Chapter 3: The Chair, the Broken Chain, and the Locked Room
The reception did not resume so much as pretend to. Conversations restarted in low fragments near the engagement table, then stopped whenever I looked up. Warm light still shone across the flowers and polished glasses, but the room had lost its ordinary shape. The chair beside me remained angled away from the table, one leg caught against the carpet where I had fallen.
I moved toward it before anyone could decide what I should do next.
My cheek still burned. I kept one hand against it and used the other to steady myself on the chair back. The broken chain had fallen beneath the seat. I saw one silver link first, then the narrow clasp caught in the carpet fibers. When I pulled it free, the metal left a faint red mark across my palm.
For a moment, I held the chain close to my eyes. It was only the part that had stayed with me. The locket itself was gone.
Across the hall, Ainsley stood near the engagement table in her black dress, one hand closed around something small. I could not see the locket clearly from that distance, but the shape of her fist made my stomach tighten. She did not look at me. She looked toward the adjoining hallway, where the residence doors were set beyond the reception decorations.
That was when I understood she had not only taken the locket. She had already decided where the rest of my mother's things would go.
I slipped the broken chain into the pocket of my blue dress and followed the trail of open doors and displaced objects toward the hallway. A folded garment lay over the back of a dining chair. Two small boxes sat beside the wall beneath a framed photograph. I recognized them as belonging to my mother's room, though I could not remember seeing them packed before. The sight made the chain in my pocket feel heavier.
Galen had been standing among the guests when everything happened. Now I heard the measured sound of his shoes behind me. He did not return to the people watching from the reception hall. He came into the hallway and stopped beside me.
I showed him my palm.
The broken clasp rested there, dull beneath the yellow light. His eyes moved from it to the boxes, then to the closed door at the end of the hall. His face remained controlled, but he reached past me and tried the handle.
It did not turn.
The door was locked. A narrow strip of light showed beneath it, interrupted by the shadow of something pressed against the other side. I could not see into the room. I could not tell whether the packed belongings were still there, whether they had been moved, or whether the room had already been emptied.
I lowered myself near the door and began marking what I remembered.
The blue quilt folded at the foot of the bed. The wooden jewelry box with the loose hinge. The framed photograph near the window. The small glass dish where my mother had kept pins and buttons. The locket had belonged with those things, even if I had carried it with me. Inside it was the hidden photograph I had seen when I opened it at the table, the tiny image of my mother that made the object more than silver.
I pressed each detail into my memory as carefully as I could.
Galen crouched beside me. He examined the lock, then the boxes in the hallway. When I looked back toward the reception, Ainsley was still watching us. The locket remained in her possession or somewhere beyond my reach. The room remained closed.
Galen rose and stood between me and the hall.
He did not go back to the guests. Instead, he gathered the boxes from the floor and placed them against the wall where they could not be mistaken for discarded things. Then he looked at the locked door, at the chain in my hand, and finally at me.
May you like
I understood his decision without hearing it. He would stay. He would help me inspect what had been removed.
I closed my fingers around the broken clasp. The door stayed shut, and the locket stayed gone, but I no longer stood alone in front of it.
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