This was where her heart was, or at least where it used to be. Why did the barn look so abandoned?
“I made furniture, mostly. People would buy it, even when they didn’t like me, even though they thought I was trouble, so I think ... I think I was good at it. And I did some carvings just for fun—whittled some animal figurines for some kids, things like that. Even a little metal-work.”
“You made those bookends you have,” Keith said, realizing it. He should have guessed that sooner: they were soher. “The scrap metal ones.”
“You noticed those?”
“Yeah, they’re incredible.” He touched the workstation and looked at the smudges his fingertips left behind in the dust. “You said ‘used to.’ Why did you stop?”
Iris whisked some more dust off one of the benches and sat down, tucking in close to Keith as he sat next to her.
“It’s kind of a long story.” She made it sound like a warning, like he might decide she was asking too much of him.
“I’ve got time,” Keith said.
9
“Inever fit in here,” Iris said. “My parents told me that even when I was a baby, I cried a lot more than Seraphina ever did, like I just couldn’t stop arguing with the world, couldn’t stop wanting things I wasn’t supposed to have.”
Her voice was dull, and Keith could tell she was repeating someone else’s words. This was how her parents described her. The sheer injustice of it made him smolder with rage. Babies cried, period. Her parents had no business making her feel bad about it, like there had been something wrong with her right from the start.
He wanted to say all that, but he wasn’t sure if she wanted to be interrupted. For now, he held his tongue—and held her hand.
“It didn’t get any easier as I grew up, either. I was always into something I shouldn’t have been. I played in the mud, I tried to color and wound up spilling paint on the floor. I talked too loud.”
Keith’s vow to stay quiet broke almost immediately. “That’s just kid stuff.”
“Did you do any of that when you were a kid?”
He pictured himself as he was in his earliest memories: a scared-stiff child who was fanatically neat, unbelievably quiet, and desperately lonely.
“No, but I would’ve been better off if I had. I know some people in the outside world with kids, and they’ve all just accepted that sometimes kids are messy and loud.”
“But not you,” Iris said, “and not Seraphina. My parents wanted another version of her, and they got me instead. You can’t blame them for being disappointed.”
“Yes, I can.”
