In the third month of the fourth year of the Yong’an era, Zhou Jizong returned to Quanhou Street carrying the bones of his elder brother Zhou Jiye. Within a single month, the Old Tao family, who lived on Quanhou Street, hastily held two joyful occasions followed by two funerals.

Ever since Zuoliang Pass had fallen, Old Madam Tao had been beside herself, dragging the women of her household to pay respects at every temple in the vicinity. At first she had held herself together — no matter how worried she was, she never let the slightest crack show on the outside. But in early March, when word came from somewhere that not a single soldier had survived the defense of Zuoliang Pass, she collapsed.

Meng Wanquan went to see her once, then came back and had Madam Lu send over fifty strings of cash, saying Old Madam Tao was pitiable — the medicine keeping her alive now cost four or five strings a day, and that was already a bargain since Master Cheng, who managed the medicine stores, had arranged it cheaply for her.

The next day, Madam Lu came to sit with Qiqian’er and said that Old Madam Tao’s heart had been knotted with grief for so long it had become an illness beyond easing. With the recent raids by the Tan people on the border, and news every day of how many had died in this place or that, thinking her son would never come home had finally broken what will she had left.

Qiqian’er had once hated Old Madam Tao — the old woman had schemed endlessly for her family’s sake, and later had conspired with Madam Qiao, using money Madam Qiao had extorted from the Chen family to smooth the way for that grandson of the Tao family. But now — now she couldn’t bring herself to hold it against her anymore. Nothing at all. For the sake of the merit it might earn her unborn child, she even sent thirty strings of cash, if only so as not to be outdone by the Old Madam.

The Old Madam and Old Madam Tao had fled the war together once, propping each other up through hard years. However much she looked down on the woman in speech, the moment Old Madam Tao fell ill, she rarely hesitated to send over two fine ginseng roots from her own private stores, along with fifty strings of cash. When Chen Dasheng and the others weren’t at the Old Madam’s side, Old Madam Tao had been.

Madam Yang, Madam Wan, and the others who had once been close with her also gave what they could according to their means — five strings here, ten there, even twenty from some — all given freely, without a trace of self-interest.

Old Madam Tao had always been skilled at making friends. Aside from Qiqian’er, who alone knew her true nature, several old women from Six Ministries Lane, upon hearing she was sick and her family in hardship, also sent people over with money or medicine.

But right at this moment, Old Madam Tao’s two unmarried daughters — one named Tao Liu, the other Tao Xu — were both hastily married off by their mother. Tao Liu was married as a second wife to Earl Xin’an, the hardest-luck man in all of Yandu, who was nearly fifty years old. Tao Xu was married to Cao De, younger brother of Consort Jing. This was no advantageous match — everyone among the old officials of the Shao Shang court knew Cao De had no interest in women at all, and he had fully intended to enjoy that arrangement for the rest of his life, but the head of the lesser Cao family wouldn’t allow it, and so he had reluctantly agreed to take on a wife as mere ornament.

To make sure her daughters would look presentable, Old Madam Tao took the several hundred strings of cash that various households had sent as support and turned it all into dowry goods for them — even the two old ginseng roots were split, one for each daughter. And so Tao Liu and Tao Xu, each carried out with twenty-six chests of dowry and a proper send-off of music and drums, left Quanhou Street with dignity.

Five days after the Tao daughters married out, Zhou Jizong returned to his mother’s side, weary and hollow, carrying the urn holding his elder brother’s bones on his back.

He had survived only because his brother had shielded him with his own body. Driven by grief and a fierce desire for vengeance, he had secretly trailed the Tan army and brought back a great deal of enemy intelligence. Even so, there had been no time to speak more than a few words to his gravely ill mother — Zhou Jizong went straight to the Ministry of War to plead for reinforcements. By the time Sun Shouyi had brought him into the palace and he returned home again at dawn, Old Madam Tao had already died with her third son’s bones clutched in her arms.

She had died as though released — smiling as she went.

From that day, Zhou Jizong formally changed his name to Tao Jizong, and the intelligence he had brought back regarding the Tan forces earned him a rank of sixth-grade battalion commander. From here his prospects were bright.

“Ah, this is what comes of being too proud for your own good,” the Old Madam sighed, taking several sets of burial garments she had prepared for herself out of a chest, laying them out one by one, and beginning to alter them with needle and thread for Old Madam Tao.

