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“Don’t tell your father,” Mum whispered.
Suddenly the overhead light in the kitchen went on.
“Cookies!” Tomo screeched, and zoomed across the room.
It was like the world had been flipped instead of a light switch. Their bright ordinary kitchen was a jarring contrast to secrets in the dark.
“Don’t try to eat five things at once, Tomo—remember the time you sneezed lemon meringue,” said Mum, relaxing and ruffling Tomo’s silky black hair.
Tomo was Mum’s favorite. He was the baby, and the one it was easiest to make happy. He made Mum sure of her ground as a mother, Kami supposed: he always made her smile. She was smiling now, faintly, as she reached out and patted Kami’s arm.
“Please just stay clear of him,” she said, and Kami realized Jared was the Lynburn her mother was most afraid of.
“Whoever he is, I agree with your mother,” said Dad as he entered the kitchen. “Stay away from him. Stay away from them all until you’re of marrying age. Once you reach a nice, mature fifty-four, gentlemen callers will be welcomed here.”
Ten slipped out from behind him and made a beeline for the bakery box, where he politely stole the lone brownie from under Tomo’s nose.
“Camilla, Henry, Thomas, you greedy monsters,” Dad said. “Not a crumb left for your father? That’s it, you’re not my children. You’re just sad, bald monkeys I won from circus folk in a poker game.”
Ten retreated with his prize and went back to lean against Dad’s leg. He split the brownie in two and offered half silently up to Dad.
“Well,” Dad conceded, “I guess you might be my kid after all.”
Ten smiled his rare smile, Mum’s smile, then hid it against Dad’s shirt. Ten had Mum’s bronze hair, brown with gold running through it, and Mum’s dark gray eyes in his thin face. He followed Dad as Dad made his way to the counter, a solemn bespectacled moon orbiting his sun.
Dad took Mum’s face in his hands and pulled it down two inches to kiss her mouth. “Claire,” he said.
“Jon,” said Mum, “please stop calling our children by names other than their own.”
Dad released Mum and grinned. “Aren’t those their names? I could’ve sworn they were.”
Mum had been the one who insisted on celebrating her children’s Japanese heritage. Kami was pretty sure she’d got the names Kami, Tenri, and Tomo out of books, since Dad and Sobo had always acted like the whole thing was a bit silly.
“Let me tell you about my day, Claire of my heart,” said Dad. “First the Gallagher account decided they wanted to change their logo. Your knight, slaying graphic design tirelessly for your sake, was not daunted, but then—even before my tea break—”
Mum smiled. Kami did not know if it was the memory of that last whisper in the dark, that “Don’t tell your father,” that made Kami wonder how well Mum had known Rob Lynburn.
Ten hovered and Dad drew him in with a hand on his shoulder. Dad loved Ten best, because Ten needed someone to love him best.
Kami stood on one end of the counter and watched her family, who she had never thought would keep secrets from each other, her parents each with their favorite child, and felt a little bleak.
You’re my favorite, Jared told her.
Kami looked out from the warmth of her kitchen and pretended that through the woods and up the hill, she could make out the lights of Aurimere House.
Yes, she told him for the second time that day. I know.
Aurimere was so cold at night, Jared kept expecting to step into one of the hallways and find it had turned into one of the wind tunnels the streets of San Francisco could become in winter.
Jared had been sticking to a three-stops plan for more than a week: bedroom, kitchen, and out the door. Now he was going off the map. This curving staircase was part of the empty bell tower attached to Aurimere. The stone steps were deep, the edges of a few jagged, and every step was a step into darkness. But Jared was used to blind curves. He took another step, then another, and came out blinking into what he thought for a second was yet another freezing hallway.
Then he found himself staring at a pair of frosty blue eyes. Ash’s cool eyes were immediately recognizable, even in oils dark with time, in the face of a guy wearing a powdered wig and a blue satin coat. Jared took a moment to smirk at the idea of Ash in that getup, then turned away.
The gallery was lined with the accusing stares of his ancestors. They stood in two rows on either side of him, in rich frames and rich clothes. They looked like history, people important enough to have changed the future and be preserved in time. They looked down at him as if he did not belong there.
Jared glared back at the faces. He already knew that. It was ridiculous, him even being here. Their whole apartment in San Francisco would have fit into this portrait gallery three times over. He felt as if all the cold shadows in this house wanted him to use the servants’ entrance.
Jared kept walking down the hall past rows of dead aristocrats. He was looking for someone. Then he saw her name, ELINOR LYNBURN, in faded gold on black wood. She looked even weirder than the dude in the white wig. She was wearing a cone-shaped headdress with a veil, and she seemed to be bald, which was hard luck on Elinor.
