I am not alone.
As I run my finger across the letters, across days and days of work, my hand trembles. Not with fear or even exhaustion, but with something familiar. Something deep and old.
I think of what Mama used to say before the sickness swallowed her whole. Before she took her final breath in the room just above my head. Before my world grew infinitely darker.
“Generations of Wilde women have lived here before you, my darlings.” She held our hands as she told us of them, Millicent and me. My Millie. “And there’ll be generations who come after, God willing. This house is ours. And theirs. And if you ever need help, you just ask the walls, whisper to the shadows. Wilde women live here, Wilde women remain here, and if you believe it, they just might find a way to protect you as they have always protected me.”
Her words are stitched into my skin, part of my very being. I repeat them in my head often, when the thunder is too loud, when his temper is the worst. When I feel the most dreadfully alone.
I whisper them under my breath, as if they were a spell.
Wilde women live here.
This is our home, not his. Never his.
Never theirs.
He doesn’t know that, but he will. He thinks I am broken. Dirty as the floor I live on. There are times when I believe it, too.
But then I hear them. The whispers of my mother. Of hers, though I never knew her voice. And when they come to me in those dark moments, I remember.
I remember how the firelight looked in her eyes. How she loved me. I remember how her voice could warm a room, make everything better. I remember the night we ran, how we stayed in the orchard until the bad man was gone. I remember how she held us, that night and others, and told us the blood in our veins runs deep. Strong as the current in the river and wide as the roots of the oldest trees.
It’s in those quiet moments I remember that I am a Wilde woman.
And so long as Foxglove stands, I am never alone.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CORINNE WILDE - PRESENT DAY
Every hair on my body stands at attention at the sound coming from below. Lewis’s safety is in the back of my mind, but all I can think about is Taylor. Here in this cabin. Here under these floorboards. Here all this time.
I dart down the stairs, rushing to my baby. Preparing for the worst.
But what I find is…
“Mom?”
My breathing catches at the sight of my mom. She’s tied up, a long piece of silver tape across her mouth and ropes wrapped tightly around her arms and waist. Her wrists and ankles are secured with cords and she’s lying on her side in the dirt, her graying blonde hair caked with blood.
It’s a scene from a horror movie, like the one I imagined the first time I came down here.
“Mom.” I hurry across the cellar to her, trying to decide what to do first. She’s thin, sickly so. Probably twenty pounds lighter than the last time I saw her three months ago.
I lift my hand to her mouth. Gently, I take hold of one corner of the tape. She winces, squeezing her eyes shut as I pull itoff. Her mouth opens, her lips cracked and bleeding, and I spot something black between her teeth.
Carefully, I pull it out. A sock.
She releases a shaky breath.
“I…I don’t understand.” I swallow, blinking back tears. “How are you here? I just spoke to you.”
A tear falls down her cheek, and when she speaks, her voice is soft. “It wasn’t me.”
“What are you talking about? It was.”
“It was him.” She closes her eyes, dropping her head forward. “I’m so sorry.”
