‘You look too young to be a grandmother,’ I blurted out quickly, too tired to mind my manners.
Her skin was porcelain pale and translucent, without a single visible blemish or line, and she wore her long red hair pulled back in a soft French pleat with not one grey strand in sight. There was no way she was old enough to have a sixteen-year-old granddaughter.
Catherine laughed loudly as she wrapped her arm around my shoulders, shepherding me into the parlour.
‘Oh, I like you already,’ she said, leaning her head against mine. ‘Ashley, darling, how was the flight?’
‘Awful, thanks for asking.’
My aunt peeled off her cardigan and cast it over the high back of a blue and white chair before rolling up her shirtsleeves. ‘How do we feel about tea?’
‘Sounds divine, and perhaps a little snack?’ Catherine looked down at me kindly, one questioning eyebrow raised. ‘Unless you’d like something more substantial? I myself cannot stand to eat a heavy meal when the weather is so ugly but you’re still a growing girl. We can’t have you going hungry.’
‘A snack sounds good,’ I mumbled, still struggling to find my voice. ‘Thank you again … Grandmother?’
The word lingered on the tip of my tongue as I tried it on. Nope, didn’t quite fit yet.
‘Why don’t you call me Catherine for now,’ she suggested as Ashley disappeared, leaving the two of us alone in the parlour. ‘And no more thank yous, that’s an order. There’s no need to thank family for being family.’
I bit my dry, chapped lower lip as she guided me to sit ona powder blue loveseat before dropping neatly onto the couch opposite. Catherine was so perfectly put together, I couldn’t help but feel like a schlub in my plane-rumpled travel outfit but if she was judging me as harshly as I was judging myself, it didn’t show. All I saw on her face was joy, her eyes lit up with delight and staring at me like I was the eighth wonder of the world.
‘We’ll do a tour of the house when you’ve had a chance to rest.’ She leaned forward and beamed at my hot, pink face. ‘Oh, Emily, you really are your father’s daughter, aren’t you? And I would recognize those eyes anywhere.’
‘The same as yours,’ I replied. ‘And Ashley’s.’
Catherine nodded and leaned back against the couch while I shifted around in my seat. Exhausted as I was, I couldn’t seem to sit still.
‘Scientists might call it a dominant gene,’ she said with a wink. ‘But as my grandmother would have said, there’s simply no denying a Bell.’
Only I wasn’t a Bell. Or at least I hadn’t known I was until Ashley showed up twenty-four hours earlier. Yesterday, I was Emily Caroline James, sixteen-year-old daughter of Paul and Angelica James, the father who died when his car smashed into a tree during a springtime storm two months ago, and the mother I lost when I was just a baby. Yesterday, I was at home in Wales, an orphan. Now I was in Savannah, gazing into the face of a dead woman.
Chapter Two
‘It’s hard to know where to begin, isn’t it?’ Catherine said, reading my mind, or at least the look on my face. ‘You must have a lot of questions.’
‘A few.’
The silken wallpaper in the parlour was painted, just like the walls in the foyer, but in here, the artist had chosen a gentle blue over sage green with white clouds overhead and willowy trees surrounding us on all four walls. Their branches were full of songbirds and curled carefully around the arched sash windows at the front of the house. I almost expected to look down and see the forest floor beneath my feet instead of polished floorboards, it was so realistic. Above the ornate marble fireplace at the heart of the room was a huge mirror that threatened me with my own tired and sweaty reflection, and two heavy-looking gold candlesticks sat on either end of the mantle. As someone who grew up playing a lot of board games, they made me uneasy. Miss James in the parlour with the candlestick. I’d never been any good at that game.
‘When they came to tell me what had happened to your father, my heart was torn in two.’
I looked back at Catherine to see a single tear sliding over her high cheekbone. ‘It felt like I would die too. There has never been a pain like it.’
Wedging my hands tightly under my thighs, I tried not to fidget. She looked devastated, truly heartbroken, but if she loved my dad so much, why had he raised me to believe both of his parents were dead?
‘You wouldn’t believe the hoops they had me jump through to bring you home,’ she went on, wiping the tear away only for another to take its place. ‘The whole system is a disgrace. Forms on top of forms on top of forms, all of them keeping us apart for far too long. I should have been by your side the moment the accident occurred. I should have been there to bury my son.’
‘It’s not your fault.’
I thought of all the paperwork I’d seen passed around over the last few weeks, my name, dad’s name, doctors, dates, addresses. Who knew death required so much admin? I paused before speaking again, a question she had to know was coming lingering on the tip of my tongue.
‘Catherine,’ I began, still not sure which words to reach for. ‘May I ask you something?’
‘Anything,’ she replied right away.
I rolled my lips against each other, stalling. It wasn’t going to be an easy thing to say and I imagined an even more difficult thing to hear. There was no other way to phrase it but the facts.
‘My dad told me you were dead.’ I croaked out the words and she winced as though I had struck her. ‘Why would he do that?’
