Lyra thought about the dream, about her father’s gifts: a calla lily and a candy necklace.With only three pieces of candy.
“I promised you a single answer, Mr. Hawthorne,” Odette said, every inch the lawyer. “The rest, if you will recall, was shrouded inifs.”
“You promised to tell us how you knew Tobias Hawthorne.” Lyra wasn’t going to give up on getting answers. She couldn’t. “How you ended up on his List.”
Odette stared at Lyra for a moment longer, then turned to Grayson. “As you correctly surmised, Mr. Hawthorne, I used to work at McNamara, Ortega, and Jones. That is how we met, your grandfather and I. We parted ways roughly fifteen years ago, a mere nine months into my employment.”
Fifteen years.Lyra’s father had died on her fourth birthday. She was nineteen and change now.Roughly fifteen years.
“As you have likely also surmised,” Odette continued, “the nature of my relationship with Tobias was… complicated.”
Lyra thought about everything Odette had said about living and loving. About Tobias Hawthorne being the best and worst man she’d ever known. About the loves she would have gone to hell and back for—and had.
Draw your Hawthorne, the way I once drew mine.
“Do not pretend to have had a romantic relationship with mygrandfather.” Grayson’s voice was like sharpened steel. “The old man was very open about the fact that there was no one after his beloved Alice. ‘Men like us love only once.’ That is what my grandfather told my brother Jameson and myself, years before he died and years after you and he allegedly parted ways. I remember every word. ‘All these years, your grandmother has been gone, and there hasn’t been anyone else. There can’t and won’t be.’” Grayson breathed, in and out. “He wasn’t lying.”
“One logical conclusion,” Odette said in a lawyer’s tone, “is that, in Tobias’s eyes, I wasn’tanyone.” Her lips came together and then parted slightly. “He treated me likeno onein the end.”
Draw your Hawthorne, the way I once drew mine.
Lyra knew in the pit of her stomach and every bone in her body that Odette was telling the truth—and not as a distraction this time.
“Likewise,” Odette continued evenly, “I would point out that your grandfather referred to his wife asgone.”
Lyra’s mind raced. Her mouth was dry. “Not dead.Gone.”
“Enough.” Grayson had clearly reached his limit. “My grandmother was buried. She has a gravestone. There was a funeral—a very well-attended funeral. My mother has mourned her mother’s death for as long as I can remember. And you would have me believe she is alive? That she, what? Faked her death? That my grandfather knew—andallowed it?”
“Rest assured, he did not know—at first.” Odette turned toward ocean once more. “When we met, Tobias was still grieving the love of his life. The toll of burying Alice was etched into his face and body for everyone to see. And then there was me. Us.”
Fifteen years earlier, Odette would have been sixty-six, Tobias Hawthorne a few years younger.
“And then…shecame back.” Odette’s voice was nearly lost to arising wind, but Lyra heard so much more than just the words that had been spoken.
She. Alice. A Hawthorne.
“Tobias’s dead wife came to him and asked him to do something for her. Like they’d never parted. Like he had not literally buried her. He did as Alice had bidden. Tobias utilized me to accomplish that favor—used me for his true love’s ends—and then he discarded me and tried his level best to have me disbarred.”
There it was. The answer—the only answer—they’d been promised: how Odette had known Tobias Hawthorne and why she’d been on his List.
“What was the favor he had you help with?” Lyra asked.No reply.
“Once that favor was accomplished, am I to believe that my long-dead grandmother disappeared once more?” Grayson’s tone was impossible to read. “That my grandfather never said a word to anyone? Like mother, like son?”
Lyra was not, in that moment, capable of figuring out what that was supposed to mean.
“Here.” Odette pressed something into Lyra’s hands.The opera glasses.“They must have a use in the game still to come,” Odette told Lyra. “My game no longer.”
She really is leaving.
“If you are suffering from the misapprehension that we are done here, Ms. Morales,” Grayson said, his tone ominous, “allow me to cure you of that notion.”
Odette looked at Grayson like he was a little boy. “I’ve given far more than I owed, Mr. Hawthorne, and said far more than I should. The only proper answer to some riddles issilence.”
Lyra’s mind was never silent. Voices echoed through her memory—her father’s, Odette’s.A Hawthorne did this.
In the grandest of games, there are no coincidences.
