”

  “Why? Why didn’t you? Why did you leave me?”

  The tear finally dared to spill over.

  Emma looked angry at the prospect.

  Marie felt herself shake, opened her mouth to speak, but the words choked in her still-dry throat. She lifted her hand to try to grab their attention, but she was weak, and clumsy, and Emma and Charlotte were laser-focused on each other.

  And the dam broke for their mother.

  “Because I couldn’t do anything for you.”

  “What are you talking about?” Emma whispered.

  “I truly had believed that by leaving, I was doing right by you girls. You and Alice. Oh Lord God in Heaven, Alice. She was the only daughter your father was truly happy to have—she was the first, surely a son would follow. And then when the son never came, he grew colder and colder toward her, more and more disappointed, as if blaming her for beginning a trend.

  “Without a son, there was no future for Ellthrop, not one that would have included you girls. It would have gone to your father’s younger brother, and all of you would have been thrown out on the street. Your survival depended on your having a brother. My survival depended upon it.

  “I couldn’t give him to you. The one child we all needed to secure the future evaded us over and over. Oh, but that didn’t mean that I didn’t love you. I did. I do. I loved you more and more each day. But I was also saddened for you. If your father could have an heir, and if the future of Ellthrop were secure, the pressure would be off the three of you to make up for the lack of it with loveless marriages. You would have a chance to marry the person you chose—or to not marry at all. So I made sure he, and you, could have that security, even if it meant that I could not be part of your lives any longer. I thought I was giving you that choice. But it was clear soon enough that I thought wrong.

  “I was sickened, knowing what I had failed to do. I know that science says women are not responsible for the sex of the baby, but that didn’t change what I knew in my heart: that I had failed to provide you with protection and security.

  “I’m sure Jane told you about the insecurity in which I found myself. I don’t believe your father would have actually killed me, and certainly he wouldn’t have wanted to. But I think he could have grown desperate enough to do it. Particularly when his favorite mistress became pregnant, and the scan revealed it was a son. So much was riding on that child, for your father and for you. I couldn’t deny you that future.

  “So I did what all good mothers do: I sacrificed myself for the sake of my children. A legitimate son for your father would have meant security for the three of you: good marriages, a home to stay in, and a good name.

  “Faking my death wasn’t so difficult. I knew they would not look hard for me. There was another woman waiting to become the next Lady Kenfield, and my sinful death meant there would be no Christian burial or funeral. Tidy. Everyone could move on. Even me.”

  Emma had crossed her arms and was looking away from Charlotte, processing all of this. Marie reached out her hand to her mother’s, who took it and squeezed. Marie understood what that pressure was like, how impossible it was to live under the inability to perform the one task the world demanded. How it suffocated you to live under the weight of your own useless body. How easy and hard it was to pretend to die, knowing that no one would look closely enough to unravel your death.

  Marie was happy to have had a model to follow.

  “I thought I was saving you,” her mother went on, “and even though it destroyed me to walk away, I truly believed that what I was doing was right for all three of you. It was the only world I had known, and I thought what I was doing was right.”

  She sighed. “And then I arrived in Brugge. The world opened up to me—it was like I was cracking the spine of a new book. I realized the possibilities that we had all been denied. I thought about what lives you could have if you left England. If you lived in Brugge, you could have a life even if you didn’t have a husband. I fantasized about getting all three of you out. But I knew I couldn’t actually do it; you wouldn’t be able to leave the country without your father’s permission, and he would never give it. I watched from afar as you grew up, hearing it all secondhand from Jane, and I ached inside. I thought I had protected you, but I saw that the toxic environment of our home had only metastasized from there. I learned how you suffered.”

  Charlotte reached out her other hand to Emma, who slowly uncrossed her arms and took it. Marie could feel the surge of emotion through Charlotte’s other hand as it squeezed hers even tighter.

  “And . . .” Charlotte choked back tears. “And I was powerless to help you get out. I could only hope that through the clues Jane left for you, one of you would figure it out and come find me.”

  The tears fell.

