Lucy smothered a sharp bark of laughter. Once again her gaze leapt to the closed door. "If you have to ask, you don't remember."
Outside, footsteps sounded up the stairs. Lucy edged away from Selena. "We'll talk later. You get settled in-that first bank of drawers is yours. Get dressed for supper."
Selena felt a rush of anxiety. She couldn't do it. Not yet, she couldn't go down with those strangers and have
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supper. It would bring back too many painful memories. She needed one more night, just one, she told herself, and then she'd throw herself into this strange new world.
But not yet. Now she needed a little more time alone, to remember. To forget.
"I ... I am not hungry." At Lucy's frown, she fumbled to come up with a better excuse. "It was a long trip and I have the aching head."
"Oh, a headache." Lucy nodded. "You always get them."
Selena frowned. "I do?"
"At least, you used to."
An awkward silence drifted between them; Selena thought that Lucy wanted to say more, but the woman didn't speak, just stared at Selena through sad eyes.
"What is it, Lucy?" she whispered.
Lucy moved toward her, touched her in a quick, bird-like gesture. "I thought you got out," she said quietly. "All this time ... since you left ... I thought you were happy."
Behind them, the door opened and Eldress Beatrice appeared in the opening. "Come along, Sister Lucy. Give Sister Agnes some time to regather herself. Brother Elliot tells me she is still weak from her injury."
Selena lifted her hand to her head. "I have an aching head ... Eldress. I shall go to bed now."
"Certainly. Tomorrow morning you'll feel much better."
In an instant, the two women were gone and Selena
was alone.
She walked around the room, touching everything, letting her fingers trail over the rough linen of the hand towels, along the smooth surface of the perfectly crafted drawers, searching for something that would spark a memory, something to combat the growing sense of un-familiarity.
There was nothing, nothing at all. Nothing but a ris-
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ing, sharp-edged desperation, a sense of wrongness about this place, about everything.
She slipped her hand in her pocket, closing her fingers around the smooth-edged bit of blue glass.
Oh, Ian ...
It felt so wrong. She didn't believe she'd been here before. She wanted to tell this to someone, to run to the door and wrench it open and scream that it had all been a horrible mistake, that Elliot had retrieved the wrong woman.
But he hadn't, and she knew that, too. When she looked in Elliot's eyes, she saw a terrible sadness, and now she knew where such emotions sprang from.
Love. Only love could cause such a devastating pain. She understood finally why the poets wrote of it, why the ballads were filled with tales of love found and love lost. Because with love, there was life, and without it, there was only this terrible emptiness.
She drifted toward the window, and immediately wished she hadn't. Just being there, standing there, she couldn't think of anything except that it was the wrong window, the wrong place.
"Find something," she whispered to herself, hearing the break in her voice that matched the tear in her soul. She clutched the talisman in her pocket and gazed out.
She would find contentment here, too, somewhere, with someone. She would get past this pain. A person couldn't go on living with such a gaping emptiness inside. Sooner or later, the gnawing hurt would fade, and the people whom she'd chosen to live among-these Shakers-would slip one by one into her heart, anchoring her to this place the way she'd once been anchored to Lethe House.