The room hums to her. Not audibly, but her blood sizzles, her bones rattle. Looking at this room is like looking at the sun, only she can’t stop. Books crowd the walls, stacked on every flat surface, wedged like bricks in the fireplace. Leather bound, paperback, hardcover, manuscripts both typewritten and scrawled out longhand.
Do you feel that?she almost asks James, but she knows this soft buzz, these whispering books, are for her alone.
“Definitely not a sex dungeon,” James says.
“What’s a sex dungeon?” Nelle hesitates at the doorway. The room feels sacred, untouched. She thinks twice before stepping in and defiling it.
Then a throat clears behind them, and she has no more time to think.
“That’s what you thought it was?” Penelope crosses her arms over her nightgown, her hair in a silk cap.
Nelle can approach this in two ways, and she hopes James will play along. She can either use Penelope’s conversation with Quill as her excuse for breaking into the room, or she can play dumb. Maybe she can’t explainwhyshe distrusts her great-grandmother, but she knows how to distract Penelope.
Just tell her the truth.
“I know it’s late,” Nelle says, “but ... there’s something I want to talk to you about. Secrets I’ve been keeping from you aboutwhoI am.WhatI am.” She reaches back to find James’s hand.
Penelope eases the library door shut. “Go sit down. I’ll put on tea.”
Twenty minutes later, Penelope not only listens intently to Nelle’s story—how Quill created her and imprisoned her for twenty-one years, how she escaped and has been exploring the world, Quill’s unexpected and unwanted visits, the vision of the cottage—but accepts it as fact. Maybe shewastalking to Quill. No sane person reacts to a story like that with calm understanding. Nelle shivers.
Penelope pours herself another cup of tea and stirs in a dash of cream. The spoontinksagainst the rim of the cup. She sips, and Nelle sees a response formulating under her methodical movements.
“Wallace has his mother’s curse,” Penelope finally says. “His father, Thomas, didn’t want to admit it, but I knew.”
“All I know about Lily is that she wrote poetry,” Nelle says, concealing her suspicions. She needs proof if she is going to risk ruining her relationship with her only loving family.
“Wallace and his mother were both writers. And avid readers.” Penelope walks to the doorway of the magnetic room. “This is my library. All of these were Wallace’s and Lily’s. Their personal collections and their own works.” She pauses as if thinking twice, then nods into the room. “Take all the time you need.”
Nelle hesitantly enters the small library. She spins once, twice, before sitting back on the chaise, overwhelmed by the sheer volume of books. It’ll take her days to peruse them all, if she evenwantsto. Quill only ever brought her misery, so reading his and Lily’s—hergrandmother’s—writing might take Nelle to a dark place. Maybe to the place she has sought after.
Roots curl into Nelle’s chest, locking her to this room. These people.
Penelope sighs. “I’ll make something to eat. Take all the time you need.”
Then, with the soft click of the door, Nelle is alone.
She picks a random shelf and finds a soft leather journal, the inside cover signedLily Waters. She takes it to the chaise and begins to read. Her grandmother’s poetry streams fluid, natural, without a structured rhyme scheme, carried beginning to end by a linguistic musicality.When she is finished absorbing the first journal, she finds another, bound by navy cloth. Then another. And another. Hundreds of poems, each like a shard of Lily’s stained-glass mind.
She finally works up the courage to pick a book with Quill’s name on it.
Thin, hardback, handwritten.
The first line sucks her in.
“She’s been in there for an hour,” James says over roasted rosemary chicken and peas, served on a hand-painted cat-themed plate. Two a.m. and his eyes are salty with sleep, but Penelope insisted they wait for Nelle. “Shouldn’t we ask her if she’s hungry?”
“I suspect she’ll be in there for a few more hours, at least. Maybe a day. Who knows how long it takes?” Penelope wipes her mouth with a napkin. “Though she may like a plate brought to her.”
“How longwhattakes?” James asks. “What’re you expecting her to find in there?”
“Answers.”
James scoops food from a Tupperware onto another cat plate, heats it in the microwave, and brings it with a glass of water to the library door. He knocks twice with the toe of his shoe.
“Coming in.”
Nelle is reading in the corner, swaddled in a blanket on the chaise, a book open on her lap. Too engrossed to notice his entrance. When the plate clinks on the table beside her, she doesn’t look up. Doesn’t say a word. Whatever she’s reading has sucked her into another dimension.
