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She’d only felt cloth like this when she was young and she would grab onto Mama June’s skirts. Or when she would get into the giant chest in the corner of her room that Mama June had said held her mother’s clothes. Mrs. Flagton’s clothes had always been as stiff and rough as her own black dress.
“I’ll need to try them on.”
“I imagined.” He looked to the door. “I’ll leave you to it.”
“No, I don’t know how they fasten and I might need your help.” She looked over her shoulder. “I can change behind the screen.”
He dropped the lavender dress into her hands and she took it, clutching it to her chest as she walked over to the changing screen along the inner left corner of the room.
As quickly as she could, she stripped out of her black dress, leaving her short stays and chemise in place, and put the lavender dress on slowly, the fabric of it slipping across her skin like the softest kitten. She honestly didn’t care if it fit properly or not—anything was better than the atrocity of the black dress she’d been stuck in for the last seventeen years. It’d been replaced over the years, of course, as she changed size or wore out the seams, but it was always the same. Sober. Respectable. Cheap.
Her fingertips ran along the skirt, making it wave, watching the light catch it as it floated about her body.
Beautiful. Pure beauty wrapping her for the first time in her life.
“I almost killed you, Pen.”
Her head jerked up. Strider had been silent and she had been lost in a reverie of the fabric.
Had he just said what she thought he did?
The rear of the lavender dress still gaped open along her back, so she set her hand on her chest, holding the cloth in place as she poked her head out past the edge of the wooden screen. “What? When?”
Strider still stood by the bed, his feet planted, across the room. His gaze travelled from the floor to her face and his light brown eyes looked like ghosts had visited—sad, vacant, living in another time. “When we were nine—that time after the fire when I couldn’t take care of you—even though I swore I would. You almost starved to death. I failed you so utterly the only option was to send you back again and again to that bloody deranged family.”
She stepped around the screen and walked halfway across the room to him, the skirt of the dress dragging behind her on the floor. “Strider—no. You never failed me.”
“I did. I couldn’t take care of you and I almost killed you.”
“You were nine. I was nine. We were too young.”
“Nine was old enough.” His voice was flat, emotionless. “I survived. I should have been able to save you too—save you from them. You begged me so many times and I couldn’t do it.”
Her eyes closed, her throat clenching. “Do you remember what you said to me that last time?”
His mouth clamped closed, his eyes darkening down to the depths of Hades. He nodded.
“You said I was a load you couldn’t carry. Useless. I was holding you down.” She winced slightly, the words still carving painfully into her chest. “And I was. I was all of those things. You needed to do it—send me back to them again and again—or I wouldn’t have survived. You were right. I wouldn’t have survived and I would have brought you down with me.”
His head gave a slight shake. “I didn’t even try.”
“No—you tried for a year—I tried for a year.” Her fingers curled into the satin of the dress at her chest. “Do you not remember how hard we tried to be fine—just the two of us? We struggled every day just to make it to the next. We wanted to be fine, but we weren’t. That was the harsh truth of it.”
She jabbed another step forward, her stare pinning him. “You—you were the only one between the two of us that was strong enough—had the mettle—to call it what it was. To send me to the Flagtons. And then to send me back to them again and again. If you hadn’t, I would have died. Or become a child prostitute. Or starved to death. You chose to do the only thing that was going to keep me alive.”
He wouldn’t look at her, his glare going to the upper corner of the room above her head. “But how I did it—”
“Yes. You were cruel and I hated you for it. I hated you for so long for what you said to me.” Her shoulders lifted in a shrug, slipping out of the loose sleeves of the dress. “But cruelty was the only thing that was going to work. You were always like that, Strider. You were kind or you were cruel. There was never an in between with you. I have always lived in the middle, but you—you always knew—to the marrow of your bones—what was right or wrong in your world.”
“Except that what I did was wrong and I crushed the one person I swore I would protect.”
“You did.” She nodded. “But, you were right to do it. Be cruel.”
His look finally dropped to her, his voice a low rumble. “I never meant the words, Pen.”
“I know—or I think I know,” she said, her voice soft. “Or I hope. Maybe it was a lie I told myself, and it took me years to come about to it—long after I saw you again in the Port of Veracruz for I still hated you then for it—but I understand now why you did what you did that last day.”
“No need for hope or a lie.” His gaze cut into her, so heated it made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. “That is the truth of it. I never meant those words. Never.”
