You Did Nothing Wrong

Chapter 1

ONE

It is in the dark that she loves him the most.

They’re both worn out by the time night falls and an inevitable softness has replaced the fractious fights they’ve left like teeth marks on each other’s skin.

She sees it as a gift, the dark, the way it curls a ribbon around his wrist and allows her to reel him close and tuck him into her lap without protest. It’s instinctual, a child’s craving for comfort when the lights go out, the way they whimper at the prospect of sleep, the loneliness of it.

She’s heard it said that sleep is similar to death, that fading of consciousness and loss of control.

When she props elbows on the edge of his mattress, chin on her fist, and watches his furrowed brow smooth as he falls still, all she can think is how peaceful and quiet and lovely he is.

And how easily he could be dead.

Sometimes she can’t bear looking at him like that and she has to slide careful fingertips across his chest until she feels the imperceptible rise and fall of delicate ribs. She will match her breathing to his until she convinces herself that she is his lungs, she is his heartbeat.

Elodie January is keeping alive this thing that she has made.

Her child, her world, her Jude.

They had a difficult day, though it blurs so seamlessly with yesterday’s harried wars that there’s a rhythmic predictability to it now.

She could set a clock by the predinner hungry meltdown, the refusal to eat what she cooked, the argument about not getting into the bath followed by not getting out.

He’s wound down enough that he’s agreed to pajamas—the fire truck ones that are far too small, elastic cuffs above his ankles, the collar ratty and chewed—and he’s now sequestered in the comfortable safety of the nursery.

His curls are still wet, his feet bare. She lost both the fight to use the hair dryer and the next one to put on socks.

She kneels by the dresser with its little bluebird knobs and folds his clothes before arranging them in the drawers.

New things, expensive things. She can afford to dress him in cable knits and cashmeres and organic cottons now, everything earthy shades of beige and brown and deep green.

Not that he cares about how their life has improved.

Sometimes she’s not even sure he understands the difference.

He busies himself lining up acorn cups for tiny wool mice and occasionally aiding in the cleanup game she’s tricked him into.

“Simon says…” She matches two of his socks. “Find ten blocks and throw them in the box at the same time.”

He abandons the acorn cups and searches for the blocks, trying to balance four, then six, then ten in his hands at once. Concentration furrows his brow and the tip of his tongue pokes out as he hurls the blocks. Only two miss, and he scrambles after them.

The games started when he was a toddler, something her foggy, sleep-deprived brain latched on to when she realized the lure they held for him, the way he lit up at the idea of playing. In reality, she was tugging at his strings like a floppy puppet.

He has just turned six, but the games still work. She needs them to work forever.

“Simon says…” She lowers her voice, conspiratorial. “Close up the dollhouse tight for the night.”

“But all its things are on the floor.” Jude frowns up at her and she has to playact serious consideration.

“Well, you can’t close it up if all the things aren’t inside,” she says. “Better fix it quick or you’ll lose.”

He squats and gathers tiny wooden furniture and thumb-size peg dolls and sets them back in the dollhouse, working fast because there is nothing he hates more than losing. Their games. Their fights.

There is something about her that sets him off, something about him that makes her feel like taffy pulled too far.

Years ago, she tried attending a mother’s group, though all she did was wither at the way they looked at her—the eyebrows rising, the condescending glances, the judgment at seeing a teenager with a toddler on her hip.

But she overheard a mother give a dry laugh as she relayed a story about her child refusing to eat a sandwich because she cut it “wrong.” Squares, not triangles.

He had to have triangles that day. Relief had rushed into Elodie because that meant it was normal, these little battles over everything, from getting dressed to eating to picking up toys.

She’d clung to that moment for years as Jude grew, turning three, then four, then five.

But his meltdowns never lessened, and her belief that every mother went through this slowly cracked around the edges.

He was her baby hurricane in a jar, and she had never been able to twist on the lid.

“I’m nearly there!” He shouts it, cramming toys into the dollhouse with anxious fervor. “Don’t let Simon say anything else yet.”

The dollhouse is a huge beast, coming up to his shoulders, handmade with Gothic turrets and working doors and slivers of real wallpaper and carpet.

