Yet somewhere between the storm, my pitiful drive-through skills and her snarky laughter, something unfastened. Something that was knotted so tightly that I believe we both feel the relief.
It’s the only logical explanation for why she breathes easier around me now. On two evenings, she’s eaten here in my room, claiming to need the quiet from the chaos her grandmother has got going on with planning her upcoming events. The first night she ate in near silence, stealing glances at the books I’ve brought with me. Tonight she doesn’t even bother knocking; she just strolls in with the trolley she hijacked from Pascoe and grows the confidence to ask things.
“So do you actually like literature, or do you, I dunno, collect these for effect?” she probes, stabbing her fork into the chicken pasta Lydia prepared. I’m vaguely offended by her question,but she never gives me the chance to answer because she spots my copy ofWuthering Heights. “Did you mean it when you compared me to Catherine?”
“You’ve both the talent to haunt a room long after you’ve gone,” I mutter, sipping from my wine in amusement. “Ask something a little more difficult if you wish to know me.”
“Fine, are you Edgar or Heathcliff?—”
“Neither,” I breeze over the rest of the question. “I prefer watching from the edges of the story, where it’s safer.”
“That would make you the unreliable narrator.”
I swallow an unnecessary retort. “Maybe.”
The conversation spirals, and once she finishes eating, she’s rifling through my poetry as I observe with a raised brow. My spine stiffens when she lifts a battered collection of William Wordsworth.
“Youromantic,” she accuses, thumbing through the yellowed pages. Her gaze catches on the other cracked spines lining the shelf. “Wordsworth, Shelley, Brontë,Shakespeare… Tell me, Your Highness, do you have a tragedy kink, or is melancholy your idea of foreplay?”
“It’s cheaper than therapy.”
She snorts, then grabs my practically prehistoric edition ofThe Divine Comedy. There’s a fleeting, sad smile on her lips. “How Edmund of you. This is one of his favourites, you know? I think he still has the copy Uncle Hamish gave him, which says a lot.”
I straighten a little, reining in my interest and swallowing down my disgust at being compared to him. “Is it?” She nods once, biting the corner of her lip as she leafs through the aged pages. “So your cousin’s favourite text justhappensto have a doomed Francesca in it?”
“There’s a Francesca in it?”
My brows pull together, my stomach shrivelling into a fistful of nerves at the expression of bewilderment she tosses my way. “Yes?”
Her confused frown surrenders to a teasing smile. “Are you asking or telling me?”
“Yes.” I clear my throat. “I mean, there’s a Francesca da Rimini in it. Trapped in the second circle of hell because she fell in love with her husband’s brother and got murdered for it. Dante talks to her and everything—I’m sorry, you really haven’t read it?”
“No need to sound so horrified, YourIntelligentness; my tutor never introduced it into my curriculum. And I tend to avoid things that men tell me are ‘life-changing’. Do you need a moment to grieve that fun fact or should I be expecting a homework assignment?”
I grin despite the thoughts running rampant inside my skull. Once her attention is stolen by the shelf again, my mind starts mapping the beginnings of a pattern. The omission doesn’t feel accidental at all and slots perfectly beside everything else I hate about Edmund, namely the way he disguises his possessiveness as concern.
It would’ve been only too easy to slip in,‘Did you know my favourite book has a doomed Francesca in it?’
So why keep this from her? Unless, of course, heenjoysholding that piece of information over her. Book!Francesca never having to cross paths with Real!Francesca. A link to her he can own without her even being aware of it. Before I can even pin this to my theory, my father’s cruel voice suddenly resounds in my ears:‘Always digging, always dissecting and fixating. You think that makes you intelligent. It makes you obsessive, Eryxon.’
I drop those thoughts like a hot potato and root myself back into the conversation. “Grieve? No, I’m happy for you, actually.Usually people learn how uncultured they aremuchlater in life. We’ve caught your affliction early, it seems.”
Francesca laughs. “No homework, then? Thank goodness, I wouldn’t have been able to impress that big brain of yours.”
That big brain of yours.
I’m glitching. Younger me would’ve been offended by the phrase, but this version of me is gutsy enough to peer out from behind the armour of what the public named his ‘intelligence’.Always hiding behind it, my father would say. I see the headlines all over again: the breezy run through high school and the quick jump to university. They’ve used that word to justify calling me brilliant, or if they’re feeling particularly scathing—ruthless.
But she says it like it’s something fond. Something that amuses her.
She sinks into my armchair with her legs crossed and Emily Brontë’s work lifted to the light. The upholstery sighs beneath her. Something about her comfort in my space fucking unmoors me.
I feel myself teetering too close to the edge of contentment, so I wait until five minutes of a companionable lull have passed and do what I do best: drag the conversation back to safer ground. Data. Questions. Territory that doesn’t involve analysing the pulse in my throat.
“There’s a painting of you all when you were younger. Did the artist catch Edmund on an off day, or has he always been that angry?”
“Oh,” she says quietly, and I brace for the deflection—because come on, it’s Edmund—but it never arrives. Her smile looks borrowed from seventeen years ago. “That portrait… Gran calls it the Shefflock.”
