The Beauregard house sat on Jackson Square like a sentence that had been running on too long, its columns and ironwork still dignified but no longer convincing, the way a woman's smile convinces nobody after the third glass of wine. Isabelle knew this the way she knew the temperature of every room in the house--not through any conscious measurement, but through the slow accretion of nineteen years spent standing in doorways and listening.

She had not left the house since she was fourteen. The official reason was pneumonia, which had been real enough in the winter of 1879 and had kept her bedridden for six months. The unofficial reason was that her mother had looked at her one spring morning, after Isabelle had asked to attend the Carnival balls that had become Celeste's right of passage, and had said, "You are still not well enough," in a voice that left no room for argument, and Isabelle had understood, with the terrible clarity of someone who has spent their entire life reading the spaces between words, that the pneumonia was cured but the confinement was not.

Celeste was twenty-three and radiant in the particular way that beauty becomes a kind of cruelty when it is distributed unequally. She practiced for her last ball every afternoon in the music room, where she danced alone to a gramophone that scratched at the high notes, and her dresses multiplied until they filled the east wing like a garden of silk and tulle and hope. The invitations arrived weekly on cream cardstock with gold lettering, each one a summons to a world Isabelle was not invited to attend even as a ghost.

She did not mind. This was what she said, and what she said was what everyone believed, including herself, most of the time.

The truth was that she minded very much. She minded the way sunlight pooled in the music room while her room, facing the back courtyard, received only a thin grey light that never quite woke up. She minded the books she was allowed to read--French grammar, botany, the occasional hymn--and the books she wasn't allowed to read: anything written by a woman who had left home, anything that suggested a world existed outside these walls. She minded the way her mother, Genevieve, moved through the house like a queen whose kingdom had shrunk to four walls but who would rather die than admit it.

Henry Crawford arrived on a Wednesday in March. He came from New York with a leather portfolio and a reputation that preceded him the way a shadow precedes a person who has spent too much time in direct sunlight. Dr. Crawford was thirty-four, divorced (amicably, he said, though the word amicable had never appeared in any sentence his wife had spoken to him), and had built a practice in New York specialising in what he called "the neuroses of high society." He wrote papers. He gave lectures. He was, by all accounts, very good at his job and very bad at his own.

Madame Genevieve hired him on the spot. "My eldest daughter," she said, leading Henry through the foyer with the proud stride of a woman showing off a painting, "is exhibiting signs of mild melancholy. She has been working too hard preparing for the ball. A few sessions with a competent physician, and she will be restored."

Henry looked past Genevieve's shoulder and saw Celeste standing at the top of the staircase in a dress the colour of champagne, and he felt something he had not felt in years: curiosity, sharp and dangerous and entirely unprofessional.

"Of course," he said. "I would be honoured."

He did not examine Celeste that first afternoon. He sat with her in the music room for an hour and asked her questions about her dreams, her sleep, her appetite, and she answered them all with the practiced ease of someone who had been rehearsing for this moment since she was twelve. Then he asked her, casually, almost accidentally, if she had a sister, and something flickered across her face--not pain, not guilt, but a recognition so quick it might have been a trick of the light.

"Isabelle," Celeste said. "Yes. She is not well. She stays in her room."

"Would she like to meet me?"

"No." The word came too fast. "No, that would not be helpful. She is not--she cannot--Mother would not approve."

Henry left without examining Celeste, and he came back the next day without an appointment, and he found Isabelle in the courtyard, sitting beneath a pomegranate tree with a book she had no business having: a copy of Wuthering Heights in English, which Madame Genevieve would have burned if she had known it was there.

Isabelle looked up when he approached, and he saw her eyes for the first time--dark, intelligent, and tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep and everything to do with the particular exhaustion of a person who has spent years pretending to be smaller than she is.

"Are you the doctor?" she asked.

"I am," Henry said. "And you are?"

"Isabelle." She closed the book and held it against her chest like a shield. "Are you here to tell me my sister is crazy?"

"I am here to ask if she is."

Isabelle considered this. "She is afraid," she said. "Not crazy. Afraid. There is a difference."

"What is she afraid of?"

