The footsteps came first, dragging along the stair, deliberate and unhurried. Whoever climbed was not rushing to help, but pausing on each board to let the sound announce them. Amelia sat rigid on the stool by the bed, the ribbon pressed into her palm, and waited for the shadow to arrive.
The door creaked, pushed open just far enough to let a figure through. Mrs. Keene — the neighbor who lived two doors down — stepped inside. Her shawl was drawn tight around her shoulders, though the room was already warm with fever air. Her eyes swept the bed and then fixed on Amelia with a look that was half-pity, half-suspicion.
"Lord preserve us," she whispered, though her tone carried no reverence. "It's quiet at last."
She stood in the doorway a moment longer, letting her words fill the silence as if she owned it. Then she crossed herself with a small, hurried gesture and approached the bed. "Poor lamb," she said, glancing at Sarah's still face. "A mercy, surely. All that shrieking was no use to anyone. The whole street's been plagued by it."
Her gaze flicked back to Amelia. "You'll sleep easier now."
Amelia said nothing. She sat perfectly still, her fingers tight around the ribbon in her lap.
Mrs. Keene mistook her silence for shock, and her voice softened with the false sweetness she used in the market when bartering fish for half its price. "Your father'll need telling, though I doubt he'll care for the body. Men don't. Best you learn that early. Grief isn't in their hands the way it is in ours."
She placed a hand on Amelia's shoulder, but it was brief, perfunctory, as though she touched something unclean. The pressure of her cold fingers lingered long after she withdrew.
"I'll fetch the women who do the laying out," she went on, already rehearsing the tale she would carry back to her friends. "We'll see her washed and proper. We can't have folks saying Sarah Hobley left this world untidy. Even the mad deserve a decent send-off."
The words slid into Amelia like knives wrapped in velvet. She felt her jaw clench. Even now — now, with her mother's lips still cooling — they called her mad. Even now they reduced her to a story for other mouths.
Mrs. Keene leaned closer, her breath sharp with onions. "And you, child… you're a queer little thing. Never one to cry or fuss. Always staring. Folk notice these things, you know. Don't grow into your mother's ways."
The neighbor's eyes narrowed slightly, as if searching for madness already brewing behind Amelia's stillness. Then she straightened, smoothed her shawl, and stepped back toward the door. "I'll spread word. Poor child. Poor, odd child."
The door closed, and her footsteps retreated down the stair. The house was silent again, but not the silence Amelia had claimed with her ribbon. This was a different silence — heavy, soiled, full of other people's words.
She pressed the ribbon tighter into her hand until her nails marked her skin. They wanted the quiet, she thought, her pulse steady as stone. But they never wanted me.