Martin caps the pen and sets it down on the table. I fear I’ve said too much, and all while he’d been trying to work. But when he opens his mouth to answer, his tone is calm.
“Candace was quite ill before she died,” he says. “The more her condition declined, the quieter Kat became, and she’d been a quiet child to begin with.”
“She must have loved her mother very much.” I watch Martin carefully to see if he will react in a way that will clue me in to his own level of grief. His beautiful face is unreadable.
“Yes.”
“And Candace’s parents? Were they of help to you with Kat during this terrible time?”
“No.”
He says the word effortlessly, as though it doesn’t pain him to say it. As though he’d not been surprised his in-laws hadn’t helped him and Kat walk that hard road since surely they were traveling it as well. “Whyever not?”
“We were not on friendly terms.”
“Why is that?”
He studies me for a moment, as though he is now watchingmecarefully, gauging how much he will tell me about the intricacies of his first marriage. “They’d planned for Candace to marry someone of substantial means—someone like them—and instead she married me. That was a disappointment to them.”
“But... but even so, surely they cared about their granddaughter?”
“Kat has never been an exceptionally sociable creature. Even before she stopped talking, she was a sober child who kept to herself. Her grandparents, the few times they saw her, found that behavior bizarre.”
“Are you saying they don’t have affection for their own grandchild?”
“Didn’t.”
“Didn’t?”
“Candace’s mother died of pneumonia last year. And I hear her father is not well.”
Poor Kat. Poor Martin. Poor dead Candace. My heart strangely aches for all three of them. How wounded Martin must be inside, and how hard it must be for him to pretend he isn’t.
As if he can read my thoughts, Martin gathers up the papers and the tablet and places them in a leather satchel resting at his feet. He closes it in a gesture that seems to bring the gavel down on the conversation. “Why don’t you rouse Kat and we’ll have breakfast?” He rises from the sofa with his satchel in hand and I follow him out of the room. He heads for the library next to the room we have just left. As I pass by the open door, I see him open a drawer in the doctor’s old desk and flip through some papers. He glances up, sees me, and waits for me to continue on up the stairs.
When I open Kat’s door, she is sitting on her bed, already dressed in a too-tight, too-short dress of pale pink and holding the broken doll against her chest. Her cinnamon-brown hair is a tangled mess from sleep, but her eyes—so very like Martin’s—are bright pools of topaz with not a hint of slumber clinging to them. Has she been awake for a while? Was she able to hear the conversation taking place directly below her on the first floor? It is impossible to tell from the blank expression on the child’s face.
I reach for the hairbrush that I placed atop the bureau last night, and then I sit down beside Kat on her bed. “Did you sleep all right in your new room, love?”
She looks at me, her eyes communicating an answer that I can’t decipher.
“I think today we should buy some new bedcovers for you in a color that you like. Do you have a favorite color?”
The girl looks down at her lap. I wonder if her gaze is drawn to the hazy pink hue of her dress.
“Pink, maybe?” I say.
She nods, and it is almost like hearing her voice.
“I love that color, too. Would you like one braid or two?”
Kat slowly holds up two fingers.
“Two it is, then. Can you turn a bit toward your pillow, love?” She obeys and I put the brush to her head and begin to gently loosen the tangles. “My best friend growing up had hair this color. So very pretty.”
To fill the silence as I attend to Kat, I ramble on about how my mother used to braid my own hair too tightly and how my midnight blue hair ribbons had been my favorite.
“There,” I say when the plaits are done. “You look very pretty. And we’re getting some new clothes for you today. Won’t that be a treat? You’re getting so tall. You’ve outgrown all your dresses.”
