“You like to pretend you’re the damsel,” said Philip, smoothing a hand over the oil slick of his hair, “but you’re the monster, Vivienne. Most men would have put you in the ground, once they saw what you’d become. But not me. I gave you a purpose. A place in my home. You will not spit in the face of my generosity again.”
She raised her eyes to his, fury beating in her blood.Or what?
He didn’t need to speak her language to understand the insolence in her stare. He smiled, watery and thin. “Next time, it won’t be a bluff. You step a toe out of line, and I’ll track down Thomas Walsh myself. You and I will take another nice little fishing trip, and you can sing him to the bottom of the Long Island Sound.”
Silence permeated the room, absolute and funereal.
“Your mother came upstairs to tell you that as of today, your privileges are revoked. You will withdraw from your summer program. You will not answer your friends when they call. From here on out you are not, under any circumstances, to leave this house unaccompanied.”
She felt the commands twist through her, the way his instruction always did—like he was tugging on some preternatural string, the length of it woven along the river of her spine.
She couldn’t disobey. Not without incurring significant hurt.
“For years, I was merciful,” he said. “I let you have your little pantomime. I let you play at girlhood. You’ll find my mercy has run out. It ends now.”
When he left, her mother stayed behind. The dogs settled, though reluctantly. They sat rigid at her side, twin sentries guarding a tomb. And that’s what she was. A living mausoleum, the ghost of who she might have been knocking around inside her.
“Philip has always looked out for us,” said her mother. She wrung her hands, her eyes rimmed in red. “You’ve lived in this house all your life. You don’t understand. You’ve never wanted for anything. You have no idea what it’s like—scraping and scrounging for every little thing.”
Vivienne stared dead ahead. She wished her mother would go away.
“Your father was my first love,” she went on, in a voice so soft it trembled. This got Vivienne’s attention. Her mother never spoke about her father. “It was all-consuming. First loves can often feel like that—like there’s nothing else in the world but the two of you. That’s what you’re feeling now, isn’t it? All you can see is that boy.”
That boy.
As though Thomas Walsh was no one. A passerby. A blip.
She wanted to tell her mother that she could live a thousand lifetimes, and she’d never know anyone as good as him. She stayed quiet instead.
“I thought your father loved me the way I loved him,” said her mother, “but he had a wife and two young sons at home. He wouldn’t leave them. He put in for a transfer—moved to a firm in Boston to be closer to his family. I let my entire universe revolve around him, but I was little more than a shooting star in his. I was left alone in New York, newly pregnant. Terrified. Philip stepped in. He didn’t need to do it. He was under no obligation. But here we are. He has given us a home. He stood by us, even when the unthinkable happened.”
Vivienne.Viviennewas the unthinkable. Her silence. Her obstinance. Her face in the mirror. Her wretched, ruined voice. It shouldn’t have hurt as much as it did to hear it.
“You should be grateful,” said her mother.
Grateful to spend her life inside a cage. Grateful to be used like a weapon. Grateful to be subservient and pretty and quiet. To keep her eyes down and her teeth sharp, poised to kill on command.
She should be grateful that she’d never see Thomas Walsh again.
When her mother finally left, it was a relief. Vivienne headed into the bathroom, the dogs slipping silently behind her. The mirror stretched out along the wall, its surface as flat and still as a lake.
Nothing peered back at her.
No leering eyes, no too-sharp grin. The glass was empty.
“Where are you?” she asked aloud. Her voice was pebbled, ground as if beneath a pestle. “Come and look me in the eye.”
If the creature heard her, it didn’t answer.
“Coward,” she called, though she didn’t know who she meant.
The creature, or the girl.
Exhausted, she slumped against the door until it fell shut, tugging up the hem of her pajama shirt. The scab cut an ugly crescent across her abdomen, scales dark and gleaming. It looked wider tonight, as though whatever horrible thing she carried inside her was slowly devouring her from the inside out. Quickly, she tugged her shirt back into place.
She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t sit here, idle and waiting, staring into a looking glass and waiting for something to look back. Playing the part of dutiful daughter and lethal weapon until there was nothing left of her but a last, lonely gasp.
A thought occurred to her, wicked in the twilight. Philip had been right about one thing—she’d never been the damsel. She’d always been the monster.
