But it isn’t the season, Mother.

Something is wrong in this house.” Inmaculada felt the skin on her arms tighten.

The convent was cloistered — the main door barred at eight each night, the windows grated, no man permitted to sleep within the walls.

And yet three of her sisters were losing their nights, and the young woman in front of her was the worst afflicted of them all.

Inmaculada had run Santa Clara for eleven years, and she prided herself on knowing her house the way a good captain knows a ship — every draft, every creak, every small habit of the women in her care.

That knowledge was exactly what disturbed her now.

Amparo was not a hysteric or a dreamer; she was one of the steadiest young sisters Inmaculada had, practical and clear-eyed, not given to seeing signs and portents in an ordinary bad night’s sleep.

When a woman like that came to you three times in three weeks, pale and frightened, describing not bad dreams but their absence — nights that simply vanished, leaving nothing behind but a drugged heaviness in the morning — you did not comfort her with talk of the season and send her back to bed.

You listened, and you felt the cold that Inmaculada was feeling now, the cold of a sensible woman confronting something that her good sense could not yet explain but would not let her dismiss.

Three sisters.

Three weeks.

And all of them along the same side of the convent, she realized — the older wing, the remodeled cells.

She did not yet know what that meant.

But she had begun, without quite deciding to, to investigate.