Hannah trails off, and Olivia can see a shine in her eyes, the warning of tears.
I grow wide, but you grow thinner by the day. I can see you withering. I am afraid tomorrow I will see straight through you. I am afraid the next, you will be gone.
“She didn’t say goodbye, but I saw the end in every word, and I knew—I just knew—something had happened.”
A single tear escapes down the woman’s weathered cheek.
“I worried, after, about you both. And when she didn’t write again, I feared the worst for Grace. But I had a feeling that you were out there. Perhaps it was just a hope. I began to make a list of places you might be, if you’d even been born, if she’d chosen to take you somewhere. But in the end, I couldn’t—that is, I never tried to find you.”
But someone did. Someone called her home.
“I think part of me hoped that you were somewhere safe.”
That word again—safe. But what is safe? Tombs are safe. Merilance was safe. Safe does not mean happy, does not mean well, does not mean kind.
“I’ve watched so many Priors wither here,” Hannah mutters to herself. “All to guard that blasted gate.”
Olivia frowns. She touches Hannah’s hand, and the woman startles, coming back to herself. “I’m so sorry,” she says, wiping the tears from her cheek and rising to her feet. “And here I just came to tell you there’s a pot of porridge on the stove.”
Olivia stares at Hannah as she hurries away, a hundred questions tangled in her head. Halfway to the door the woman stops, one hand diving back into her pocket. “Oh, I almost forgot,” she says, “I found this downstairs. I thought you might like it.”
She draws out a card the size of her palm and turns it toward Olivia, who stiffens at the image there. It is a portrait. A young woman’s face, looking off to one side. It could be a picture of her, in several years’ time, if the hair were darker, the chin a bit more pointed. But the look in the eyes is hers—all mischief—and she realizes two things.
That she’s looking at an image of her mother.
And that she’s seen her before.
Or rather, pieces of her, floating in the hall downstairs.
Which means that Hannah is right, and wrong. Her mother is never coming home.
She is already here.
Stay with me. Stay with me. Stay with me. I would write the words a thousand times if they’d be strong enough to hold you here.
Chapter Eight
Grace Prior is dead.
After all those years, Olivia knew her mother wasn’t coming back. And yet, there was always that narrow sliver of hope. Like a door left ajar. Now it swings shut.
She sinks onto the ottoman, the portrait in her hands.
What happened to you? she wonders, consulting the image as if it’s not static, a collection of lines and oil paint. As if it can tell her anything.
Why did you leave? she asks, knowing she means both Gallant and herself. But the girl in the portrait only looks away, as if distracted, already planning her escape.
Olivia blows out an exasperated breath. She’d have more luck, she thinks, asking the ghoul. Perhaps she will. She rises, setting the portrait on the desk, and starts toward the door, only to pass a mirror and realize she’s still in her nightgown.
Yesterday’s dress sits on the floor, drab, discarded. Her suitcase lies open, the second gray shift waiting there. These clothes belong to someone else, a student at Merilance, an orphan in a garden shed. Olivia cannot bring herself to put that life back on, to feel it against her skin.
She goes to the wardrobe and studies the dresses still hanging inside, trying to reconstruct her mother from swatches of fabric, to shape the image of a woman she has never known. They are all too large on Olivia, but not by much. A few inches spread across a body. A few years between. How old was Grace when she left? Eighteen? Twenty?
Olivia picks out a butter-yellow dress and a pair of flats, a size too large. Her heels slip out with every step, making her feel like a child playing dress-up in her mother’s clothes. Which, she supposes, is exactly what she is. She sighs and kicks off the shoes, resolving to go barefoot as she takes up her sketchpad and sets off in search of answers.
Gallant is a different place in daylight.
The shutters are open, the windows flung wide, the shadows retreating as daylight spills in and a cool breeze drives the stale air from the massive house. But the sun has lifted a veil, and she can see that the house is not quite so grand as she first thought. Gallant is an old estate, fighting the fall into disrepair, an elegant figure beginning to droop. Skin sagging a little over bones.