“Iris,” she repeats, that raspy voice scratching lightly over the name. She tilts her head, red lips pursing, thick black eyebrows rising. “Iris, Poppy, Zinnia … and Lily.” I hear the question in her words, though she doesn’t ask it directly, and none of us answer.
“There’s one we’re missing,” Lily tells her before turning to us. “Y’all know where Violet is?”
“Sol asked her to go clean up the shed,” Poppy answers.
“She’llbe in here soon enough, then,” Lily says. “I promise, everyone here is real nice.”
The new girl gives a small smile and nods before saying, “It’s nice to meet everybody. My name is—”
Before she can finish, the back door of the cabin swings open, and footsteps too heavy to belong to Violet thud across the wooden floor.
We move as one—Zinnia, Poppy, Lily, and me—without a word, with barely a thought, we move together into the hall, ready to see him, to greet him. The new girl follows behind, asking no questions, though I’m sure she has many.
He stands by the back door, unwrapping the moth-eaten scarf from around the lower half of his face and neck. Two pale blue eyes look our way from beneath blond, bushy brows, and a smile forms amid the thick mustache and beard. “Girls,” he says in greeting. “I see you’ve made a new friend?”
Lily beams at him. She radiates adoration, bathing in his light. “Sol,” she says, “I met her when I was in town. She needs a place to stay. I told her she’d be welcome here.”
“Of course she’s welcome here,” Sol says. He takes a step forward, and we separate like the sea parting for Moses, making apath for him to move straight toward the new girl. “I’m glad you found us, sweetheart,” he says.
She stands there, staring at him. She looks tense, her shoulders up near her cheeks. But the second Sol smiles down at her, she seems to relax.
Just like we all did.
“We take care of one another here,” he tells the girl. “You can call this place your home as long as you need to. We’ve got a few rules, of course, but I’m sure the girls will fill you in.”
She nods. “Thank you. You’re Sol, right?”
“I sure am,” he says, throwing an appreciative nod to Lily. “I suppose Lily’s told you a bit about me. About all of us.”
“A little.”
“Excellent,” he says. “And you …” He stares down at her for a long moment, taking her in. She doesn’t flinch. She stands there like I did once, and like Zinnia and Poppy after me. Eager, anxious, hopeful.
Grateful.
“You,” Sol says, placing a gentle hand on her cheek, “seem like a Rose to me.”
IRIS
“Sowhat do you guys do here?”
I glance over my shoulder at Rose. She’s sitting on the floor of the attic, on one of the twin mattresses, with her arms pulled all the way inside her hoodie, wrapped around herself. She must still be cold.
Sol asked me to help her settle in while he has one of his private Growth Sessions with Lily in his bedroom. He says Rose will share the attic with Zinnia, Poppy, and me, news that delighted Zinnia in particular but has left me nervous about the change.
The drafty attic, with its creaky wooden floorboards, is my favorite room in the cabin, despite how cramped it has become. When I first arrived, this had been Lily’s room. She slept on the double bed while I slept on an old mattress on the floor. When Poppy and Zinnia arrived a few months later, the sleeping arrangements changed. I opted to keep my little mattress, whilePoppy took the bed and Sol bought another twin mattress for Zinnia. Lily moved into Violet’s room—the bedroom downstairs, next to Sol’s.
It took some adjusting at first, but Zinnia, Poppy, and I have made the small room work for us. We keep our spaces clean, and we are patient and forgiving with one another when it comes to privacy. I feel safe in the attic. Before Lily brought me into the hollow, safe hadn’t been something I’d felt in a while.
But now things are changing again.
I can hear Sol’s voice in my head already, warning me against the pitfalls of selfishness, reminding me of how much he and the other girls here have shared with me. So I don’t complain about this change.
“Iris?” Rose says, tilting her head so that tangled black hair falls into her face. “Did you hear me?”
“Oh, yeah. Sorry.” I clear my throat. I’d just been standing there, staring down at her and the small room we’d all be sharing. “What did you ask?”
“What do you do here? This place is a long walk from town. You must keep yourselves busy somehow.”
