“Jessica. I don’t want to imagine a world where I never helped raise you. Never sat on the porch of the Great House at night, looking at the stars. Never killed anyone, or gave out presents on Quilting Day.”
I didn’t have an answer—next to a sleeping Hiromi, I’d tried to imagine myself as something other than a Morton, and failed.
Grandmother gave a sigh. “Do you suppose Dwight was right all along? We adopted Sebastian too late?”
“That’s not why he’s gone. I’ve also turned against you.”
“You were intentional—we made you a traitor. With patience and kindness, we’ll make you one of us again.”
I didn’t argue. The more Grandmother believed that, the sooner I would leave this room.
We began to knittogether in companionable quiet. For hours sometimes, she visited me without questions. We Mortons are patient, silence our old friend, and she believed my heart would go cold again.
Not quickly enough—a week later, I grew tired of waiting.
“I don’t know where Sebastian is hiding. He didn’t trust me.”
She accepted this with a nod, like I’d mentioned the weather. We fell into silence again.
But the next day she said, “Trust doesn’t come into it—he worships you. He wouldn’t disappear without a plan to reconnect.”
I shrugged. Elizabeth’s contempt was showing again. Sebastian didn’t worship anyone. No Morton did, unless they were flailing, like Peter.
“We made a lot of plans. But I don’t know where he is.”
Her needles danced for another moment, then became still. She set them carefully into her lap and reached into a pocket.
She held up a shiny key on a silver chain. “What’s this, then?”
I kept my hand from going to my neck. “The necklace you sent me. And a key.”
“Where’s the lock?”
“Nowhere important.” The lies I’d been practicing at night began to flow. “Sebastian found it at Senior Tea one day, on the floor under his chair. It was a joke between us.”
“A joke?”
“A symbol,” I said, my eyes on my knitting. “Lost and found.”
“Did Sebastian realize he was lost?”
I shook my head. “He always worried he’d have to run without me one day. Because you trusted me, but never him.”
“We did trust him,” Grandmother said. “Until he betrayed us.”
“That key was our signal. When I was ready to join him, all I had to do was drop it in the lost-and-found box next to Admissions, still on this chain.”
She frowned. “And your cousin will magically appear?”
“He’d find a way to get in touch with me.”
Grandmother looked at my hands, watching for a dropped stitch. “So to find him, we have to set you free. You’ll go back to Helshire and wait for him.”
“Yes.”
Her voice became low and soothing, like when she’d told us bedtime stories. “Would you bring him back to us? Even knowing what we’ll do?”
My hands kept knitting as I opened myself, like in poker games at Lavernick, letting expressions spill across my face. Vulnerability was a kind of power.
