And in that terrified, searching gaze, Eleanor saw Millie.
Not Millie as she’d been in the coffin, waxy and still. Millie as she’d been alive, breathless with laughter, running toward Eleanor with a scraped knee and a complaint that required a mother’s arms.
It hit Eleanor like a fist to the chest: the knowledge that she still had something inside her that could not watch a child be torn apart and remain quiet.
Before she understood she was moving, her boots were stepping through the crowd. People parted, surprised. The widow never spoke. The widow never stepped into town matters. The widow belonged to her grief like furniture belonged to a room.
Eleanor stopped in front of Arthur Vance.
“Mr. Vance,” she said.
Her voice came out rough, as if it had rusted from disuse. Still, it carried.
Vance turned slowly, eyes narrowing. “Mrs. Hart,” he said, thick with contempt disguised as politeness. “This doesn’t concern you.”
“It concerns me,” Eleanor replied, surprised to hear certainty in her own mouth. She looked past him at the girl. “She’s just a child.”
A man behind Vance muttered, “A savage child.”
