“Oh, they had excuses for what we did,” she said. “They had their own code by which they abided, more or less. No stealing from the poor, only the very rich. No violence. No swearing information on anyone, even the worst of our sort. They spoke as if their art and skill at their trade made them part of a different nobility. By the time I was ten years old, already I saw the self-deception in that code. We were thieves, not artists. Criminals. I knew we were no better than the lowest pickpocket.”
“Is that why your mother put you in a school?”
“I had become an inconvenience to her. I was getting too big. I attracted attention. She thought to come and get me when I matured more, and could be her partner. She visited me the first year, but when I was fifteen I told her I would never steal with her, that I would not live that way. She wrote to me after that, but I never saw her again.”
“And has she come back into your life now? Or your father?”
For a moment she did not respond.
“In a way,” she whispered. She turned her back on him, drew herself into a huddle, and buried her face into her pillow.
He did not realize she wept until a muffled sob escaped. He laid his hand on her trembling back and she only cried harder. He pulled her into his arms and held her and kissed her head in an attempt to comfort her.
Slowly, with shaking breaths, she calmed. He pressed his lips against her temple. “Will you tell me?” he asked. “I think I know some of it, but probably not the important parts,” he said.
She kept her back to him. “The important part is that I have been stealing again. I have returned to my origins and my training.” She tensed again. After a minute passed, she turned to face him. “You are not shocked or angry?”
“No, not at you.”
She rose on one arm. “You knew.”
“I guessed. It solved many mysteries. I do not know why you did it, however.”
“Perhaps it is my true nature, and the years of goodness were not.”
“Do you believe that? Have you been asking yourself which is the real Amanda Waverly? You found her in that school after your parents left you. I want to know why you risked losing her again.”
She lay down facing him, her face mere inches from his own. “Hold me, and I will tell you.”
* * *
She told him about the letters and demands. About her mother’s plea for help. About the brooch and the buckle. “I had hoped to follow the buckle to where he kept her. I had followed him. You were waiting when I returned. It is gone now, I am sure.”
She kept her face near his and felt his breath. His embrace had not loosened.
“You were blackmailed.”
“He asked for no money.”
“He demanded you do something and said he would harm you in some way if you did not. That is blackmail.”
“I doubt it will make any difference in a court of law.”
For all their closeness, the consequences of her acts occupied space between them. She could not imagine the thoughts going through his mind.
“I should not have told you.”
“I had to know.”
Perhaps he had hoped to learn he was wrong. Her story may have salved his pride at how she’d left him, but now he faced the cost of knowing the truth.
She stretched to kiss him. “I am relieved to make a confession, even if—I will not blame you if you have to—”
“It has not come to that. I will find another way.”
She wanted to believe there was another way. She did not think there was. She nestled closely and accepted the comfort of his arms, which was all he had promised her tonight.
* * *
