The room was warm. The summer sun came through the east-facing windows early and turned everything amber. She had never particularly liked this room. It was beautiful in the way that rooms in houses like this were beautiful, all coordinated elegance purchased and arranged by Margaret before Evelyn arrived, and never truly felt like hers. But she had learned to move through it without complaint, the way she'd learned to move through most things here.
She went to the wardrobe. She pulled out the small traveling case she had brought with her when she first arrived at this house as a bride. She had never unpacked it entirely, had always, in some place she refused to examine, kept a few essential things inside it. She hadn't known why at the time. She knew now.
She opened the case and looked at it for a moment. Then she began to pack.
She did not take the dresses Nathaniel had bought. She did not take the jewelry Margaret had given her at Christmas—a gift intended, she understood now, less as generosity than as ornamentation, the way you put a nice frame around a painting you're obligated to display. She did not take any of it.
She took three dresses of her own: the ones she'd brought from her father's house, the worn green one she wore when she worked in the kitchen garden because no one cared if it got dirty, a shawl her mother had made, a small book of poetry her sister had pressed into her hands the morning of her wedding, crying in the way younger sisters cry—not because they understand the sadness, but because they sense it. She took her father's pocket watch, which he had given her the year before he died because he'd had no sons and he thought she should have something that told time. She took the small writing kit in the rosewood box.
She left everything else.
It took her less than twenty minutes to pack. She came back down the stairs carrying the case herself. Thomas, the young footman who had been with the household since before her arrival, was at the bottom of the stairs and moved forward automatically to take it from her.
"I've got it, Thomas," she said.
He hesitated. "Mrs. Whitmore?"
"Is there a wagon going into town this morning?"
He blinked. "Yes, ma'am. Silas is taking goods to Alderman's before noon."
"Ask him to wait for me, please."
Thomas opened his mouth, closed it, and nodded. He went.
She walked to the front hall. She set the case by the door. She straightened a painting that had been hanging slightly crooked since last Tuesday—she noticed this every time she passed it—and stood for a moment in the house that had been hers for two years and had never, not once, felt like home.
Nathaniel appeared in the hallway. He'd followed her. She hadn't expected that. He looked at the traveling case. He looked at her. Something crossed his face that might, under different circumstances, have been the beginning of something—an apology, possibly, the early, clumsy shape of one.
"Evelyn, I'm not angry."
She said it was true. That was the strange part. "I want you to know that I'm not angry, Nathaniel."
"Then—"
"I'm done," she said. "That's different."
He was quiet for a moment. "You can't simply leave."
"I'm going to."
"Where will you go?"
She picked up her case. "Somewhere I was not chosen because no one better was available."
He moved forward, not to stop her, or perhaps he intended to—she wasn't certain. But she had already opened the front door, and the summer heat and the smell of Virginia in July came in all at once: the green smell of growing things, and the distant, particular sweetness of the tobacco fields. And she walked through the door into it.
She did not look back.
The wagon was waiting at the edge of the drive. Silas, who was sixty-seven and had been driving wagons for the Whitmore household since before Nathaniel was born, did not ask any questions. This was one of the things Evelyn had always appreciated about Silas: he had a deep, fundamental understanding of which things were his business and which were not.
He took in the sight of her with her traveling case at 9:00 on a Tuesday morning, nodded once, and waited while she climbed up onto the bench beside him.
"Town," he said.
"Town," she said.
He clicked his tongue at the horses, and they moved off down the red clay drive. Evelyn watched the Whitmore estate grow smaller behind her in the summer haze, and she thought: *Two years. Two years of breakfasts and households, and apologizing with her eyes for existing in a space that had never been made for her. Two years of learning to shrink herself into shapes that fit without complaint into rooms that were not designed with her in mind.*
She did not feel sad. She felt, for the first time in two years, as though she could breathe without calculating how much air she was permitted.
In Alderman's, which was the nearest town of any consequence, Evelyn went directly to the office of Mr. Prentice, a solicitor who had handled some of her father's estate and who knew her family well enough to be trusted with directness.
She sat across from him and explained the situation in twelve minutes. Mr. Prentice, a compact, careful man of fifty with the expression of someone who has heard most things and is surprised by very little, listened without interrupting.
When she finished, he was quiet for a moment. "You understand," he said, "that the legal position is complicated."
"I understand the legal position," she said. "I'm not here for legal counsel this morning. I'm here to ask you to send word to my cousin Agnes in Harlan County. I'll need somewhere to stay while I determine what comes next."
He looked at her over his glasses. "Harlan County is nearly a hundred miles, Mrs. Whitmore. The mountains."
"Yes."
"It's rough country, particularly in summer."
"I know."