Chapter 10

Ember's POV

The greenhouse door was only half open, and the cold, damp air pushed out ahead of us — wet soil, snapped stems, and under both of those, the iron tang of rainwater seeping through the cracked panes.

I followed my mother in, my feet coming down on a floor of broken glass and torn branches that crunched with every step.

One corner of the roof had caved in. The iron frame hung crooked, and a few broken branches had wedged themselves between the steel beam and the glass, swaying a little whenever the wind came through.

A man in work clothes was already there, both hands braced against the thickest of the branches, his face stuck somewhere between a flinch and a grip he didn't dare let go of.

Directly under what he was holding sat a row of shelves carrying plaster casts — a woman's profile, two hands, a bowed figure holding something against its chest — all of them wearing a thin coat of dust.

My mother didn't move on it right away. She pulled her gloves on, bent down to study the branch that was jammed the worst, then straightened and stood looking up at the hole in the roof for a long time, her eyes traveling from the broken glass to the shelves and back again.

Her lipstick was fresh. The ends of her hair were already halfway soaked.

Finally, she turned to the man and said, "Keep both hands where they are and don't let go of that branch for anything. We'll pack the bottom row away first and put it somewhere safe, and leave everything else standing until Mr. Hawthorne gets home to decide."

None of them could do the lifting. The man had both hands pinned to the branch, and the maid had come down holding my mother's bag and nothing else, so my mother took the near end of the wooden crate and pulled the far end toward her with her foot.

I came in off the doorway and took the corner opposite her without saying anything, and we worked down the bottom row one cast at a time, her lifting and me setting them inside, the plaster cool and gritty against my hands.

From that angle I could see her face while she handled each one, and she kept her eyes down on the shelves the whole time, arranging the packing like it was any other thing in the house that needed doing.

She never once asked me whether I thought the two of us should be the ones doing it.

Then Vincent's voice cut across the greenhouse from the door.

"The hell are you doing?"

It came from somewhere behind my mother, a spot she hadn't been facing. Her body went stiff in a way you could see from across the room, her shoulders drawing inward, and her fingers around the plaster loosened.

The thing dropped past my eyes and hit the concrete — first a flat knock, then a wide spray of splitting, white powder jumping up onto the hem of her skirt and the tops of her shoes.

For a moment nobody made a sound. The wind came through the hole in the roof and lifted a thin skin of dust off the shelves.

Vincent took two steps forward. His jaw was locked, and behind his lenses his eyes went from the broken pile to my mother's face.

"Who said you could touch anything in here?" he said. "This isn't your fucking house. There's not one thing in here that's yours to decide."

My mother bent at the waist right away.

"I'm sorry," she said. "We were only afraid the branch would come down. We wanted to get the row out of the way first — nobody meant to put a hand on anything. When Arthur gets back, I'll tell him the whole thing exactly as it happened."

Her voice was soft and her words came slowly, laid out straight and even, one after another, with the caution of somebody walking across ground that belonged to someone else.

Vincent watched her through the whole of it and said nothing until she was done.

"My father isn't here today," he said. "With him gone, you don't have to keep the act up. What's that face you make for?"

I listened with my nails dug into my palm.

"What are you yelling at her for?" I said. The words came out of me before I could stop them, louder than I meant, with an edge I hadn't planned on putting there.

Vincent turned his face toward me. He looked at me in a way he hadn't looked at her, and whatever was in it only made me hotter.

"She dropped it," I said. "Because you came and stood in the doorway without a sound and then cracked down on us. Anybody holding that thing would have had their grip shaken loose. If you actually cared about these casts, you'd have gone upstairs to find somebody to fix the roof, instead of standing here taking it out on us."

"Ember." My mother, from behind me.

I didn't turn around.

His eyes came back to me and stayed there, slow, like he was checking whether I'd understood him.

"You remember the cocoa that night?" he said. "The cup your mother drank from was the same as yours."

Something in my head snapped clean through. What I'd swallowed that night with my face burning red — the salt, the bitterness, the powder that wouldn't dissolve. My mother had held her cup and drunk it down sip by sip without so much as lifting an eyelid.

"She can swallow that much, and you still haven't worked out why?" He stepped back half a pace, as if clearing himself a way out. "How are you this stupid?"

He left. His heels knocked against the gravel, once, again, fading.

I stood where I was and didn't move. I was already halfway into it in my head — the two of us back up the stairs, the suitcase off the closet shelf, one more bus ride out of somewhere.

My mother crouched at the shelf and picked the broken plaster up into her palm piece by piece, slowly, her fingertips shaking a little. She set each fragment down in the crate like it still mattered which way it lay.

I could feel my own breath sitting too high in my chest. So I said it first, before I lost the nerve.

"Mom," I said. "Let's move out."

She stopped, and then let out a breath. It was a long one, coming up from somewhere deep.

"There's a reason Vincent is the way he is."

I froze. And then something in me pushed back, quiet but firm, the way it does when you know you're not going to win, but you can't let it go either.

Maybe there was a reason.

But a reason wasn't the same thing as a right, and I didn't know a single reason in the world that made it okay to stand over my mother while she apologized for something that wasn't her fault.