Chapter 1

The guard's fingers closed around my arm above the elbow and yanked.

"Do not make this worse," Vance muttered. His thumb pressed into the muscle. He still wouldn't look at me.

Behind us, Preston Hale's voice rolled across the whole pavilion. "Check her apron. Check her bag. The sapphire eye is gone off the Queen's horse, and she is the only person on this pier holding a chisel."

I twisted toward him. "I was varnishing the chariot benches. Vance, I've been at the chariot benches since noon."

Nobody was listening. The Pier Lighting Festival had filled the boardwalk with people in linen and good wool, paper cups of cider in their hands, and every one of them had turned to watch the woman in the paint-stained apron get walked off the deck. My apron had a smear of burnt umber on the hip and a torn pocket where I kept my scrapers. I'd worn it to work for nine years. That afternoon it felt like a costume somebody had put on me so the crowd would know what to think.

Then I heard Sophie.

"Let go of my mom!"

She came through the donors like a small yellow storm, braids half undone, the soles of her light-up sneakers flaring blue against the wooden planks. She got one arm around my waist and planted her feet.

Vance stopped. He had a daughter. I knew that about him. He still didn't look at me.

"Sophie," I said. "Stand behind me."

"No." Her fist came up.

In it was the brass token - the heavy little disc on the frayed red cord my mother had knotted around my neck when I was small, and that I had tied around Sophie's four years ago, the week Elena died.

"Is that from my carousel?" Preston said. "Is that pier property?"

"It's mine," I said. "It was my mother's."

"It's brass. We're missing a sapphire." He turned to the crowd like a man on a stage. "Search the child."

"Touch her and I'll break your hand," I said.

Preston's mouth opened. Then he stopped talking.

A man had come to a halt in the middle of the walkway between the horses. Dark suit, no tie, silver hair cut close, one hand loose at his side. Augustin Rourke. Everybody on the pier knew the name even if we never saw the face. The Rourke Foundation had paid for the pavilion's new roof, the rebuilt band organ, the scholarship that sent three of Sophie's classmates to camp. He was the reason the carousel still turned.

He wasn't looking at me. He wasn't looking at Vance.

He was looking at my daughter's fist.

"Where did she get that?" he asked.

His voice was quiet, and it cut through the festival noise anyway.

"She's a child," Preston said quickly. "It's a piece of junk. She probably found it under a-"

"My mother gave it to me," I said.

Augustin Rourke crossed the deck. People moved out of his way without being asked. He stopped in front of Sophie and crouched - a tall man folding down slowly, one hand braced on his knee, the way old men do when they don't want anyone to see them struggle. Then he held out his open palm.

"May I see it?" he said.

Sophie looked up at me. I nodded, because I couldn't think of one reason to say no, and that is one of the small decisions I will be paying for the rest of my life.

She lifted the cord over her head and laid the token in his hand.

He turned it over twice. Then his thumbnail found a seam near the little horse's mane - a seam I had looked at a thousand times and never once believed was a seam - and pressed.

The token clicked open.

Augustin Rourke looked down into it for a long moment. When he lifted his head, his eyes were wet.

"I made it for my daughter," he said.

The carousel organ kept playing. Somewhere behind me, Preston Hale had gone very, very quiet.

I heard my own voice come out flat and small.

"My mother was Elena."