Old Madam Tao had been thinner than the Old Madam, and in the terrible mental anguish before her death, she had — as Madam Wan and the others put it — wasted down to no more than fifty or sixty jin.

Qiqian’er, being pregnant, could not attend a funeral in person, so she sat at the old house eating and drinking, watching the Old Madam alter the burial clothes.

Burial garments were also called “aging clothes.” Traditionally, a daughter would prepare several sets, and a daughter-in-law several more — the more layers worn, the finer the quality, the more it reflected filial devotion on the part of the children.

That Old Madam Tao would die had long been foreseeable, yet she had no daughter-in-law, no granddaughter to warm her final days, and her daughters had only just married out. Whatever spare coin she’d had, she had tucked into her daughters’ dowry chests as they left. This only made her daughters-in-law resent her all the more — she had died wearing her old clothes.

The Old Madam had been frugal her whole life, yet giving away her own burial clothes to someone else was, on one hand, an act with its own quiet benefit to her, and on the other, something she understood in a way few could. Though she and Old Madam Tao had quarreled, tangled with each other, and schemed against one another in years past, they were, in the end, two women cast adrift on the same tide, and that understanding ran deeper than any grudge.

Could anything in this world ever be perfectly resolved both ways? Impossible.

Even the Old Madam knew full well that Old Madam Tao would have no burial clothes of her own, no coffin, and might even end up laid to rest at a temporary charitable mortuary with no burial plot at all — yet the woman had no regrets.

It could be said that every woman of Quanhou Village who had lived through the war accepted her bitter fate, accepted that her own stars were ill-favored, accepted that some lack of merit in a past life had earned her this suffering in the present one — but not one of them knew the meaning of the word regret.

Having taken a few more stitches, the Old Madam looked up and laughed. “You know, she was proud her whole life — she’d never have guessed she’d go out wearing my clothes. And look, aren’t they fine? All satin. Look at that color, so bright — every stitch of it sewn by my own hand…”

The Old Madam had no daughter left, no filial daughter-in-law either. Qiqian’er said she’d take care of everything, but the old woman had her own ideas, and in her spare time she liked to sew burial clothes for herself.

These clothes really were satin, though Qiqian’er knew the truth — the Old Madam had pulled old garments and scraps of ruined satin out of the Huo family ancestral hall, patching together good pieces from one place, cutting a whole section from another, even gathering bits collected along the road during their days as refugees, never wasting a single scrap, until she had pieced together six full sets for herself, purely through her own resourcefulness.

If she hadn’t brought them out today, Qiqian’er wouldn’t even have known they existed. The Old Madam clearly wanted to be praised, so Qiqian’er obliged sincerely: “A’Nai, this style is exactly what was fashionable in our Qingfeng days! Oh, and your stitches are so much finer than mine — I didn’t even know you could cut a round collar jacket. You really are something.”

The Old Madam’s heart swelled with pride, though her mouth said otherwise. “Hah, what’s there to be proud of! There are plenty of skilled people in this world — what am I compared to them? The one who died had ten times my cleverness in just one corner of her mind! It’s just that the fabric was too fragmented to make a proper crossed collar, so I made do with what I had. Doesn’t matter now — she won’t hold it against me anymore, since she’s gone.”

She held up the innermost set, made of fine cloth, for Qiqian’er to see, folding it carefully as she spoke. “My hands aren’t as deft as hers were. She was the clever one. Ah, if she’d schemed a little less, who knows, she might have lived a good long life. But what was the point of it all, in the end? Nothing left to show for it…”

Qiqian’er smiled and nodded. “That’s true. Scheme less, live longer.”

“Tomorrow I’ll go find your Grandmother Jiang, have her chant a few scriptures to help her pass on peacefully… Truth be told, your Grandmother Jiang never much liked how calculating she was either.”

“…All right.”

And who was it that kept feeding her all those little stories about the woman, I wonder!

The old woman was in an unusually reflective mood today, and without waiting for Qiqian’er to respond, she drifted off into her own memories, all from the years they’d fled with the army.

The woman who had pinched every copper coin for most of her life was now, today, truly generous — and it wasn’t just the matter of the burial clothes. When a person died, something had to be placed on the body, so the Old Madam threaded copper coins onto a red cord to make a sash for Old Madam Tao.

