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So whohadbeen in line to inherit? Not Mom, after she left. And Caleb and Leopold hadn’t had a good relationship either. Maybe that wouldn’t have mattered, or maybe it was as Celia had suggested and Victoria would have inherited by default. Which once again made Roman a likely suspect if he wanted to hasten the process. I certainly couldn’t see Victoria doing it—unless, maybe, her husband had demanded it. She was so overwhelmed by him. Any time they were in a room together, she constantly glanced his way as if for approval.
Maybe I was thinking about it all wrong. Maybe it had nothing to do with who was going to inherit Harrow. Something else, then. Why did people kill? Money? Love? Revenge?
Jessamine had died when she was in Leopold and Iris’s care. Had it been their fault?
I looked at Sandra, working hard at pickling herself in pinot. Grief lay in her bones like a cancer, killing her just as surely. Caleb’s grief was softer, subtler, in the things he didn’t say, in the care with which he moved through the world.
I couldn’t imagine something more horrible than losing a child. If they blamed Leopold, I couldn’t rule them out.
I wanted to. I wanted to cross each and every one of them off the list. Roman, okay, fine, but everyone else? I’d never had family before, beyond Mom and Simon. Being in a room full of people who looked like me, who treated me like a person, wasastonishing. Even if this wasn’t exactly the picture of a Thanksgiving gathering you’d put on a postcard.
The tension between hope and suspicion left me jangling with nervous energy. I ate the rest of my meal without tasting it, and when it was finally over, I found myself restless. I wanted to go up and work on the bones, but the only one waiting for me was the fox skull, and every time I sat down with it, I could only stare, all ideas and instincts abandoning me.
“Want to take a walk?” Mom asked, catching up with me in the hallway. “I feel like I lost track of you two minutes after getting here.”
“To be fair, it takes a search party and a team of dogs to find each other in this place,” I pointed out.
“I’m actually going to miss tripping over each other every time someone has to go to the bathroom,” Mom confessed, and I laughed.
“Me, too,” I said, though that other life already felt so far away. I felt as if I’d always been at Harrow.
We wandered through hallways that were slowly becoming familiar to me. “Why didn’t I know Jessamine had died?” I asked her after a while. “I didn’t even know she existed.”
“She was born right before we left,” Mom said. “We never talked about my family. And when she died, you were really sick. By the time you got better, the funeral was over. You hadn’t known her, so I suppose I didn’t really think to break the news to you.”
“When was I sick?” I asked, frowning.
“Last year. Over Christmas,” Mom said. “Don’t you remember?”
“No.” I stopped dead. “I don’t remember being sick at all. Are you sure?”
She stared at me. “Of course I’m sure. You couldn’t even get out of bed for weeks. You were delirious. Eli even came down to help take care of you in the worst of it.”
“Wait, Eli came to our house?”
“I don’t even know how he found out. I don’t think I mentioned it to Caleb,” Mom said absently. “He was a real lifesaver. I’d hear you two talking. I assumed you remembered.” She frowned at me.
“Not even a little,” I said, bewildered.
“I don’t know what to tell you, hon.” Concern flickered briefly in her eyes, but she shook her head as if clearing away a fog, and her expression smoothed.
There wasn’t a gap in my memory, precisely—but I didn’t remember Christmas, it was true. It was like November and January had been stitched together seamlessly.
Just like the missing days between last week and today.
It was all connected, I was sure of it. The reason we’d fled. The missing girls. Jessamine’s death and Leopold’s.If I could only see how, I thought,I could find my way through this maddening spiral.
I couldn’t see it. Not yet.
But I thought I might learn a few more secrets tonight.
15
I DRESSED WARMLY,glad to finally have more than the same five outfits to cycle through now that Mom and Simon had brought back our things.
Bryony was waiting for me at the edge of the trees. She wore a skirt the color of midnight, spangled with constellations, and she’d put her hair up in a messy bun, baring her long, elegant neck. A draped wool cardigan had slouched down to her elbows as she stood with her arms crossed.
“I wasn’t expecting you to wait for me,” I said, immediately knocked off-balance.
