Chapter 68
I wasn’t in a hospital this time.
The bed was too comfortable, the room too spacious. Moonlight spilled from a skylight twenty feet above.
Familiar smells enveloped me: Grandpa Dwight’s tung-oil furniture polish that smelled like petrichor. Merwin’s laundry soap with its hint of sage. I was in my old cotton pajamas, lying between linen sheets, under one of the family’s handsewn quilts, soft from decades of use.
On my bedside table was a plate of Beatrice’s shortbread cookies, smelling of butter, caraway, and maple syrup.
Home.
Sitting up, I felt bruised ribs from colliding with the turnstile. My back ached from landing flat on the marble floor.
Nothing like the blow to Sebastian’s head—he’d be concussed, or worse. The fight replayed in my mind. I’d stayed back, throwing books, leaving him to close without me.
We were both faster than Cyrus. We should have run—out the main exit, straight past him. But Grandmother had been there too, hidden in the dark, quietly lethal.
We could’ve bolted up the stairs and climbed down from a second-floor window, out the rear of the building. Onto the road and away. But we’d let ourselves be drawn into a fight, reliving the killing of Uncle Max—me throwing, Sebastian stabbing. Had he escaped?
He’s lost. They all are, except you.
I couldn’t think about that. I couldn’t not.
I got out of bed, stretched, and started looking for a way out.
The skylight was the only window. There were two doors. One opened onto a bathroom, my toothbrush from Helshire already in the medicine cabinet. The other door had no handle and lay flush with the wall; no hint of a draft. The room let in no sounds—no wind, no birds, not even an electrical hum.
I went through all the estate’s buildings in my head, trying to place where this could be. I’d explored every nook and cranny of my home. There was no space for a hidden room this large.
Was I underground?
My overstuffed armchair was here, a dresser full of clothes, a shelf of textbooks—they didn’t want me falling behind, even now.
One of the walls was covered with climbing holds, my chalk bag and an old pair of split-toed shoes waiting at the bottom.
The family didn’t want me to get bored, or out of shape.
Or hungry. Next to the cookies sat a picnic hamper, the tumbler and water jug Peter had made me in his pottery phase. The overstuffed armchair was the one I used to sit in when visiting my mother, before she decreed it too dusty and sent it to my room.
Safe. Cozy. Home.
None of this is your fault. We set you up.
I ate a cookie, washed my hands, and hoisted myself to the top of the climbing wall. I couldn’t reach the skylight, not even with a wild swing. Hanging there, I thought about what Grandmother had told me before the needle.
You’ve done nothing wrong. It was all in service of the family.
I’d betrayed them, and now they’d want me to betray Bianca and Regina, Divya and Kumar, Hendrik and Leopold, and Arabella. I knew where Sebastian was hiding.
I could burn down two generations of Care.
Cyrus had trained me in pain resistance. But did those long-ago lessons apply to my new self ? I cried listening to Mozart now.
That’s when I realized what I hadn’t seen among my things.
I climbed back down and searched the bedside table, then the medicine cabinet. I even went through the pockets of the clothes in the dresser.
My pills were missing. Not an oversight.
Without the pills, my brain would swell. Veronica had warned me that missing even one risked confusion, seizures, delusions. Maybe a stroke.
They didn’t have to torture their darling prodigy, did they? Not when I would simply crumble from within.
This room was everything I loved about my family. The food and furniture we made ourselves, from scratch. The clothes passed down from hand to hand. The history, which meant we were never alone. We carried our family not only in our phones, but in our mouths, against our skin.
But there was always something missing. Something as small as the right pill, and just as vital.
We were cruel. We were heartless.
Whatever happened to me in this room would hurt.
Which only meant that Sebastian and I had made the right choice. Our family needed to be pulled down, made powerless.
I had to protect Care from the Mortons, no matter the cost.