Chapter 10
The dressing suite door clicked and I didn't look up at first. I thought it was him again.
My bandage itched under the sleeve they'd put me in. Someone had dressed me in a soft cream blouse that hid it completely. The suite was too quiet. Too perfect. A vanity with all my hair things laid out like I was going to some dinner, a locked window, a guard's shadow under the door in the upstairs hall.
It wasn't him. It was her.
She slipped inside and closed the door behind her with both hands, careful not to let it latch loud. Her pearl earrings caught the light. She still wore the cream Victorian dress from before, but the emerald brooch was gone from her collar.
" He's on a call," she whispered. "Ballroom. Charity gala donors. We have three minutes."
I stood by the vanity with my arms crossed over my stomach. My left shoulder throbbed. I didn't trust that she was alone, and I didn't trust that three minutes meant anything.
She didn't come closer. She held out her hand. In her palm sat the brooch.
The emerald was heavier than it looked on her dress. Dark green, cut deep, set in old gold with tiny pearls around it. I'd stared at it since I was little whenever she wore it.
"For the guard outside," she said. "Ray. He works the upstairs hall on Tuesdays. He'll take this and look the other way for ten minutes tomorrow morning. That's all we need."
I stared at it. "That's your brooch."
"It was my mother's," she said. Her hand trembled a little. "It's worth enough that he won't ask questions. He has a daughter at State. He understands looking away."
I didn't take it right away. My throat was dry. Past passivity sat between us like the marble foyer downstairs — she had stood behind me while I was dragged. She had shouted, but she hadn't stopped him.
She saw it on my face and her eyes filled.
"I know," she said. "I know what you're thinking."
She stepped to the vanity and set the brooch down instead of pushing it at me. She turned her wrist over.
For a second I didn't understand. Then I saw it — a faint, faded pale mark on the inside of her wrist. Not golden anymore. Not glowing. Just a thin branching scar, like a river that had dried up years ago.
"I had one too," she said quietly. "Before you. Before this house. I was nineteen. His name was Michael. He worked at the gas station on Route 9 and he had hands that never stopped shaking when I was near him."
I sucked in a breath without meaning to.
"I denied it," she said. "My father told me it was nonsense, that girls like us didn't get to choose. I let him talk me out of it. I married into this house instead. I told myself it was safer. More proper." She looked at me then, really looked at me. "I have regretted it every day since. Every single day I watched you grow up in this place and knew exactly what it felt like."
My eyes burned. I didn't realize I hadn't blinked.
"Why are you telling me now?" My voice came out smaller than I wanted.
"Because you still have a choice. I didn't." She pushed the brooch an inch closer to me. "Tomorrow morning he takes you to the foundation tower. The donors' breakfast. Ballroom on the thirty-second floor. He'll want you in white again, presentable. The bandage hidden. Smiling. That's when he'll be distracted. That's when Ray will be on the service elevator."
I picked up the brooch. It was warm from her hand. Heavy.
"If I take this, if Ray takes it, what happens if he catches us?" I asked.
"Then I say I lost it," she said immediately. "He'll be angry. But he'll be angry at me, not you. I've handled his anger before."
That was the lie she'd always told herself to survive, and I heard it for what it was now — not passivity, but a calculation that had kept her alive long enough to help me.
I closed my fingers around the brooch. The emerald pressed into my palm.
"Tomorrow morning," I repeated. "Thirty-second floor. Service elevator."
She nodded and her shoulders dropped like she'd been holding her breath since the bedroom.
"Put it in the lining of your bag," she whispered. "The white one he laid out. Don't wear it. Don't show it until you need it."
Downstairs, a man's voice rose faintly from the ballroom — sharp, performing for a phone call about the charity gala. Her head turned toward the door.
She squeezed my good wrist once, quick and hard.
"Don't wait like I did," she said.
May you like
Then she was gone, slipping back into the upstairs hall, leaving the door cracked exactly as she'd found it. I stood alone in the dressing suite with the brooch burning in my fist and the sound of his voice still echoing up the marble stairs, and for the first time since he'd gripped my arm on that bed, I wasn't just being dragged anywhere.
I had a morning. I had a window. And I had her with me.
