“I hope not,” Honor replied quietly, her eyes hard as she stared past Vivian’s shoulder, her expression closed off. “But it looks like I need to do that favor for you sooner rather than later if we want to learn anything more.”
ELEVEN
“Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”
Vivian was startled out of her distraction so suddenly that she pushed her needle through the fabric too quickly, stabbing it deep into her own hand. She yelped and dropped the mending without thinking, cursing loudly.
Florence frowned at her. “You know it’s not ladylike to swear like that,” she said before turning back to the pot of beans and broth she was stirring.
“Well, we’re not ladies,” Vivian snapped, still shaking out her hand. “God almighty, that hurt. Or at least, I’m not a lady.”
“I’m well aware,” Florence said dryly, but there was a smile hovering around her lips that would not have been there a few months ago. “Don’t bleed on my clothes, please.”
“Thanks for your concern,” Vivian grumbled, retrieving the dress from the floor and setting to work again. They had both been trained as seamstresses in the orphan home—“Respectable work,” one of the nuns had reassured them, “and always in demand”—but Florence was the one who still had to sew daily for work. Vivian had taken overthe household mending ever since she started doing deliveries for Miss Ethel instead of bending over tiny beads and tinier stitches every day.
“I’m still waiting for an answer, though.”
Vivian grimaced. She had hoped Florence would forget her question. “What do you mean?”
“You know exactly what I mean.” Florence turned away from the stove, the ladle sticking out at an awkward angle as she crossed her arms. But underneath the disapproving stare, Vivian could sense the sharp edge of worry. It was there in Florence’s clenched jaw, the rigid set of her shoulders. “You’ve been distracted, and you were tossing about after you got home last night.”
“You were asleep when I got home,” Vivian said defensively, scowling down at her work so she didn’t have to meet her sister’s eyes.
“I’m never asleep until you’re home, Vivi.” The soft answer made Vivian flinch. “Not completely. Are you going to answer the question?”
“Nothing’s going on,” Vivian insisted, resisting the urge to stab her needle into the fabric. As much as she might want to, she had been a seamstress too long to take her nerves out on the mending. “Last night I had to help Bea out with something. That’s all.”
She was hoping that mentioning Bea would convince Florence to stop asking questions. She and Florence owed the Henrys so much. When the sisters had moved into their shoebox rooms after leaving the orphan home, Florence had fallen sick almost immediately. With influenza still fresh in everyone’s minds, no one would come near them, and Vivian had been too scared and poor to know what to do.
Della Henry had heard about the two Irish girls who needed help, so she had showed up at their door one morning to do exactly that. And both Kelly sisters knew they would never be able to repay her for it.
But when Vivian looked up, Florence was watching her still, her worry plain as day.
“Do you remember the last time there was something going on?” Florence asked quietly. “And you didn’t want to tell me what it was—Idon’t blame you for that,” she added quickly, raising her hand to cut off Vivian’s protest. “You had no reason to think I would listen. So I’m telling you here and now, this time I’ll listen. Is there something else going on at work?”
Vivian hesitated, then wished she hadn’t. She didn’t want her silence to make Florence worry. “Nothing’s going on at work,” she said. It was true enough, though she knew Florence might take issue with that definition of true if she knew the whole story. But this time it wasn’t anything that put them in danger, so Florence didn’t need to have it weighing on her. She worried enough about Vivian working at the Nightingale. There was no use adding to those fears. “I’m just worried about Bea. Pearlie’s death has been hard on her.”
“I can imagine. I envied her when Pearlie arrived, you know,” Florence said. “I used to dream about our own family showing up like that. That they would care enough to come find us someday.” She had turned back to the stovetop, and she spoke softly. But Vivian, her sewing forgotten for the moment, heard every word. “But I guess more family just means more people to lose. So maybe we’re lucky, after all.”
It was so rare that Florence said anything about their unknown family. Vivian stared at the fabric in her lap, her hands still, not quite brave enough to raise her eyes. “You don’t dream that now?”
The room was quiet enough that she could hear Florence’s barely there sigh. “Not much room in our life for daydreams, is there? Besides, they’ve had two decades since our mother died. If they wanted to find us, they would have by now.”
“Maybe they didn’t know where to look.” Vivian had never been able to shake the hope that one day someone from their mother’s family—or even their unknown, unnamed father’s family—would manage to track them down and welcome them back. It was a hope she held on to out of stubbornness more than any actual chance of it happening. “Maybe they didn’t know we were there to look for at all.”
Or at least, it had felt like stubbornness until a single day in Chinatown,only a few months before. Less than a single day, really. A brief moment, when she and Danny had been helping a man who collapsed on the street. Vivian, unable to understand what anyone was saying around her, had been cradling the man’s head in her lap when he opened his eyes, looked right at her, and called her by her mother’s name.
She had felt like her own heart would give out, like she might collapse right next to him on the sidewalk. But a moment later, the man had been whisked away by his neighbors in search of the local doctor. Vivian had been left staring after him, wondering if she had imagined the whole thing.
Before that moment, they’d had only one link to their mother and their past: a sour, unhappy neighbor who had lived in the building when their mother was there and who, in spite of resenting the responsibility, had made sure they stayed together long enough to be sent to the same orphan home. She never spoke well of their mother, though she had known her only a few months before she died. But she had always said Vivian and Florence looked like her, though they both had dark hair and their mother’s hair had been bright red.
Florence had dismissed the possibility that the stranger’s words meant anything, unwilling to let that hope flicker back to life. But since that day, Vivian had been torn. She wanted to track down the man, to find out whether he did know something about her mother, about their family.
And she was terrified that if she did, she’d discover they had known all along that Mae Kelly had left behind two daughters when she died, and they just hadn’t cared.
“Come on.” Florence’s brisk order broke into her thoughts as she wrapped two dish towels around the pot’s handles and took it off the stove. Vivian could tell by the tone of her sister’s voice that Florence, too, was thinking painful thoughts and didn’t want to admit it. “The beans are ready. Get your shoes on and get the bread and let’s take this over to the Henrys.”
“Yeah, sure.” Vivian sniffed, but she didn’t wipe her eyes. She had learned long ago that crying took up time and energy that she couldn’t afford to waste. Folding the mending back into its basket, she gave Florence a sideways glance. “Oh, I forgot to tell you. Turns out, a girl from work was Pearlie’s sweetheart. And she’s having a baby.”
