As a child, she’d assumed that the rattle was predetermined—that it was just how beds were supposed to be, and there was nothing anyone could do to prevent the noise that rang out every time she turned over in her sleep or snuck in and out of her room. But she’d slept in a lot of beds in the intervening years, and she could now recognize the loose shimmy of the metal. It could easily have been silenced: a simple matter of tightening a couple of screws loose in the frame, where the headboard was joined to the platform. Why hadn’t Francis ever fixed it? She only wondered for a moment before the
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