Isabelle looked at the pomegranate tree, at its gnarled branches and its fruit that had burst open in the rain and split into perfect segments, like something that had been so full it could no longer contain itself. "Everything," she said. "Everything is too much, and she knows it, and she doesn't know how to be anything else."

Henry sat down beside her on the stone bench. He did not ask permission. He did not offer advice. He simply sat, and in the silence that followed, Isabelle opened her book and began to read aloud.

Over the next two weeks, Henry came every afternoon. He told Madame Genevieve he was treating Celeste. He spent his mornings with Celeste, asking her questions she had prepared answers for, and his afternoons with Isabelle in the courtyard, where she showed him things: the garden that her grandmother had planted fifty years ago and that her mother had let go to ruin, the library that contained three thousand books that Isabelle had read through a keyhole, the attic room above the garage where she kept every letter her father had ever written, every photograph, every scrap of paper that proved he had existed and had loved both his daughters in different ways and ruined them both in the same.

"You are not what she tells people you are," Henry said one afternoon, watching Isabelle explain the botanical Latin names of the pomegranate leaves with a fluency that made him realize she was every bit the person he had met in New York's best drawing rooms, just in a different context.

"No," Isabelle said. "She is not what she tells people she is either. The difference is that everyone wants her to be what she tells them she is. Nobody wants me to be anything at all."

The ball was on Easter Saturday. The invitations had gone out. The band had been hired. The dresses had been pressed. The house smelled of orange blossom water and anxiety. Isabelle felt it the way you feel the pressure change before a storm--not as emotion, exactly, but as atmosphere, as something you breathe without choosing.

Henry found her in the courtyard the night before the ball. She was sitting beneath the pomegranate tree, the copy of Wuthering Heights open on her lap, reading not for pleasure but for comfort, the way some people pray.

"I have to tell you something," he said.

She looked up. "I know," she said. And he realized, with a shock that was entirely professional and entirely personal, that she knew everything.

"It is not your place," Isabelle said. "You are not responsible for this house. Your job is to treat my sister, and you have been very kind to her, and she is not crazy, she is just a young woman who has been given too much weight to carry, and you should go back to New York and write your papers and live your life and not let us become another case study."

"Isabelle--"

"It is all right," she said. "I have been invisible for five years. I have learned to be comfortable with it. Go do your job. Treat my sister. Help her be what she needs to be. I will be here when you are done, sitting under this tree, reading this book, exactly where I have always been."

The ball was everything Isabelle expected and nothing she saw. Celeste danced until her feet bled. She smiled until her face hurt. She accepted compliments with the practiced grace of someone who had been rehearsing her smile since birth. And when the midnight hour arrived and the band struck up the final waltz and Celeste stood in the centre of the ballroom with champagne in her hand and the entire social world of New Orleans watching her, she dropped the glass and it shattered on the floor and she made a sound that was not a scream and not a cry but something between them, the sound a person makes when the performance ends and there is nobody left to perform for.

Madame Genevieve dragged her home. The house was quiet for the first time in weeks. Isabelle sat in the courtyard and waited, and at three in the morning, Celeste appeared in the doorway, barefoot and in her underdress, her hair undone, her face scrubbed of every trace of paint.

"I saw you," Celeste said. "At the tree. Every night. I saw you."

"I know," Isabelle said.

"I hate you," Celeste said. And then, after a long pause: "I hate what she has made of us. I hate that you are the only person in this house who is real, and I hate that I have spent my entire life trying to be a reflection of something that was never real to begin with."

Isabelle reached out and took her sister's hand. It was the first time they had touched without an audience in twenty-three years.

"I am real," she said. "I have always been real. Even when you couldn't see me."

Henry was gone by morning. He had left a note on the kitchen table that said only, "I cannot help you here, and you do not need me to," which was, Isabelle thought, the most honest thing any stranger had ever said to her family.

She went back to the courtyard. The pomegranate was still splitting open in the rain. She opened Wuthering Heights to the page she had been reading and began again, not for comfort this time, but because the words were hers, and for the first time in her life, she understood that being seen by nobody was not the same as not existing.

She existed. She had always existed. And the house, for all its columns and ironwork and history, had never been big enough to contain what she was.