Anne:

Once I'd got everything in the oven or on the stove, I went out on the back stoop and had a sit with my workbasket. Heart-sick and bone-weary as I was over Sophie, there was still an inn full of guests and folks what had reservations for dinner, and I had to feed them. There wasn't no way around that. So it would be simpler food as was served up to them, but it would be good food and not the worst I'd ever made, even if it weren't the best.

I did no more toward putting on mourning than to put on a black shawl. I knows what's right, but I also knows that black's a tricksy color when that it comes time to wash it. I don't have no one working in my kitchen wearing clothes what can't be washed—or boiled. Not since I read about them germs what Monsieur Pasteur found as makes folks sick. I was sewing up black armbands for my son's shirts when his Da come running up, panting like Truffle on a hot day.

He saw me, and staggered over. "You all right?" I asked. "I got smelling salts here, if you're the need for them."

"What happened?" he asked. "What happened to him?"

"The lad? I gave him a bit of laudanum, just so's he'd sleep and not go crying himself sick."

"And that killed him?" he asked.

"What? He isn't dead. He's up in his bed. When his heart's broken and he starts in to cry, he'll cry till he's throwing up and fevered with it. So I gave him a drop of laudanum, that's all. He'll sleep through till morning, and when he wakes, he'll be a bit fogged. No worse nor that. He'll bear it better for the rest. Come on in, I'll show you." I stood up.

"He is not dead—and you are not—but the doctor said, when I got off the train, that he was sorry for my loss. Who have I lost, if not you or him?" he asked.

"Sophie. Come on--."

He picked up the workbasket up for me. "Thanks—I've been making him some armbands. I don't know as you needs them—you wears black all the time anyway."

I led him up the stairs to our boy's room, where young Erik was a lump under the covers. He had to check for himself that the lad was all right. "How much did you give him?"

"Four drops in a glass of water."

"He's breathing normally and his heart is beating as it should," his Da fretted. 'Yet—because I have struggled with opiate use, extra caution should be taken when giving him such drugs. You ought not to have given it to him."

"That's what you say," I said, and my voice sounded strange in my own ears. "You come home, Sophie's lying out downstairs waiting for the hearse, and you start in on telling me I shouldn't give him something what'll help him through this? You don't go asking how I am, or how nor why Sophie died, or nothing? I –I—." There I broke down in tears again.

"I'm sorry!" he cried out. "Anne—I'm sorry! I was so afraid it was going to be you, or else him, who was dead, I was sure of it." He reached out a hand to me, and I wound up flinging myself into his arms, and crying into his shoulder.

TBC….

A/N: Sorry. The muse of this fic has been sleeping. I thought you might like a short bit now, to tide you over. I think she has been shaken awake though—thanks to my friend Maria!