Now Jacob’s pathetic cries were a mockery, and I trembled, my knees pulled tight up to my chin. I could not, would not hold him in my arms and watch him slip away. Not again

It was 1692 when I lost Isla to the water.

We were drowning. The water was warm as blood and thin as paper. Maybe if I hadn’t let go, Isla would’ve lived, but when my lungs filled with air after they pulled me from the river’s choking claws, hers filled with water, and she was lost even before I had realized what I stood to lose. They tried to take me away before I could see, but I saw. Her face was blue as ice, and yet she looked calm, peaceful. Like she was sleeping.

No one spoke of what happened for months after, but Father was distant, and Levi treated me like a fragile doll. Mother, as she would be, was a quiet pillar of kindness and strength, trying as best she could to uphold our daily lives. I could not sleep — for fear that I would not wake. A sleeping victim. Like Isla. I spoke quietly, afraid to reveal how my heart still felt the icy fingers of death enclosing it.

For hours each night, I sat, unmoving, listening. Listening to the breaths, those small whispers of life from behind each curtain, and I would count every one.

Isla had made the winter months warm for us with her easy laughter and pleasant songs, and no amount of tea could do it in her stead.

“You cannot be blamed,” Levi would tell me when I finally rested from the chores, and my fingers would find a needle and thread weaving the image of a girl with caramel hair and warm eyes.

“G-d chose you to live, Ruth, so live.”

He was wrong. I was three years her elder at 17, her protector, and I had failed.

I knew he missed me almost as much as Isla, because I let the silence sit between us where I had never let it before. But Levi was nothing if not patient and kind, so he sat next to me for hours studying the books that have been in our family for generations, his sweet lilting voice carrying their tunes into the night.

He would reach his 23rd year with the new moon, but the broken part of my heart was filled with the dread that perhaps he would not. Life can be snuffed out in an instant. When I’d dwell on the thought, my fingers would become stiff and shaky, my heart fluttering urgently, and my needle would be forced to rest.

The thoughts were a storm, unrelenting, and although my body craved sleep, my mind would not allow it. I was afraid I would go mad from sheer exhaustion.

Madness was something we all feared. All around us, our town was falling to it. We heard the awful news, and it brought terror to us in Ryal Side. I had been to Salem only once with Father to trade the white linen aprons Mother sewed, and the entire ordeal had taken us a quarter of our short afternoon. Now, in Salem, the girls who were shuddering in violent fits have accused Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborne of living for evil. Fear was rampant, and yet, what could one do but continue to live?