Vintage, like everything in this nursery.

This is one of the few rooms Bren has finished renovating.

He went so far as to hire an artist to replicate the nineteenth-century wallpaper patterned with little foxes and hedgehogs and rabbits in tidy jackets so he could have it reprinted for authenticity.

The floorboards glow with a honey gloss, the mahogany shelves are piled with old-fashioned toys, and he restored a little bed carved with woodland creatures.

Jude is obsessed with running fingers over the animals’ embossed shapes as he falls asleep, his thumb in his mouth even though she reminds him that he’s too old for that.

He’s small for his age; he acts so much younger.

“Look, this baby could fit down the chimney.” Jude stands on tiptoes, holding a tiny wooden doll no bigger than his thumb and trying to post down the narrow chute.

“Don’t. It’ll get stuck,” Elodie warns, but he’s already switched to putting the doll in his mouth before she gives him a warning glare.

His frown is petulant, as if she only exists to spoil his fun, and he throws the baby onto an overturned doll bed. “Guess the house can eat you later.”

Elodie closes her eyes briefly and decides not to ask.

She lays the last clean clothes into the drawer and slides it closed before tugging the sleeves of her sweater over cold fingers.

November in Virginia has struck with a bite her Australian bones aren’t ready for, not even in thermal leggings and double socks.

She looks a mess this evening, but it’s been a long day.

Her curls are thick and unkempt, spilling about her shoulders dark as bitter chocolate, and her pale skin is almost translucent.

They are not dissimilar, she and Jude, he a paper doll cut from her scraps with the same thick curls and dark eyes.

His delicate face makes him look like a fine-boned fairy prince left among mortals.

She will always remember that day at the pediatrician’s office, Jude at three years old, the ink still wet on the referral to get him assessed.

He’s a beautiful little boy, though. You’d be surprised how much easier getting assistance goes when they look like darlings.

The way through it back then had been to smile pleasantly, to give a polite laugh that said she understood the comment was meant to lighten the situation, not underline the foulness of how that medical world treats children who aren’t quite typical.

But she hated that doctor and she tore up the referral on the bus ride home.

She needed then, as she needs now, nothing to make things harder for her child.

She is doing the right thing for him.

She is doing her best.

“Simon says,” she says, “give your mama a hug.”

Jude has finished with the dollhouse, but he hesitates, hopping from one foot to the other.

He considers her, the frown saying he’s not sure if a request like this should be part of his game of Simon Says, and she holds her breath to see if this is the mistake that will cost her the evening.

Everything has been going so well. The nursery is tidy, laundry done, a quiet lull has filled the space between him and her.

He scampers over and climbs into her lap, his knobby limbs everywhere at once and an elbow nearly clipping her chin as he snuggles into her. It’s a decent hug, because Simon so decreed it.

Elodie presses her mouth to the top of his head, breathing in soap and shampoo and little boy.

Already these golden, precious seconds feel like they’re sliding away too fast. He will get up; he will leave her.

She wants to fold him in half and crush him so deep into her chest that his heartbeat will thud against her own.

“It’s bedtime.” She tugs fingers through his curls, gently detangling the knots. “Do you want a story?”

“No.” The whimpering starts, half-hearted, though; he’s tired. “I heard a scary thing in the walls.”

“It might be mice.” She winces inwardly at yet another problem with this old house.

“No! I’ll show you.” Jude pops out of her lap, and she immediately misses the warmth of him. He clambers into the little woodland bed and presses his ear to the wall right above the headboard.

Bedtime procrastination never surprises her, but he isn’t often bothered by the half-dismantled state of this house that Bren has cheerfully insisted on renovating himself.

It’s an old Victorian, built sometime in the 1890s, beautiful but rotten at the edges.

Wind rattles through the cracks, the old wiring flickers, and she has lost count of the times she’s heard a foot depress on the floorboards upstairs while she’s been home alone.

Tricks of an old house. But it’s set her skin crawling more than once, and Jude is more sensitive to sounds than she is.

They’ve only been in this house, this country, for four months. It makes sense he’s still adjusting, still acting out after all the changes.