Daughter of a trucker. Sam tries to imagine the imposing woman as a young girl, waiting at a screen door for her father to come home after three weeks on the road. She tries to see Diamond as a child, mind full of gears and gadgets, turning in perpetual curiosity.
“Wasn’t she a Harvard grad, though?” Sam asks.
“Scholarship kid. That’s where she met Amerson, at a party at my father’s apartment.”
Emboldened by his open state, she asks, “Did you ever know your father?”
He doesn’t answer right away, and she thinks perhaps she’s asked the wrong question. But before she can apologize, he says, “His name was Peter. I remember sitting around his lab while he worked, toying with pipettes and flasks.”
So, Will had been old enough to remember. Sam tries to recall her own father and fails. Her mother doesn’t talk about him, and considering he’d left them by the time she was six months old, it’s an irrelevant topic, anyway.
“Did he teach you alchemy?” she asks.
“A little.”
She thinks of her fight with her own mother, how walled off her mother’s heart is, and can’t imagine her letting Sam in on anything that personal. “Did you know what your parents were working on?”
“Yes, well.” A strong wind bends the shadows on the ceiling, and Will’s gaze follows the movement. “They tested the batches on me.”
Sam props herself up on one elbow to stare down at him. “They tested sand on you?”
“My father made samples, and my mother administered them to me. Sometimes I reacted well. Sometimes I reacted badly. I was very sensitive to it, so I made for a good subject.”
She’s quiet, horrified by his words. All the sand in the world, all of Grand Central’s success, all the syndicates in their modern form, exist because Will had been his parents’ lab rat.
“How old were you?” she ventures.
“Four.”
So young. Her skin prickles at the cruelty of it, and she pictures a little version of Will, perpetually pale and sick, cheeks still round with baby fat, hunched over a toilet and retching violently into it while his mother looked steadily on.
“I’m sorry,” Sam whispers, stunned, not knowing what else to say.
“Don’t be.” Will’s voice is emotionless. “Amerson always patched me up afterward. I manage it well enough.” He nods at the empty glass on the nightstand as he says it.
It had never occurred to Sam that Will’s regular drinks were something heneededto have. What lingering effects did he suffer? Pain? Illness? Whatever they are, he hides them well.
No wonder the old alchiatrist had seemed so familiar with Will. She’d watched over him since he was a child, had nursed him back to health countless times.
“Does your mother ever regret it?” Sam murmurs.
“Can’t say,” Will answers. “She would keep meticulous journals about my reactions to everything, how I’d deteriorate and how I’d heal. It wasn’t always about the sand. She would write down everything that happened to me. My changing height and weight and the length of my limbs. Whether I was happy or sad. Whether I got along with others at school. My questions. My opinions. How often I told her I loved her. It was all data.”
Sam remembers the day when Diamond came into bathroom while Sam was frantically washing her hands. She recalls how the woman had spoken in her firm, soft voice. How Sam had felt herself leaning in the woman’sdirection, wanting her affection. She can hear the same yearning now in Will’s voice, some buried part of his boyhood, an eternal longing for his mother’s love.
“What happened to your father?” Sam asks.
Will is quiet for another stretch before he finally answers. “Sand enhances everything about you,” he begins. “Everything good, and everything bad. My father had always suffered from depression. As the first philosopher, he had no idea that his talent would shorten his life, or that sand would hit philosophers the hardest. At Harvard, he took a cocktail of drugs to keep himself functioning and productive. By the time I turned nine, alchemy and sand had taken their toll on the darker corners of his mind. So one night, when my mother was still at a series of meetings, I went upstairs in our home to find my father hanging from the ceiling of their bedroom.”
Sam’s heart twists at his words. She winces. Will had been nine years old when he’d found his father’s body. He had been alone in their home when it’d happened, must have huddled somewhere and waited for help to arrive.
She reaches for him and touches his cheek with her hand. Will doesn’t seem to notice her gesture at first. His eyes are far away now, lost in some memory, and it isn’t until she closes her eyes and leans her head against his that he turns in her direction.
“I’ve never told anyone,” he whispers, and she opens her eyes again. His gaze is so different tonight. The hard exterior she is so used to, the cold glint and the intimidating sear, all of it has faded, and in its place is something that must resemble the boy he used to be. And Sam wonders if this is how it happens to all of them, that once upon a time, he had seen beauty in the world too, had trusted and smiled and been a child. He had kept his heart open until he couldn’t bear the wounds any longer, and then he had shut it, letting himself go still and cold.
She kisses him. He kisses her back, and this time his touch is gentle. His arm curls around her bare waist and pulls her to him under the blankets. She wraps her arms around his neck as she shifts beneath him, relishing the heat of his body, wishing this night would stretch on indefinitely.
In the hour before dawn, a low buzz from Sam’s phone stirs her awake. She shifts, remembers she’s still in Will’s bed, and glances over to see his backturned to her. Then she looks at her phone and sees a message from her mother glowing on the screen.
