She lifted the sketchbook in her hand, open to the nude drawing of herself. Her hands shook, making the pages shake too. “What the hell isthis?”
Hawthorne’s lips parted at the sight of the sketch. He dropped the wood in his arms and the logs fell, thudding at his feet.
Emeline threw the sketchbook furiously to the floor. “Why am I in all your sketchbooks, Hawthorne? Why are there drawings of me from before you ever knew me?”Nude drawings!
Standing in the midst of the scattered wood, he ran his hands raggedly over his face.
“You were going to abandon your dreams,” he said, pressing his palms into his eyes. “You were going to stay. Here. Forme.”
His hands fell to his sides.
“I couldn’t trap you like that.”
What?She took a step back. “What are you talking about?”
He stared at her like the world was falling apart around him—and not for the first time. He swallowed so hard, she heard it.
“The girl I told you about? The one I betrayed?” His voice cracked. “She’s you.”
The words made her go cold. An electric kind of cold, starting in her belly and moving swiftly outwards.That’s not possible …
Emeline suddenly remembered Sable singing to her last night. Singing a song there was no possible way she could know. One with a strange memory trapped inside it.
“Two summers ago,” said Hawthorne, “you told me you were giving up on your dream. You said you didn’t care about being up onstage because I couldn’t be there with you.You were going to sacrifice it all and stay. Here, where there was nothing for you.Lessthan nothing for you.”
He looked away miserably.
“I went to the king and asked him to … to make you forget. If you forgot—me and everything else in the woods—there would be nothing to stay for. Nothing to hold you back anymore.”
Emeline’s heart dropped. She took another step away from him.
“Are you saying …”
“That you and I—” He shook his head, then started again. “That you’ve known me for a long time. Why else would you be in my sketchbooks? How else could I love Ewan like he’s my own family? Why else would Sable be so protective of you?”
Sable.The song. The memory of the two of them, up in the barn beams. They couldn’t have been older than fifteen.
“In making you forget me and the woods, I made you forget her too. I made you forget everything. It’s a wrong she’ll never forgive me for.”
No. It’s not possible. I would remember …
Except she wouldn’t. Not if her memories were stolen.
She thought back to when she first arrived in the court. Sable had kept her distance, and Emeline had assumed the girl was simply shy. Then Sable intervened when the king tried to choke her to death, and Emeline hadn’t understood why she would put herself at risk. But if they’d been friends …
Realizing that her entire body was trembling, she hugged her chest to try to hide it.
“If everything you’ve said is true, why would Sable go out of her way to avoid me?” she demanded.
Hawthorne glanced away from her. “For the same reason you avoided Ewan, I imagine.”
Emeline bit her lip. Shehadavoided Pa—refusing to visit or call him—because it hurt so much to be forgotten. Still … “A real friend would have told me the truth.”
“And would you have believed her?”
Emeline paused, remembering all of the times she’d told her grandfather the truth, and how it so often twisted his fractured mind into further chaos—like the night she told him Rose had abandoned them.
Upon arriving in the king’s court, would Emeline have believed that a shiftling girl she had no recollection of was, in fact, a long-lost friend?