  “But I never dared to dream that two of you would do it.”

  Whatever defenses Emma had left fell as she too began to sob. She and Charlotte grasped hands over Marie, who raised hers to join as well. With strength that was returning to her, she pulled them both in close to her, and the three held each other for a long time.

  “You’re awake,” Ingrid said as she entered the room. She made no comment about the three crying women. “Give the patient some space, please, and let her move about.”

  Marie found her voice, which scraped her throat as she spoke. “Is it true, you got it?”

  Ingrid nodded. “Yes, all of it.” She held up a jar with a tiny microchip inside. “You’re free.”

  “Wonderful,” Marie said, wiping her eyes. “But why did you keep the chip?”

  Ingrid smiled. “Because some women like to finish it off themselves.” She withdrew a small hammer from the pocket of her coat. “Would you like to do the honors?”

  Marie nodded, and, with great help from her mother and sister, got out of bed. She shuffled over to a table and held out her hand. The pain from the procedure was still there; she knew she probably wasn’t actually feeling her bones, but she could swear she could feel where the chip had been dug out from her. Ingrid gave her both the jar and the hammer.

  Marie unscrewed the jar and tipped the chip onto the table. She raised the hammer. With one movement, she’d be free forever.

  Then she paused, hammer hovering in midair. Her hand trembled slightly, but she did not move.

  “If I destroy it,” she said, “they will know this was where I last was.”

  “That’s right,” Charlotte said. “They’ll never know where you went from here. You will have the same freedom I did. Chips like this didn’t exist back then.”

  “But they’ll know where to start looking,” Marie said. “Maybe they’re already here.”

  Emma put her hand over Marie’s so they held the hammer jointly. “Do you need my help?”

  Marie thought for a moment, then nodded.

  She removed Emma’s hand from the hammer. And then she set it down on the table.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  “How did you find us?” Marie asked, as Emma helped her into a new set of clothes provided by URN. The clothes were well used but of high quality. It felt both familiar and wrong to wear them. Their quality suggested that the sisters were far from the first women from their social situation who had made this journey and left their clothing behind for others who followed behind them. Slipping into them was a disguise, but also felt to Marie like she was returning to something more familiar.

  Charlotte smiled. “Jane.”

  “Jane?”

  “When her son was thrown off the train, he notified Jane, who notified me. They used their connections to get you into the right hands. Jane and Dirk have worked with URN for years. She said that Dirk even gave you a hint of where you could be safe, and Jane told me to come here, that you’d be here after you were brought across the border.”

  “You know,” Emma said, pulling a sleeve down Marie’s arm (Marie winced in pain as she did). “Remember what Dirk said when he was in the cargo compartment of the train, when they were asking for his ticket? He asked if he was on the express to Strasbourg. He was giving us a hint of where we would end up.”

  “But we couldn’t do anything with it,” Marie said. “Why would we have put any significance in that? We ran to that cathedral by random chance, with Alice pursuing us, which no one saw coming.” She stood up and shuffled around the room a bit. The pain in her hip was receding but still there, a dull ache. “He never could have foreseen that.”

  Emma gently took her elbow to offer support, but Marie waved her off. She needed to be able to stand on her own two feet now, literally and figuratively. Who knew how much more running was ahead of her? “He was thinking ahead all that time?”

  “If you hadn’t ducked into that cathedral on your own, someone else would have brought you there,” Charlotte explained. She stood up and walked along Marie’s other side. “I don’t know who, maybe someone at your lodging—you probably stayed in a convent in FFC, right?” Marie nodded. “URN has people placed in most of them, and eventually you would have been brought to the cathedral. After I fled Brugge, I was supposed to wait for you in FFC, but once John Hart began chasing you, a change of plans was necessary. We had to get out of his reach.”

  Marie nodded, with a wince of pain as she took a turn. “You know John Hart?”

  “The Dowager Duchess knew your father,” Charlotte said. “She used to come to Ellthrop with her husband, and John Hart would always be there with them, attending to her every need. He was so young, just a teenager. He went everywhere with her.”