That night Hattie did what she’d always done, which was be invisible in a lit hallway, and she listened.

Odette had Rosalind in the small sitting room, the two of them close together over tea, and Odette’s voice had gone back to its gentle register, warm and worried and endlessly reasonable.

She was talking about the future.

She was always talking about the future — it was the country she’d colonized in that old woman’s mind.

“You shouldn’t wait,” Odette was saying.

“Estates get contested, Rosalind.