“What do you mean?”
She sighs and shifts back onto her elbows, reclining against the rugs and stretching her feet toward the hearth. “We lived out in the middle of nowhere—not really the city proper. My moms have an estate on hundreds of acres; the nearest neighbor is miles away.”
“Don’t you have school friends?”
“I didn’t go to school,” she says. “My parents were the kind of rich people who felt that spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a small army of private tutors was a better investment than Emma Willard. Of course, that meant Quinn was my only friend—and they started at Yale when I was eight. That left the tutors. And the dogs, naturally.”
I assume Quinn is Ellis’s sibling; clearly the Haley parents have a fondness for surnames as first names.
After a moment I lie back as well, settling in close enough that I can feel Ellis’s chest rising and falling with every breath, my head nestled in the crook of her shoulder. “Is that why you started writing? Because you were bored?”
“Maybe. Probably.” She drapes a hand over her eyes. “Yes.”
I turn my face toward her and inhale; her hair’s still wet, but it smells like lemon.
“My mother’s crazy,” I confess. It’s easier to say when Ellis can’t see me. “Better now, perhaps; or perhaps she’s traveling so often I don’t notice anymore. But when I was younger…you never knew which version of her you would get. Maybe today she thinks you’re the best person in the world, or maybe not. Maybe her life is falling apart and it’s all your fault.”
Or maybe she’s drowned herself in another bottle of vintage Clicquot and needs you to rescue her again.
Ellis doesn’t say anything. I’m grateful for that—I don’t know that there’s anything she could say that would be better than silence. Her hand falls from her face to drape across my knee instead, the two of us like twin corpses side by side. Her eyes are still shut.
“She never saw herself as the problem, though,” I go on. “First it was my anxiety that was the culprit. Then, after Alex, it was that. She was so humiliated by the idea that she’d produced me. Like it was the worst sin in society, to parent a child who…who had to be institutionalized. All I want is to be better than her.”
The confession falls out of me like a stone. And once the words are spoken, I can’t take them back.
I half expect Ellis to laugh and tell me how I’ve failed, that my mother was right to be ashamed.
But instead Ellis lets out a heavy breath. “Well. My parents were never around, but I have to admit…maybe I lucked out on that front.” She looks at me now, turning her head so that our noses all but brush. Her breath is warm against my lips, her face so close I can see every delicate pore.
All of a sudden my heart beats a little faster. I can’t stop thinking about the way Ellis moved with that sword in her hand, sweat-slick and intentional.
I sit up too abruptly, digging my nails into the rug beneath us. “I have to go,” I say. “I just remembered I owe Wyatt revisions by Monday.”
Ellis pushes herself up more slowly, but she doesn’t get off the floor when I stand. “All right. Will we be seeing you for dinner?”
“Oh. I don’t…maybe. We’ll see.”
“Felicity, wait.” Ellis stops me when I’m already halfway out of the room. I pause and look back over my shoulder; she’s still sitting on the floor, firelight flickering off the wet gleam of her hair. “I was thinking…”
For a moment she almost looks her age, the set of her features softer somehow, lips parted. But then the effect passes and she’s Ellis again.
“The next Night Migration…perhaps you should take the lead again. Half the point of this project is my proving magic doesn’t exist. So why don’t you teach us some magic?”
My breath has stopped moving in my chest; my blood has gone still in my veins. I blink. And in that split second I see her again—Margery Lemont—her pale face rising behind Alex’s frame.
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”
Ellis tilts her head. “Why not?”
“I shouldn’t be doing magic. Not anymore.”
“You’ve done magic already. You initiated me into the Godwin coven, didn’t you?”
“That wasn’t magic. That was just a ritual.”
“What’s the difference? It doesn’t need to be anything dark and terrifying. One of us can cut her finger and you can attempt a healing spell, if you like. But I want to give you a fair chance to prove magic is real before I disprove it for good.”