Midnight at the Electric

10 months after she was supposed to leave for the United States, Lenore writes to Beth. She writes that she is pregnant, and she apologizes for not getting on the ship. She says that she went to the ship that day, but when she tried to hand over her ticket to board, she panicked and left. She was scared.

Lenore describes how she stayed with her parents and started going to London with her mother. She went back to the house, but James clearly had not been there. Lenore fell into a routine and convinced herself she didn’t want to go to the United States and that Beth was not a good friend.

During her trips to London, Lenore would go to the British Museum, where one time she saw James, who was getting ready to depart on a five-year expedition to Indonesia with his family. She met his parents and looked at their exhibit then left to rejoin her mother.

Later that night, Lenore saw smoke coming from the cottage, and she went there to find James waiting for her with dinner. They apologized to each other, and James gave her a baby Galapágos tortoise.