“These will sit under her clothes, where the underworld officers won’t see — this’ll be her secret stash… She used to say I was too proud, too hard to get along with, and spread no end of nonsense about me behind my back. Hmph! And she was thick as thieves with that woman next door.”

The Old Madam pointed toward the direction where Madam Qiao used to live. “Oh, they were so close you’d think they shared one cooking pot between two households. But yesterday, the moment Old Madam Tao breathed her last, the door panel was already taken down, her body laid out proper and straight, and did that woman come by to so much as burn a scrap of paper for her? People show their true colors when trouble comes, wouldn’t you say, Qian’er?”

Qiqian’er nodded, a little dazed. “Mm, that’s true. Before, Aunt Gao and Aunt Wan quarreled with Old Madam Tao plenty of times — Old Madam Tao even called Aunt Wan petty-minded, and Aunt Wan couldn’t stand how she curried favor with people from the Ministry of Personnel’s lane. But yesterday she was the first at the door helping manage things.”

The Old Madam raised a finger. “Exactly right. Your Aunt Wan gave at least ten strings of cash, and what kind of life does she live? Every coin scraped together penny by penny, a widow raising a family alone, no man to rely on — renting out rooms, selling water, can’t even afford meat most days. Nothing like our family, is it?”

Qiqian’er nodded, wanting to smile but unable to manage it.

The Old Madam always talked this way, fond of holding up their own family’s comfortable wealth against others’, though never in front of outsiders — only muttering it once back home.

In the past, hearing this, Qiqian’er would surely have made some sharp remark. But now, with Zhou Jiye dead at Zuoliang Pass, and Chen Dasheng and the men of Quanhou Street unable to escape their own fate either, could it be that the men of Quanhou Street owed some debt to Zuoliang Pass?

Qiqian’er didn’t want to dwell on it, so she changed the subject. “Grandmother?”

“Hm?”

She asked, feigning innocence: “Why is it the custom to lay the body out for three days, or seven, and why does a family take down half a door panel to place the corpse on when someone dies?”

The Old Madam, in the middle of taking in the waist of the fourth set of clothes, paused at the question. Remembering that Qiqian’er had grown up without a mother of her own to teach her these things, she explained patiently: “You don’t know this? Well, when a person dies, you see, the soul has to go report to King Yama. But if the person was good in life, sometimes King Yama shows mercy and lets them come back…”

Qiqian’er feigned astonishment. “Come back? A dead person can come back?”

The Old Madam held up the red cord she was winding.

“Of course they can! We even had someone like that near us! Remember, back in our home village, the neighboring village — oh, you know, the aunt on your Uncle Jiang Zhushan’s side, the one whose in-law’s family had that aunt on the mother’s side…”

Qiqian’er, being pregnant, found herself muddled and unable to keep track of the tangled relations, but to the Old Madam, every one of these ancestral connections was crystal clear in her mind, not a single thread out of place.

She kept working as she spoke, head bent low. “By the proper order of generations, you’d call her Old Great-Aunt. That Old Great-Aunt was terribly mischievous as a girl — the apricots had just started turning yellow when she climbed too high a branch, lost her grip, fell, and stopped breathing. Well! Her father gritted his teeth and sold two sheep to buy her a thin, cheap coffin. But before they even put her in it, they laid her out on a door panel for one night — and the next morning, when the sun came up, hah! She was alive!”

Qiqian’er, truly astonished this time, said, “Really came back to life?”

The Old Madam nodded. “Ah, alive! That sort of thing happened more than you’d think. In the old days people used to bury someone as soon as they died. But when they’d move the grave later and open the coffin, well — you’d see the claw marks where the coffin lid had been scratched. Tsk, tsk… That’s why the old rule says never put the dead straight into the coffin — lay them on the door panel first and wait for King Yama to make his judgment.

“If you were a truly good person, you might come back to life. If you’re truly dead, then on the seventh day your spirit comes back to see the descendants — that’s why, when someone outside sees a house missing half a door panel, they know someone’s died there. Some of these old customs really do make sense…”

Before the Old Madam could finish, an old servant woman called through the window to Qiqian’er: “Fourth Madam, someone from the Tao family’s Second Young Madam has come to borrow cooking pots from our house…”

Cooking equipment, in the countryside, was something a village of five hundred households would need at least three sets of — each with two large woks, three medium pots, five hundred coarse porcelain bowls and plates, chopsticks, and so on — in short, the tools for cooking a communal feast for weddings, funerals, and other large gatherings. In a place like Quanhou Street, any family with means would keep at least one such set, sometimes two.

