“Yes, we do,” she said, looking up at him. The same freckles she’d had as a kid. Same hazel eyes, same clenched fists. “Better than most people would. Because I’ve seen the tarnished side of you, the one that flies into a rage and throws around his muscle. And you’ve seen the ugliest parts of me.”
He knew he should get up and leave this very minute. “It don’t mean we’re good for each other.”
“I’m not saying we are,” she said reluctantly. “I’m just saying we know each other. If it eases you to think of me as a stranger, then so be it. It hardly makes it true.”
She didn’t know the half of his thinking. He shook his head minutely. “In truth, Nina, I’ve been tryin’ to wipe my mind of you altogether.”
She winced. “Any success?”
He paused, thinking that his answer should stay locked away. “None at all.”
She nodded, looking down at the piano keys, fingers playing a phantom of a song from her memory. She swallowed. “That will become easier when we part ways.”
Patrick very much doubted it. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“Which one?”
“Kenton Hill,” he said. “Did it mean somethin’ to you?” He’d taken her to the hills and through the village, to the Coal Works and the market beneath the lamps. And he’d thought he’d seen the parish work its magic on her. Had he imagined it?
Nina suddenly filled with something. She expelled it in one heavy breath and said, “I’ve traveled the Trench over, and I’ve never loved a place more.”
A lump rose in his throat. “And when you thought you might still bury it… what did you tell yourself?”
She hesitated before responding, as though knowing the weight of her answer. “Polly told me something back then,” Nina said. “She told me that I had to try not to see it—all the good in Kenton. Scottie and Otto and your brothers. The dancing and the music. The community. You.” Nina’s hands pressed to her stomach like something had punched her. “But I saw it all anyway. In truth, I told myself I had time to find a solution. I made bargains with myself. I was drunk, I think. On the parish. On you.” She looked up, smiled sadly.
He tried not to show his understanding, how conflicted she made him feel. “Then we were both drunken fools.”
She nodded weakly.
Patrick turned back to the piano. “Can you play?”
“A little,” she said. “Though I was my music professor’s least favorite student.”
“He was a fool, too, then.”
Nina smirked. “In my first year, I used to sneak into the conservatory to practice at night. The headmaster caught me once, but he walked right by like he hadn’t seen me. After that, I was never chastised again in my music lessons. I think Professor Dumley had something to do with that.” She frowned at the wall for a moment, lost in thought.
It was odd to imagine her in the Artisan school alongside the other swank kids. Patrick could only imagine her as she’d been at the siphoningceremony: lopsided bow, poorly stitched blouse, dirt on her nose, fire in her eyes. “Was it difficult?” he asked. “To try and fit in where you didn’t belong?” For it had always been so clear to him where she truly belonged.
“Impossible,” she said. “Polly and I were the only brink children in our year. They called mewormand hersquidbeneath their breath. I didn’t know how to fight back. In Scurry, it would’ve been fists and slurs. In the Artisan school it was gossip, whispers, jokes. The violence was all silent. I think it turned me into a coward. It didn’t get any better until…”
Here, she came up short, something lodged in her throat.
“Until what?”
She looked away. “Until Theo,” she admitted.
Patrick tensed, the poison rising in him against his will. Like Nina, he was born in the brink, where a person was measured by how well they fought. He wished he could eliminate any other man from her thoughts the only way he knew how.
“Did he defend you?” he asked, trying to hide the flash of jealousy. “Rough up the other boys in front of you and make you swoon?”
Nina scoffed. “Artisan boys don’trough each other up.”
“Ah, pardon me. Then he picked you flowers and drew you pictures?”
The blood pooling in her cheeks told him he wasn’t far off.
“He was a friend to me,” she said. “For no good reason other than I needed one.”
