Page 63 of The Beautiful Ones

For one suspended moment, grief loosened the hold upon her throat.

“He r-remembered me?”

The words came broken, but they came.

“Yes.”

She bowed over our joined hands and wept. Not prettily. Not with the delicate tears her mother permitted in company. Her whole body folded beneath the knowledge that a dead man had defended her while the living men of her family bartered her name among themselves.

I held her until the worst had passed.

When she lifted her head, she wrote again.

THE LETTER?

“Hidden.”

YOU MUST TAKE IT AWAY.

“When it is safe.”

She shook her head hard enough to loosen the remaining pins.

NOT SAFE HERE.

“You are here.”

Her gaze dropped. She erased the slate with the heel of her hand and began again more slowly.

I WAS CRUEL TO YOU.

The garden returned between us: Adrian among the white blossoms, Cécile drunk upon her sudden fluency, my warning repaid with humiliation.

I did not tell her it no longer mattered. Forgiveness that denies the wound is only another manner of silence.

“You were,” I said.

She flinched, then nodded.

“And I was hurt.”

The chalk waited.

“But I knew you before he gave you that voice. I knew you when every word cost you. One afternoon of easy speech cannot make me forget the girl who shared her books with me and listened when no one else thought a servant had anything worth saying.”

Tears slipped down her cheeks.

I AM SORRY.

This time, I believed her.

“Then help me keep the letter alive.”

She looked toward the dark window. A small white mark circled her wrist where Octavia had touched her, delicate as frost upon glass.

“What happened there?”

Cécile covered it with her other hand.