“Compensation,” I say as I lift the bottle of plum wine. “It’s mulled. Winslow insisted. Said I looked like a man who really fuckin’ needed it.”
“Rude.”
“True.” I tip the bottle toward the lamp, and the glass glows dark ruby. “Want to try some?”
“I . . . I’ve had it once before.”
“Illegal confession?”
She snorts. “Hardly. I had a sip just before my eighteenth birthday. Elspeth would’ve let me have more if I’d asked. She loved pretending to be scandalized and then handing me whatever I wanted.”
“Yeah? And you wanted a lot of things?”
“Actually, yes.”
I stand because it gives me something to do. The little cupboard at the end of the landing holds a pair of short tumblers and one ancient enamel mug with a chip in it. Blue rim, white body. I hold it up.
“Which one?”
“The mug,” she says, smiling properly now. “Obviously.”
I pour us both a finger or two of wine. It’s a little warm and spiced just right; the cloves hit first, then cinnamon, then that round plum flavor that always tastes like someone solved winter for ninety seconds.
I hand her the mug. Our fingers brush. There it is again—that foolish pulse.
She lifts the mug and takes a careful sip. The lamplight puts a little gold in the brown of her irises. Honey and cinnamon and all things soft. She swallows, shuts her eyes, and huffs a laugh at herself.
“I forgot,” she says. “How it tasted. How it feels like ... warmth from the inside out.”
“Goes to your elbows first,” I say. “Then your knees. Then right behind your ribs.”
She points to my tumbler. “You forgot head. It definitely goes to my head.”
“That’s because your head’s a very busy place.”
She looks down into her drink, choosing to let me have that one, and I choose to be grateful. I take my own sip. The heat rides the spice; my shoulders let out a thick knot.
“You want to know something?” she asks, voice conversational like we’re on our second glass instead of our first. “Even as a child, I always thought of myself as selfish.”
“That right?”
I’ve called her the word a thousand times in my head. Selfish. Flighty. Unmoored. But now, hearing it from her, it curdles. My chest tightens. I’m not so sure I like the way it sounds anymore.
“My mom shipped me off whenever she could. Camp. Cousins. Here. I don’t think she meant it as cruelty. I think she genuinely believed she wasn’t equipped. I was ... a lot. Loud where she wanted quiet, quiet where she wanted presence. Routines, rules, textures. Those things matter to me. They didn’t to her. So, the solution was to send me where I was easier.”
I rub the pad of my thumb over the new bandage. “Easier for whom?”
“For her,” Elsie says. “And maybe for me, in some ways. Because I learned a lesson: with her, love was a reward for not being a burden. You make yourself small, neat, convenient, and you get your mother’s affection.”
Pressure keeps building behind my sternum. I take another drink to buy my mouth a second. “You weren’t small here, though?” I finally ask. “Were you?”
“No.” She smiles into the mug. “I was feral here, and Elspeth let me be. I could be stubborn and wild without reproach. I could line up the spoons from longest to shortest and leave them that way, and she’d work around it. I could say no to certain sweaters, and she wouldn’t laugh. She made the world a place I could live in.”
“And yet,” I say, because I’m an idiot who can’t leave well enough alone, “you left.”
“I left because I built my entire life out of holding my breath until it was time to come back to Blue Willow. You can’t do that forever, can you? I had to know I could survive outside this place.”
I shake my head. The urge to argue—to point at the walls and the lamp and the way the house has been bending toward her since she arrived—rises like a tide. I watch it. I let it break and go out again.
