Chapter 11: Rielle's Photograph — The First Family Speaks

The photograph was small. Celestine had noticed it at dinner — the way the young woman's fingers returned to it between courses, not looking at it, simply touching its edge as one touches a sore tooth to confirm it still hurts. Now, in the blue-grey of early morning with the train motionless and the snow pressed white against every window, the woman sat in the dining car with the photograph face-down on the table and her hands folded over it like a tent.

Celestine had been awake since the avalanche. She had not attempted sleep. She had sat in her compartment for a time with her notebook open and the single line she'd written — Twelve wounds. Twelve hands? No. More than hands — staring back at her with the patience of something that intends to be understood eventually, and then she had felt the pull of the dining car the way she sometimes felt the pull of a room that wasn't finished with her, and she had come.

The young woman's name was Rielle. Celestine had caught it from a steward's address at dinner, held it lightly, made no use of it yet. She was perhaps twenty-four. Her hair was dark and worn back simply, and she had the quality of someone who had learned to take up very little space — not from timidity, Celestine thought, but from long practice at being in rooms where a display of need would have been inconvenient to the people around her.