The rain is falling, as usual, but I am used to it.

I remember the feeling of actual rain drops on my skin. It was as if the world was renewing itself, just a little bit with each storm. I remember the pitter-patter on the roof of my house, like a timpani drum in one of Beethoven’s symphonies. I remember the smell of morning dew that greeted me when I opened my door. I remember the rainbow of colors arching through the sky. I remember that a promise was made to me by one I held dear. And I remember that I am a prisoner and that these are just memories, a few left from my many lifetimes.

And then one day, the rain finally stops once more. The box opens, and a hand reaches inside. The necklace and its stone are placed around the neck of a young woman. It is her 18th birthday, and her gentleman caller has thought to curry favor with her father by lavishing a gorgeous piece of jewelry on his hopeful bride-to-be. He tells her father that despite the simple wooden box’s appearance, the necklace is worth more than it seems. And in that regard, he is correct.

I feel the young woman’s energy mixing with mine. She is vibrant and she is bold and she does not love this boy. But she will do what she is told, because that is her station in life. It is 1889 and Ariella Livingston is a girl out of time, in more ways than one. She reminds me of another girl I knew briefly in a different age.

Ariella senses something is something amiss with the gift but cannot possibly decipher what it is. Still, she dutifully wears the necklace every day as the months go by, as her nuptials are arranged and draw nearer, and as I grow stronger.

One evening, as she is staring at herself in the mirror, Ariella grasps the necklace’s green stone tightly, and something unexpected happens: I appear and I am radiant. The girl screams with my voice and nearly sends the entire Fifth Avenue manse into a tizzy. Her lady’s maid is soon rapping at the door, and it’s all Ariella can do to stop the older girl from downtown from barging in and finding a peculiar blonde dressed in her mistress’s clothing. Another squeeze of the stone and I am funneled back into my prison. Ariella thinks she has temporarily gone mad from the pressure and the crushing weight of expectations and vows not to touch the stone again.

A month passes, and the wedding is now only days away. Ariella is sobbing on her bed after a particularly trying dress fitting and the idea somehow enters her head. A moment later and my trap has been sprung. I bide my time and watch as the girl runs to the mirror again to look at me. I could take control, as I have gathered enough of her energy, but I wait and see what she will do.

And what she does next is something even I could not have expected. The summer night is cool despite the stench of Manhattan, and Ariella quickly threads her way toward her betrothed’s townhouse a few blocks away. It feels so good to walk free that I don’t care at the moment that I am letting her do the walking for me. The girl sneaks into the house through the servants’ entrance in the back and then climbs up the rear staircase until she’s just outside his bedroom. A rap on the door and it opens a few moments later. The boy is young, but cute. She could do a lot worse.

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“Who … who are you?” he asks and Ariella presses my finger to his lips, pushing him inside and closing the door with enough force that someone is bound to have heard something. His resistance is surprisingly short-lived, but then again, I am nothing if not rapturous. The two embrace in unsubtle ways and, sure enough, the escapade has attracted the attention of her betrothed’s household. And, clever girl that she is, who should barge through the door moments later, but the boy’s father, trailed by Ariella’s own father. She smiles and pushes her way past the startled men and back out into the night, a free woman.

Or so she thinks.

The next morning, her wedding dress is still waiting for her in her antechamber, and she runs to her mother, hoping for an explanation. But it is not the one she wants to hear. Everything will go forward as planned, her mother says, there is too much at stake, too much embarrassment were her father to call everything off. She will have to make do, she will have to take it in stride, for the good of her family and for her own sake. She doesn’t want to be known as the rich girl who couldn’t keep a man satisfied, now does she, her mother chides.

This she cannot abide.

Ariella runs to her room and shuts the door. She spends the rest of the day staring in the mirror, daring herself to disappear beneath me. Finally, she comes to a decision that I wholeheartedly endorse. She pulls out my necklace and activates it, and that’s when I speak to her at last.

“Hello,” I say, and I take control long enough to squelch any urge to scream.

“You seem to be in a predicament, but I can help, if you let me.”

I give her back my body for a moment so she can respond, and she nods my head.

“Good. There isn’t much time, and I am not very familiar with this era. Enlighten me.”

“What … what do you want to know?” she says, quivering.

“Everything.”

Ariella starts from the beginning, from the founding, which I know, to the wars that followed, to the gilded age we currently reside in. For a girl with several brothers, she knows much of her father’s business. We go over this in great detail. Finally, I let her sleep as I get to work.

The girl wakes up days later in a four-poster bed that is not her own. The room is sparse at the moment, just the bed and a silver mirror. She runs to the latter and squeezes the stone and I reappear, smiling.

“Where am I?” she asks.

“Your new home downtown. Congratulations, you own the whole building. And your tenants will start moving in within the week.”

“I … how did you…?”

“Your father’s creditors were happy to extend him margin for some promising trades, the results of which were funneled into several holding companies, which then took out loans from other banks to acquire real estate in many parts of this fine city, including the new apartments on this block.”

“My father … the paper trail … he’ll find me at some point.”

“Don’t worry about him. The maze I’ve constructed is hardened against such snooping. Besides, if he gets close enough, I need merely knock over one domino to send his entire house crashing down.”

“You wouldn’t!” she exclaims.

“Why shouldn’t I? They were about to sell you off like a breeding cow. You deserve to be free.”

She contemplates this and acquiesces to my machinations.

“What happens now? Who are you?”

“Now, we build. As to who I am, I am a lost soul, same as you.”