She went upstairs and into her parents’ bedroom. The bed, on this ghastly morning, had never been made. The sheets were still awry, the pillow dented from her father’s sleepless head. He had known. They both had. Hoping, keeping up their courage, but filled with deadly certainty. They both had known. Nothing left. On the table at Sophie’s side of the bed lay the book that she had been reading the night before she went to London. Penelope went and sat there and picked up the book. It fell open in her hands at that well-worn page. “What a happy woman I am, living in a garden, with books, babies,
...more

