“She’s got a lot of work to do on herself,” Lily replies. “She needs his help more than any of us.”
“She’s not even putting in the work. She’s just mooching at this point. It’s Marigold all over again.”
I’m in the middle of putting the dishes away after washing them, but I freeze at the mention of Marigold. There’s a long moment before Lily responds.
“Don’t say that,” she says, so quietly I barely hear her.
“Get over it, Lily. It’s been years.”
“I am over it,” Lily says. “I just …”
“You just have a meltdown every time you go near the shed.” Violet’s voice is cold and mocking. It’s a tone I’m used to but thatI rarely hear her use with Lily. “She’s gone. There’s no point being sad about it. She would’ve ruined everything anyway.”
“I know. But … maybe if we’d done things differently, if we’d done better—”
“We? Don’t speak for me. I did my best with her. It ain’t my fault she was too pigheaded to know what was good for her.”
“Fine,” Lily says. She sounds so quiet. So much smaller than I’m used to hearing her. “Maybe ifI’ddone better, worked harder to make her see—”
“You can spend your life on maybes, but that ain’t gonna get you anywhere. She’s gone, Lily. And we’re better off for it, if you ask me.”
Lily is silent after that. Violet keeps going, though.
“Rose is the same sort of problem, though. Everyone can see it. Except Iris. The rest of us all know she’s a weed in this garden. She’s exactly the poison Sol’s warned us about. And now he’s giving her so much of his time instead of the rest of us.”
I wince at the sound of my own name, and a stone drops in my stomach as I take in Violet’s words. Could it be true? Are all the other girls skeptical of Rose? They’ve all been so welcoming to her, except Violet, of course. But were the others actually wary of her?
“He’sjust trying to prevent another situation like with Marigold,” Lily says at last. “He still wants to save her.”
“Let’s just hope she doesn’t drag the rest of us down with her first.”
I don’t hear anything more after that, as the two of them head down the hall with the clothes to wash in the tub.
Their words linger with me, though, leaving me wondering if I’m oblivious, if my fondness for Rose is keeping me from seeing the trouble she’s bringing to the hollow. It’s hard to deny the way her presence has changed me. After a year of being here, of unwavering loyalty to Sol, I’ve broken his trust and lied to him in recent weeks, for her.
And the older girls aren’t the only ones who’ve noticed our closeness. A few days later, while the others are downstairs and Poppy and I are tidying the attic, she broaches the subject directly.
“Iris,” she says, “can I ask you something?”
I look over my shoulder at her from where I’m currently making her and Zinnia’s bed. “Of course. What’s up?”
She sits down on Rose’s mattress, fiddling with the hem of the raggedy orange dress that I’m pretty sure Violet picked up from the local Goodwill last summer. “Is something going on with you and Rose?”
Istiffen, worry immediately beginning to coil tight in my stomach. “What do you mean?”
She bites her bottom lip. “I just … I feel like something is happening between y’all. You two were close and then you seemed like you weren’t talking or were mad or something and now y’all seem like you might be cool again? And I see the way y’all look at each other sometimes.”
“We don’t look at each other like anything,” I say, more insistently than I mean to.
“Yeah, you do. And to put it bluntly, it’s nothing like the way I look at Zinnia. Or any of the other girls here, for that matter. Because … we are all supposed to be sisters, right?”
I don’t meet her eyes as I smooth out the sheet. “We are,” I say. “And I’m not supposed to look at Rose any differently.”
There’s a long silence. When I finally finish the bed and turn around, I find Poppy tilting her head and watching me for a long moment, lips pursed, dark brown eyes narrowing slightly. But then she smiles. That big, wide, very white smile that I know means she is genuinely delighted by something.
“You like her.”
“Of course. I like all of you.”
