Prologue
Violet
“Doyouthinkthere’snormal out there for us?” I asked Theo, looking at him from across the parched grass covered picnic blanket.
It had been a dry summer, no rain, only heat from the sun cooking all the green. And Theo had stolen me away for an afternoon, our parents at some function they wouldn’t allow me to know anything about.
After spending weeks on end staring out at what of the world was visible from my window, to be out in it was… overwhelming, overstimulating. But Theo brought me back, like he always did.
A bee bumbled its way over our slices of apple, and Theo gently shooed it away.
“This is our normal,” he replied, shoving a chunk of bread into his mouth, chewing it while he watched me accept that. He knew I never would. It was his fault I wasn’t the wallflower they’d tried to create. “Sneaking out past the nannies when the parents are away.”
I scoffed. Theo had my nannies wrapped around his little finger. Whenever Theo wanted, they let him take me outside. As long as my parents weren’t home, as long as the guards had left with them, the nannies were sympathetic. They looked the other way as he piled food into a tote bag and unlocked my door, dragging me away from the house and into the sun.
“That’s not fair,” I responded, every bit of my fourteen-year-old self getting frustrated. I hated that Theo and Charlie had the freedom to leave, that they could go and live how they wanted outside the walls I spent all day looking at.
I imagined the walls crumbling down, crushing the guards beneath, their guts popping out of their bellies and spraying over the yellow lawn.
“Why are you smiling if it isn’t fair?” Theo bopped me on the nose, and I caught his gaze, giving him a half-hearted scowl. I said nothing, and his smirk dropped. “What are you imagining in that head of yours?”
“A way out.”
Theo ate another piece of bread before offering me a chunk, slathering it in melty butter first. I took it with a faint smile and tried to focus on this. The small good. The little moments I got when I wasn’t locked out of sight.
“Normal for us is sneaking around for a moment of happy, a moment of sun,” Theo murmured, his words catching in his throat. Not from tears, I checked, but anger. His jaw grew tense, his eyes hard as he looked away, towards the house.
My hand found its way onto his arm, and I gave it a little squeeze. “This is making me happy,” I told him. “You know the way to my heart is through bread and cheese.”
His little excursions with me always involved food. Mother kept me on a strict diet because my body seemed to cling to calories like I was an elephant or something equally enormous and disgusting - that’s what she always said. I never minded my thighs or my stomach, almost as if it were a quiet rebellion from my body, but she hated it. Hated that I had thighs that spread when I sat down, or that my boobs had come in early and showed no signs of slowing their growth.
When she saw my belly a few days ago, she scowled and didn’t let me eat for the rest of the day. It never bothered me. I was happy with how I looked, as long as I wasn’t like her. My hair was darker, my features bigger, my body carried more fat. I was not my mother’s daughter, and I never would be.
“That’s all I ever want in life, you know,” Theo said, his voice sad again. “For you to be happy.”
“I wish we could run away,” I murmured.
He looked at me then, his eyes bright, a little shiny with unshed tears, his jaw tight, fierce. “We will.” He shifted his weight, coming closer to me on his knees. “One day we will. We’ll run, and it’ll be only us. No parents telling us what to do or how to live. This normal will be gone.”
My heart stuttered like it wanted to believe. Oh god, did I want to believe it. I imagined our life, full of joy and food and laughter, just me and my big brother, happy and quiet in our lives. Far from all of this, free in an enormous city or sprawling landscape filled with cute animals and roads that led everywhere.
But it wasn’t possible. We were Lewis’s, our lives weren’t our own. Trained from birth to be what our father demanded of us.
“Your normal is going to change now, anyway,” I said, watching a butterfly as it skittered over the nearby flowers. Vines snaked up the fence surrounding the property; it could have been pretty if it wasn’t a prison. “You’ll get to live outside of his thumb.”
“No, sweetheart, I won’t.” He was keeping something from me; that was obvious from the sadness in his tone. Despite how much he loved me, how close we were, he never shared what he didn’t think I could handle. He kept as much from me as they all did.
He protected me as best he could, often the one to force my parents to let me leave a room I was uncomfortable in, or to stop talking to me like I was a piece of dirt at the dining table, he stood up for me, but nothing changed.
“But we have this,” he continued, taking my hand and giving it a squeeze. “We’ll always have each other, so that’s all that matters, yeah?”
I nodded, squeezed him back. “Right.”
At dinner that night, one of the rare times they allowed me to sit with everyone while we ate, my life tipped upside down. Our parents had arrived home early, ruining the end of our picnic when the nannies came rushing out to hurry me back to my room. There was something in the air then, something that made my skin prickle.
“Theo is going to the USA, following Charlie’s footsteps to get an excellent education,” Father told us, proud as punch as he cut into his steak.
Theo bristled, but didn’t look surprised. He was across from me, pushing his food around his plate, refusing to meet my eye. Like he’d suspected this, like he knew. One of the many things he hid from me until he could no longer.
