Already on the morning of her departure, Marta’s absence was palpable—perhaps more so than her presence had ever been. Even the house seemed to acknowledge it. At the breakfast table, only phrases necessary to passing, handing and pouring were exchanged, and even those parsimonious articulations were made in hushed tones. No one said it, but they all knew. Marta had left.

After breakfast, without a word as to her intentions, Aunt Cornelia marched purposefully up the stairs, followed by Pearl, Livia and Danae. Danae’s normally olive-skinned face was a tenuous, uncertain yellow; Livia was afraid she might throw up. Cornelia opened Marta’s bedroom door with more decision and authority than anyone recalled ever having seen her display, to reveal the sheets rumpled in exactly the same patterns they had manifested the morning before. (Cornelia had surreptitiously visited her niece’s bedroom each morning for the duration of her stay, and had observed, morning after morning, that Marta almost never made her bed.) Cornelia then turned and informed Livia, Danae and Pearl, in the flat whispers people use to speak of death, that it looked like Marta was gone. Cornelia confirmed her deduction based on the empty drawers of the chest beneath the window. Marta had not even bothered to close them, and Cornelia felt, although she was unable to articulate it, a sense of outrage at the sight of the bare, vulnerable wood at the bottom of those drawers, almost as though Marta had marched out the front door stark naked before her very eyes.

Livia took the news in silence. She excused herself politely from her aunts’ presence as though she were leaving the table, and went up to her room, stopping for a few seconds on the third floor landing and holding her breath, wavering in indecision. She could hear Cornelia’s decisive steps descending the stairs to the parlor, followed by Pearl’s lighter, more irregular footfalls. They only went into the parlor together when a very serious, lengthy conference was in order, and Livia knew that she would not be observed if she returned to Marta’s room. But she continued toward her own room instead. Once inside, she closed the door carefully behind her and approached the mirror above her dressing table. The face that stared back was definitely her own, but the features were somehow sharper and more severe; something had happened to the eyes.