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Her mouth moves quickly, too fast for me to read her words. I catch her frown and the shape of one word.

“I can’t hear you,” she says. “You’ll have to speak up.”

So, I’ve gone too far the other way. I try for something between too low and too loud, with my hand pressed to my chest so I can feel the vibration of my voice. I repeat myself – the sewing, the cleaning, the carrying, and staying out of the way.

She watches me while I talk, and I see the moment she looks under my hood and sees the right side of my face. I turn slightly from her.

“You’re her,” she says, and that much I get whole. Then her mouth goes fast again, and I hold onto what I can. “I remember you. I remember your voice. Half a year ago, you lifted the whole of Rosemere with it. I was in the wings, I heard all your performances.”

She turns her head toward the street, and I lose the rest of what she’s saying. I smile so she’ll think I’ve followed. When she looks back, she’s slowed down a little, the way people do when they remember that I’m deaf.

“I’m terribly sorry about your family. What happened to you was deeply unfair.”

“Thank you,” I say.

“There’s no job for you here.”

She doesn’t say why, and she doesn’t have to. I don’t ask for an explanation, because I already know the reasons better than she does. I don’t ask her to think again. I’ve said everything I came to say and she’s answered it.

“Thank you for telling me,” I say as I step away.

People come along the pavement, half a dozen of them. I know their walks before I can make out their faces. I’ve stood in the wings with these people. I press myself against the brick to give them space. Not one of them turns their head. They go past me and in, one after the other. I think they must pity me and not know what to say. That’s fair, because I don’t know what I’d say to me either. The stage manager goes in last, and the door swings shut.

I walk as far as the corner before I turn around and look at the Lyric House the way I told myself I wouldn’t.

The façade is lit, the posters are taller than I am, and Callia’s face is on every one of them, her dark hair worn loose, her green eyes painted a shade brighter than they are. She’s a little older than me, and we used to be friends. She hasn’t spoken to me since the fire.

I remember standing at the center of the stage with the house lights down and the applause coming from every part of the building, from the stalls, the boxes, and the gallery. I remember the faces in the front rows with their mouths open. People looked at me while I sang with love in their eyes and their whole attention, hundreds of them at a time, and I never got used to it. After, I went home up the stairs, past the warmth of the ovens, I lay down in my bed and slept without any trouble at all, because my mother and father were proud of me and I knew exactly where I belonged.

I cry there on the corner. I can’t hear myself doing it, and nobody stops to ask if I’m all right. When I’m done, I wipe my face with the good side of my sleeve and turn my back on the Lyric House. I go to the bridge.

The city of Rosemere looks best in the evening. The carriages are out, the restaurants have their lamps lit, the flower sellers are packing up what’s left of their stock, and the marquees along the avenue are glowing. It’s a prosperous city, a crowded one, a beautiful one, and none of that is for me anymore. I keep to the edge of the pavement, keep my hood down, and no one looks twice at me.

The covered bridge is close to the Lyric House. I’ve slept under it since I left the hospital. I have a nest there of blankets I’ve collected, three of them, one good and two thin, wedged into the angle where the stone of the bridge meets the bank. I climb down, get into it, and pull the good blanket up to my chin.

Then I do what I do every evening, which is to take stock.

I don’t blame the neighbors, and I don’t blame the Lyric House, or the stage manager, or the people who walked past me tonight without turning their heads. I understand all of them, because I’m a scarred, deaf former singer with no family and no money, and there isn’t a use for me anywhere in this city. I’ve looked.

I’m alone, and winter is coming. Three blankets under a bridge won’t keep me alive through the cold. No one in Rosemere has told me to leave, not in so many words, but everyone who’s opened a door to me has said the same thing without saying it, and I’m not too slow to understand it.

I need a roof over my head. I have no family to give me one, no savings to buy one, no home to go back to, and no work that would earn me one.

I turn the coins over in my pocket, six copper and one silver, and I think about the bride market.

It’s held outside the city in a field, in a few days, because the people who run Rosemere don’t want it inside the walls and act as if it isn’t there. Monsters come to buy wives, and women who’ve run out of other choices stand on a stage and wait to see if anyone bids.

I’m not fool enough to think any monster will want me for a bride, but I’m going to go. I’ll tell them the truth, which is that I can sew, clean, cook, carry heavy things, and keep a house. That I’ll work harder than anyone they’ve ever bought, and that they can have me for whatever they think a pair of hands is worth. I expect that to be very little, and I don’t mind. A small price still means a household, and a household means walls, a fire, a corner to sleep in, and that’s more than I’ll have under this bridge when the snow comes.

I let myself hope, a little, that a monster might look at my face and not turn away. They’re monsters, and they know what it is to be judged by human eyes and found wanting. Maybe one of them won’t care about the burns, as long as I can scrub a floor.

I don’t let myself hope for more than that. I don’t imagine one of them wanting me the way a man wants a woman, because that girl on the posters is gone, and I’m what’s left of her. And what’s left of her is ugly but useful, and that will have to be enough. I only hope that someone out there needs a pair of hardworking hands badly enough to pay for them, and that they’ll let me keep them busy until spring.

Chapter Two

Aveline

I leave everything under the bridge, but there isn’t much to leave. The three blankets stay wedged where the stone meets the bank, and if this works, I’ll never need them again.