chapter one
Elsa Wolcott had spent years in enforced solitude, reading fictional
adventures and imagining other lives. In her lonely bedroom, surrounded by
the novels that had become her friends, she sometimes dared to dream of an
adventure of her own, but not often. Her family repeatedly told her that it
was the illness she’d survived in childhood that had transformed her life
and left it fragile and solitary, and on good days, she believed it.
On bad days, like today, she knew that she had always been an outsider
in her own family. They had sensed the lack in her early on, seen that she
didn’t fit in.
There was a pain that came with constant disapproval; a sense of having
lost something unnamed, unknown. Elsa had survived it by being quiet, by
not demanding or seeking attention, by accepting that she was loved, but
unliked. The hurt had become so commonplace, she rarely noticed it. She
knew it had nothing to do with the illness to which her rejection was usually
ascribed.
But now, as she sat in the parlor, in her favorite chair, she closed the
book in her lap and thought about it. The Age of Innocence had awakened
something in her, reminded her keenly of the passage of time.
Tomorrow was her birthday.
Twenty-five.
Young by most accounts. An age when men drank bathtub gin and drove
recklessly and listened to ragtime music and danced with women who wore
headbands and fringed dresses.
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