Curious, Qiqian’er called through the window: “They’re setting up the stoves?”

She had assumed, given how thoroughly Old Madam Tao had offended her whole family, that no one would even help with the funeral.

The old woman answered: “Reporting to Madam, their Fourth Young Master has come home.”

Ah, that explained it — with the son back, the funeral would have to be properly arranged now.

If you asked Qiqian’er, everyone had a reason to resent Old Madam Tao — but there was one person who was simply shameless about it: Zhang Shi, mother of the top examination graduate, whose entire family had been supported by Old Madam Tao’s son all along. Now she was playing deaf and dumb.

If it weren’t for her own son coming home, hah, Zhang Shi wouldn’t have been willing to part with borrowed cooking equipment at all — her household had two funerals to deal with, and the third son had died a violent death far from home. Cleaning the equipment afterward would require paying a shaman for purification — that alone could cost three to five strings for a set that size.

The Old Madam didn’t even look up. “Don’t quibble over anything today. Neighbors, old friendships — we can afford to lend a hand, let her go out with some dignity at least.”

Qiqian’er nodded and called back out the window: “Go get a token from Jixiang’s household, have her prepare a few piculs of coarse grain and salt, and send word to the estate to send over some spring vegetables these next few days, and lead over four sheep…”

If the Old Madam hadn’t reminded her, Qiqian’er would have forgotten entirely — it had been so long, and back then, in her grief and confusion after Dasheng’s death, with no money to her name, even the Tang family had lent a hand for that funeral, however distant the connection. The court’s decree of posthumous honors hadn’t arrived until the seventh day of mourning, right as the coffin was being carried out.

The Old Madam sighed sorrowfully. “That Zhang Shi, I never thought well of her — there are eight ghosts living in that heart of hers! If you want someone upright, it’s Huang Shi — such a pity for her, her husband is as heartless as her father-in-law, and she never bore a son to protect herself, so her mother-in-law looks down on her too. All the hard, bitter work falls to her and the other daughters-in-law. These past days Old Madam Tao hasn’t had a whiff of trouble on her, and when I went to see her, it was Huang Shi tending to her…”

Before she could finish, the doorman called through the window: “Old Madam, Fourth Madam, the Tao family’s Fourth Young Master is kneeling outside.”

The Old Madam paused, startled. “Didn’t he already send word of the death?”

The doorman hesitated. “This one doesn’t know, madam. Young Master Tao just came and knelt down there…”

Qiqian’er made to move, but the Old Madam pointed at her and scolded: “Don’t you dare move, I’ll go see. You stay right here, don’t you scare that baby of yours…”

Qiqian’er touched her belly, and by the time she looked up, the Old Madam had already gone briskly outside.

Tao Jizong himself hardly knew how he had made it back to Yandu. His commanding officer had given chaotic orders; the county magistrate had fled through the right gate with his family in the dead of night. Left behind with only his foolish elder brother, they had scraped together whatever men they could to make a stand — but the Tan forces had entered through the right gate without shedding a drop of blood.

And then came the massacre of the city.

Fire lit the sky, screams filled every ear, corpses covered the ground — Zuoliang Pass had become a lake of blood and hell itself. He had gone berserk, and by the end he no longer even knew what he was cutting down.

Later, his arm grew too heavy to even lift his blade — if his brother hadn’t shielded him with his own body, if he hadn’t obtained a suit of superior armor through a benefactor’s help before leaving the capital, he would have died long before.

He had hastily cremated his brother, gathered the bones, shouldered the urn, and along with a few surviving soldiers, tracked the Tan army — counting their horses, their blades, the number of their camps. Once he had it all recorded, he carried the urn home to the capital.

The whole journey back, he moved in a daze, feeling neither pain nor hunger, simply stumbling forward. It was only thanks to the benefactor’s help — a good horse hidden near an old temple close to Zuoliang Pass before he’d even left the capital — that he had the means to make it home at all.

After reporting before the emperor and rushing home from Yandu, he found his mother lying on a bare door panel, dressed in thin, threadbare clothes, covered only with a patched sheet.

