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The young woman had fallen in love. Kenna just hadn’t figured it out yet.
That wasn’t the only reason, either. Unless Lila was mistaken, Camille desperately wished to live on the compound. The orphan had finally found some place that felt like home. She wouldn’t dare jeopardize that with a simple eye roll or a crabby word spoken out of turn. Such events had a way of spreading, and gossip likely traveled faster when it concerned outsiders.
Camille would marry an oracle child someday. Lila had no doubt.
But Lila didn’t say a word about her suspicions. It wasn’t her place to share secrets that weren’t hers. “If people on a sojourn speak to Dr. Patterson every few weeks, what do people who return to the compound do?”
“What do you mean?” Mòr asked.
“They’ve been gone for six years, sometimes longer. How do you know they still fit? Surely the situation has come up before?”
Worry lines formed on Kenna’s brow. “It happens. No one has to come back.”
“You’ll have to forgive my sister,” Mòr said. “If a son takes a lover outside of the family, they nearly always stay with that lover, just like highborn males. Her son Duncan has fallen in love with a woman in Andalusia.”
“This is exactly why I wanted to keep him close.”
“The sojourn is a time for exploration and adventure. For living wide and long. For returning wiser than you left.”
“For going off and getting married. For never coming home again.”
“Kenna, if he chooses to stay with her, he’s not replacing the family he was born into. He’s gaining a second one.”
Kenna snatched up a washcloth and whipped at a spot on the counter.
“Where did you go on your sojourn, Kenna?” Lila asked.
Kenna’s mouth twitched. “I went to New Orleans. I met my children’s father there. I spent much of my sojourn pregnant.”
“It was quite a bountiful sojourn, too. Kenna had three children in six years.”
“Where’d you go?” Lila asked the oracle.
“I didn’t go on a sojourn. I might have had the chance if my mother had not died so young. I’ve never been away for more than twenty-four hours.”
“The travel books in the parlor. You buy them?”
“I should stop. It makes it harder. I can’t seem to help myself, though.”
Connell entered the kitchen holding a small white envelope. He slid it over the countertop toward Lila. “The guards at the gate said a man arrived with this five minutes ago.”
Lila opened it, expecting a note from Connell about the bug. Instead, she found familiar cursive writing.
Come to my house at once. It’s an emergency.
Somehow, Max Earlwell had known exactly where to find her.
Chapter 19
Dixon stood beside the truck in the dark, his boots shuffling upon the gravel. He looked uncertainly at the structure in the middle of the woods, a doll’s house carved from steel and encased in wall-sized panels of bulletproof glass. Lights burned in nearly every room: in the library, in the kitchen, in the billiard room, in the study, in the little nooks above the glass staircases. Max’s workborn servant, a man Lila knew to be more than a mere butler, strode through the parlor with a duster, his golden coat and black breeches still ironed and crisp so late in the evening.
His eyes never lifted from his wristwatch, a wristwatch that likely wasn’t a watch at all.
Lila scanned the trees, wondering where the cameras had been hidden this week.
Are you sure Max Earlwell lives here? Dixon wrote.
Lila nodded, understanding his confusion. If you knew the right people, then you’d heard whispers about Max Earlwell, the best spy in Saxony. Few knew the location of his strange house, though. Fewer still dared to get close. Max would see those people long before they saw him, launching a few spies to learn all they could.
