Chapter 5

I walked out of the courthouse holding the glass and did not drink it.

Celia drove me herself. She insisted. She talked the whole way about how much she had suffered, how Grant had leaned on her, how she had tried to protect me from the truth because the truth was too heavy for a broken woman. I kept the glass in my lap and watched the fizz die.

At the manor she put me in the blue guest room, one floor below the east wing, and locked nothing, and told the cook to bring a tray. She was so kind it made my skin crawl.

That night at nine she came in without knocking and set a cup of tea on the nightstand. Chamomile. The same bitter edge under the honey.

"You should rest," she said.

I raised the cup to my mouth and made the small satisfied sound they expect, and while I turned to the window I tipped it into the fern beside the chair. Two years of carrying trays had made my hands very good at not spilling.

She stayed. She sat on the edge of the bed and smoothed the quilt like our mother used to, and after a while she started to talk the way people do when they think the other person is gone.

"You have no idea how much I did for you," she said. "Grant wanted you at the bottom of the river. I told him a wife who can't remember her own name is cheaper than a body, and easier to explain." She laughed a little. "Two years in a gray dress. That was mercy, Evie. That was me being generous."

I lay still and kept my breathing slow, and under the quilt my thumb pressed the record button on the old phone Tessa had given me that afternoon.

"Did you cut the line?" I whispered, mumbling it into the pillow like a woman half-asleep.

"Somebody cut the line," Celia said. "It doesn't matter who paid for the knife. You were going to sell the orchards to pay Grant's debts and take the house out of this family's hands, and I could not let that happen. So yes. I made a decision, and I have slept fine for two years, which tells you everything about how much you mattered to me."

I felt her stand. Then the weight of her hand on the mattress, and her voice right above me, amused.

"Your thumb is on the screen, sweetheart."

She tore the phone out of my hands. I came up off that bed and grabbed her wrist, and we went across the room and into the wall, and I got a fistful of hair and she got my throat, and I made a sound I had not made in two years. We hit the window.

The phone went out into the dark and down into the ornamental pond, and the splash was the loneliest sound I had ever heard.

Celia stood over me with her hair down, breathing hard, and for the first time she looked like what she was.

"Don't try that again," she said. "I married the lawyers. You married the man."

She left me on the floor. I lay there tasting copper and listening to the house.

Then I got up, because I had one thing she didn't know about. Milo had told me Grant tapes everything, and men like Grant never throw away the thing that could bury somebody else.