第8章 The Match Girl's Burden

The first door was the hardest. Marta had told her this, and Elin had believed her, and believing had not prepared her for the truth of it.

The child in the fractured winter was a girl. Younger than Elin—seven, maybe eight, with hair the color of straw and eyes that had forgotten how to be surprised. She was sitting in a doorway in a city that was not Thornbridge, a city of white stone and empty streets and a sky that had not seen the sun in longer than the girl had been alive. She was holding a box of matches. Her grandmother’s matches, or her mother’s, or a stranger’s—Elin could not tell and it did not matter. What mattered was that the child had been sitting in that doorway for a very long time, striking match after match and watching kitchens bloom and fade, kitchens that belonged to dead women who had stored themselves in phosphorus and fire and were waiting for someone to show this child what the matches were really for.

The child looked up when Elin touched the surface of her