From this moment on, he was a child with neither father nor mother.

His eldest sister-in-law was crying. His second sister-in-law avoided his eyes and complained bitterly of her grievances — that was how he learned his sisters had already been married off. His third sister-in-law clutched their third brother’s urn and wouldn’t let go, while his own worthless wife hid in the room, refusing to show her face.

He understood exactly what state his mother had been in. He had left the household’s women and children to support that fool Tao Wentong, and the Old Madam had doted on him for nothing — all he could do was kneel there like a block of wood, unable to think of any solution at all.

In sudden fury, he beat him. His second sister-in-law nearly came at him with her fists, hurling ugly words.

In the middle of this uproar, a crowd of old neighbors from Quanhou Street — outsiders, not family — came pouring in to help, and looking at his own household, Tao Jizong felt utterly without hope.

There was no money in the house. He had no choice but to swallow his pride and come borrow from Qinwei Lane. At the very least, his mother and brother deserved a proper coffin for burial.

He pressed a hand to his shoulder, wincing — the wound below his collarbone still hadn’t healed, from the medicine applied by imperial order just last night when he’d gone before the throne. His Majesty had told him to go home and bury his brother first — who could have known his mother would be gone too.

He hadn’t cried. Truly, he hardly felt grief at all. In these recent days he had seen so much death — an entire city of fifty or sixty thousand people at Zuoliang Pass wiped out — that even his mother’s death couldn’t draw a single tear from him.

“Child, why are you kneeling here?”

The Chen family’s Old Madam approached, supported by attendants.

Tao Jizong didn’t want to cry. Instead he gave a bitter laugh and kowtowed three times to the Old Madam, hard enough to draw blood.

The Old Madam was startled. “You — what are you doing?”

Tao Jizong lifted his face to look at her. “Old Madam, I’ve come to borrow money. My brother is gone, my mother is gone, and there isn’t a single coin left in the house… I’m no good, I’ve amounted to nothing…”

He struck himself across the face, left and right, before forcing out: “Old Madam, I — I want to borrow a large sum from you. I want to buy a plot of land for my brother and my mother, and two proper coffins to bury them with dignity… I meant to ask Lord Meng or Lord Cheng, but they’ve gone to escort medicine supplies, and I… I have no other way…”

He finished with three more bloody kowtows.

“A large sum?” The Old Madam was stunned for a moment, then nodded, unexpectedly, without hesitation. “You — child, don’t do this! Your family has just suffered such a terrible tragedy… Ah, why am I even wasting breath on this, your mother is still lying there cold. Just tell me how much you need!”

The Old Madam had no real concept of what counted as a “large sum.”

Tao Jizong calculated quickly in his mind, then looked up and said loudly: “A hundred strings for the funeral arrangements, and for my brother’s and mother’s coffins and burial plots, I think… two hundred more. I’ll borrow three hundred strings.”

“Done!” The Old Madam didn’t hesitate for an instant, and without even needing support, she turned and hurried into the house.

Before long, she came back out with three attendants carrying three bundles.

Seeing him still kneeling, she hurried him to his feet. “Oh, you poor child, after all that suffering at the border, barely escaping with your life, and now half dead from a whole funeral’s worth of grief — why are you kneeling on this cold ground?”

She had the servant hand the money pouch to Tao Jizong first.

“You’ve only asked this once, no need to rush to repay me, I have use for it! This is three hundred and fifty taels — the money shops in the district are currently exchanging at one tael to one thousand three hundred cash, don’t let anyone shortchange you. I’ve given you extra, use it comfortably, no need to feel you’re imposing.”

Tao Jizong sniffled and hugged the money pouch, nodding.

The old servant then brought over two more large bundles. The Old Madam patted them and said, “This bundle has the bedding and pillows for the coffin lining — never used. One set for your mother, one for your brother.”

Tao Jizong opened his mouth, and a hoarse sound escaped.

The Old Madam pointed at him. “Save your wailing for later! Seven days of it ahead of you, pace yourself! This bundle is the six-layer burial clothes and shoes I made for myself — even if you hadn’t come today, I was going to bring these over myself. I was just altering them at home. When you get back, if anything doesn’t fit right, have your wife take a few stitches to adjust it. Your mother was proud her whole life, it wasn’t easy for her, truly.

