Augusta was trying to clear more space on the third floor. The house was packed. They needed more room to move about. Maybe she was feeling a little overwhelmed too—everyone was back. All of them! A family and she was the head of it.

She stacked some small boxes, making towers that allowed for a little floor space. She tried to clear off some of the long table in the center of the room. It was dusty, stuffy work so she went to one of the windows to let in more air.

But once she had one hand on the sill, she stalled.

She remembered going to the library after her bout of rheumatic fever was over. She looked up the workings of the heart. She wanted to know what might have gone wrong, the total damage.

She read the books in this very room, curled near the windows, and learned that the heart operates with electrical signals that cause it to contract. She felt electrical storms were the earth’s way of getting pumped like a heart. The idea had terrified and delighted her. As a summer thunderstorm swept in, she pressed her face to the windows so she could see the ocean. She got so close she fogged the glass and had to wipe the glass clean.

And with every squall, she urged the ocean to rise up and swallow them all, whole. Love, she decided, was what weakened the heart most of all. She’d never fall for it. She stepped back from the window, let the glass clear, and decided to control the ocean. That was when she began conducting.

She looked out at the view now, the scuttle of tourists and cars, the distant dimpled glass of the Atlantic. She’d been wrong. Love was uncontrollable, but that didn’t mean it was deadly. In fact, it was the only way to truly live.

The storm had come. She and Jessamine had weathered it, but she’d known then that it would churn things up, that change was coming. She hadn’t expected to change, within herself. She hadn’t seen that coming. She was old, yes, but she was changing. She could feel it—not unlike a fever.