Chapter3

Celia's POV

Arthur remained silent. I waited for their response. The silence spread between us, lasting what felt like an eternity of held breath. Then Diana breathed out quietly and touched the rim of the setting lightly with a fingertip, as though she had only just recalled that she was still wearing it.

“Oh, this? It came in a gift box Arthur brought this evening. I liked how it looked, so I wore it.” She raised her hand to the brooch, pausing, her nail brushing gently against the clasp as she toyed with it unhurriedly. “Is this yours? Good heavens. I’m so sorry — I didn’t know. Let me give it back to you.”

Diana removed it slowly, her gaze drifting toward Arthur now and then.

"It's yours," Arthur said, and he closed his hand over hers and pressed her palm flat against her own chest with the brooch still pinned underneath. "I gave it to you. That makes it yours. As for Celia, I'll buy her ten better ones. This one doesn't matter."

He spoke of it all in that flat, matter‑of‑fact tone — the tone of someone who believes money can fix anything. In that instant, Mother’s flower press became just another item he could check off his to‑do list tomorrow. A fragile light that had burned behind my ribs for six years flickered and shattered, and the thing that had held it up finally let go.

I stepped around Zoe and put myself in front of Diana, close enough to see the tape on the back of her hand, close enough that they had to stop walking.

"That brooch is mine," I said. My voice shook and it was clear anyway. "Somebody took it out of my house without asking me and put it on you. You should give it back."

She turned her face to Arthur, and her shoulders pulled in, and her eyes filled in the patient, well-lit way they filled when there was a witness. She looked at him, not at me, because he was the one who got to decide.

"I'll have ten sent to you tomorrow," Arthur said, and his hand came up against my shoulder — not hard, only enough to move me back half a step, the way you move a chair that's blocking a doorway. "Don’t argue with her over this."

"I don't need ten," I said. "I need that one."

The words out, I could hear my heart racing.

Diana's hands went to her cardigan, and she worked the pin loose and lifted it off the wool slowly, so the knit wouldn't pull. She held it flat in her open palm — the flattened asters and larkspurs sealed under their thin skin of resin — and held it out to me with her eyes down.

"Take it. Please." Her voice was very small. "I don't want the two of you fighting because of me."

"That's what I keep telling her," Arthur said, and his hand found Diana's elbow and turned her toward the elevator bank. "You're the kind one. Not like Celia."

She let him steer her away, and said something soft and forgiving over her shoulder that I didn't bother to catch.

I closed my fist around the brooch, its chill pressing into my skin. I stuffed it deep inside my coat pocket, resolved that no one would take it out ever again.

Arthur guided Diana past me, his movements gentle and his voice soft. I turned away so I wouldn’t watch them. The elevator chimed behind me, and the hallway fell quiet save for the crackle of the ice pack as Zoe shifted.

Once they were gone, my knees buckled, and I sank down onto the bench. Just two hours ago, I’d uttered the word “divorce” to Arthur. Still, seeing him rest his hand so tenderly on another woman’s arm, some hidden part of me went on bleeding silently. I reminded myself not to squander my time and affection on someone unworthy. Arthur was not worth it.

So I sat with it, and gave it a few minutes, because I have learned that if I give a thing a few minutes it stops being bigger than I am.

Zoe crouched in front of the bench, keeping her wrapped elbow clear, and laid her hand over mine where it rested on my pocket.

“How could Arthur treat you like this? You shouldn’t have married him in the first place,” Zoe huffed beside me.

I nodded. “He’s not worth it. That’s why I’m divorcing this with him tonight. I won’t let myself hurt over him any longer.”

Zoe stepped forward and wrapped her arms around me. “I’m on your side.”

My heart swelled with warmth. It was the first time in so long that someone had stood by me. I had never known how good it felt to be supported.

We sat a while longer on the chairs in the corridor, and I paid her bill at the window. Then I drove Zoe back to the estate so I could pack my things and leave. I stepped into the house where I’d lived for six years and spent an hour upstairs cramming everything I owned into two suitcases. All the things that mattered were inside. When I carried the suitcases back downstairs, the kitchen light was still on.

Leonie was standing at the counter in her pajamas with half a slice of orange cake in her fist, eating it fast, her cheeks already flushed pink with the sugar I had kept out of her hands since she was four — the child who had come into this world too thin and too tired, who had been brought back up on herbs and lentils and lights out at seven, and who knew, because I had told her a hundred times, precisely what it did to her.

I took it out of her fist and set the rest back on the plate.

"You can't have this," I said. "You know what it does to you."

She wore that familiar look of impatience, just as she always did, and turned to leave. Then she glanced back and spoke in a voice so low it was almost as if she could pretend she had never said it at all.

"Mom never lets me have anything. Aunt Diana lets me eat whatever I want."

The words went through me slower than I expected. I stood there holding a plate in a kitchen I had already stopped thinking of as mine, and when I found my voice it came out rough.

"So in your heart," I said, "you like her better than me, too?"