“I see that now.”
“And I didn’t send you any letters,” Nelle says. “I wasn’t allowed to write.”
The kettle starts to howl.
“I’ll get it.” James goes into the kitchen, grateful to escape the ice between the women. He was teetering on the edge of distrusting Penelope, but Quill’s attack pushed him over. Still he finds himself asking whether she wants milk or sugar.
“Neither,” Penelope says.
James serves the cups, setting his and Nelle’s on two coasters shaped like roses.
“Those letters were the one point of contact I had with you ... I thought I knew you ... For years, he must’ve been forging them.” Penelope reaches across the table, hand outstretched toward Nelle. “You are a born writer, Nelle. Youdeserveto have control over your own life, as your predecessors did.”
“I agree.”
“I always thought you consented to being hidden. That ... that it was your choice.”
“You should have made sure.” Nelle gives in and touches her hand. “But that doesn’t forgive anything. Whyhideme for twenty-one years? Didn’t you thinkthatwas abusive?”
“I thought he taught you,” Penelope says, “you know, how dangerous you are.”
Nelle laughs. “Dangerous?”
James shakes his head. “She wouldn’t hurt a firefly.”
“Wallace didn’t tell you about the consequences?”
“He told me I’d die if I wrote for myself,” Nelle says.
Penelope curses Quill under her breath. “Of course he did. As I’m sure you’ve learned by now, youcan’tdie. At least, not in that way. But what you are, the power you hold, is a danger. To loved ones. To society.” She dims, reaching for her tea. “Bianca and Eleanor didn’t die by a freak accident. Quill compelled the fire that took their house that night. He woke up with an idea and jotted it down, mistakenly using the ink pen filled withhisblood. He went back to sleep, and minutes later, the house was engulfed.”
Nelle’s hand goes clammy in James’s. He gives it a tighter squeeze.I’m here with you.
“You know how that story ends. They were human. He—like his mother, Lily, like you—isn’t.”
“So how did she die?” Nelle asks. “Lily, I mean.”
“Ironically”—Penelope grimaces—“she wrote for herself. A direct command to cease existing. I can only imagine the second her pen lifted, she was gone, because all Thomas found in their house was an inkwell tipped across her hardwood desk and a black streak off the last letter she’d written ...g.”
“Quill told me that his mother died from a sickness.”
“It is a sickness of sorts,” Penelope says. “But how could we explain to people who knew her that she’d taken her life? We lied, Thomas and I together, and said she’d had a malignant brain tumor. My husband had died years earlier. With Sam gone the year before, and then Lily, it was only Wallace, his father, and me left.”
James runs his thumb over the back of Nelle’s hand. “I’m sorry for all your loss.”
Penelope nods. “Thank you, James.”
Nelle takes a prolonged sip of tea. “Your husband wasn’t written into life like us?”
“No,” Penelope says. “Lily was the first. Samford was an accountant, which I found boring, but there was something about him. I saw the magic. Years after we were married, I found out that his mother had experimented with spells and rituals, often usinghimas a test subject. He knew from a young age that he could write things into life, but he kept it a secret. To him, it was never a gift, but a curse. He was so scared to wield it, he barely wrote at all.”
“Then how did he create Lily?” James asks.
“We tried to get pregnant for years. I was forty when I finally missed my time of the month. We went to the doctor, too scared to be hopeful, and he told us we had one.” Mist blankets Penelope’s eyes. “Months into the pregnancy, I lost her.”
She clears her throat and continues.
“Samford wrote a poem after the death of our daughter. The first words he’d written in years. A poem about what she would have looked like. How she would’ve laughed. The little personality she would’ve had.” A tear runs down her cheek. “I woke up that night and heard an infant giggling. I thought I was having a—what do they call it—a night terror. I tore down the hallway, Samford right behind me, and into the nursery that would have been little Lily’s. And there she was, in the bassinet. A real baby. Hands reaching for a mother she’d never known yet somehow knew. I still had milk, so she latched on right away. She was mine. My miracle baby.