“A person is born once and dies once. Her own parents treasured her as a baby, raised her with such care, and in the end handed her over to your family, where she served your Zhou household top to bottom her whole life. The least she deserves is to leave with dignity from her own parents’ hands, to go out warm and well cared for. Surely you don’t expect that heartless father of hers to be buried beside her? Do you even know how to properly dig a burial plot?”

The Old Madam glared at Tao Jizong as she asked.

Tao Jizong understood at once and nodded firmly. “I know. A single grave, separate. My mother wouldn’t want to lie beside anyone else either! Old Madam, I’ve already changed my surname. From now on I am Tao.”

Hearing this, the Old Madam was thoroughly pleased, clapping her hands. “Ha! Well, that settles it. You’re a boy with a conscience after all. You’ll wear mourning white for your mother, carry on the Tao family’s ancestral rites — your mother didn’t suffer for nothing in this life!”

The Old Madam extended a hand for Tao Jizong to support her as they walked toward the Tao household.

“Well, I’ll come along with you. Your family… none of them are of any use anyway.”

As they walked, she spoke to Tao Jizong at an unhurried pace. “It’s not that I blame them entirely — your mother wasn’t good to them either. This is just retribution!”

Tao Jizong nodded, his face twisted with emotion.

“Find someone you trust to manage the accounts. If you don’t have anyone, I can find someone for you on this end. Child, I’m lending you this money, so you’d better keep a close eye on it — I’m not saying this to gossip, but it’s the same in every household! Once the elders are gone, the family scatters. This money, you’ll have to pay it back, you know.”

“Yes, I understand.”

The two of them hadn’t even reached the mouth of the lane when they heard a commotion from the direction of the house.

They stopped to look, and there in the street was a man of about fifty, being pinned to the ground by seven or eight women from Quanhou Street, who were giving him quite the beating.

The old man thrashed and roared: “That’s my wife who died! That’s my house! Why can’t I go in?”

Madam Yang, the loudest of the bunch, planted her hands on her hips and cursed: “Bah! You heartless old wretch, you think we don’t know! You handed her the divorce papers years ago! Your family? Your wife? What nonsense is this — you think the women of Quanhou Street are so easy to trifle with, spit!”

She rolled up her sleeves as she finished, marched to a covered cart by the door, and yanked back the curtain. Inside sat a haggard woman in her thirties, holding two young children close.

“Oh? And who’s this now? A mistress, or some concubine?”

“I’ll curse your ancestors three generations back!”

Madam Lü, the strongest of them and clearly enjoying herself, saw the woman in the cart and hit the old man even harder.

There were two kinds of widows on Quanhou Street. One kind, whose husbands had truly died. The other, whose husbands had taken concubines while stationed elsewhere and never come home, never supported their families — living widows in all but name.

Everyone here had been holding back their frustration, and now that they’d finally caught one such man showing his face, of course they were going to let him have it.

Someone had just died in this house — how dare the in-laws make trouble at a time like this?

The elderly Chen Old Madam, slow to catch up with what was happening, asked: “Who is this?”

Tao Jizong’s eyes were full of hatred, his teeth grinding audibly. “I — I’m confused too. Wasn’t he supposed to be out of town? That’s my father…”

Before he could finish, the Old Madam let out a furious roar: “I’ll curse your ancestors eight generations back! You dare show your face here? You shameless wretch, you dare come bully a dead woman at her own door? You think Tao Lamei has no family of her own… This old lady hasn’t even breathed her last yet!”

Through a whole war, countless women had driven their carts and relied on one another to survive — never abandoning each other through all those years of wind and rain, sharing even the last scrap of a single flatbread bite by bite to keep each other alive.

No outsider could ever understand a bond like that, and none ever would again.

And so it came to this: a woman bearing an official court title of honor, sworn godmother to a reigning prince of the realm, dear friend to the Empress Dowager, head of the incense-burning society, and grandmother by marriage to a household connected to six marquises — personally throwing herself into the brawl, her palm strikes landing harder than anyone else’s. When her hand grew tired, she braced herself on a servant’s arm and started kicking with her feet instead…

By the time the runners from the Qingfeng prefecture office arrived and figured out just who was involved, they were so frightened they shrank to one side, trembling, not daring to say a word about breaking up the fight — wishing desperately they could simply pretend to be blind.