Page 155 of Queen of Nothing

So I guess I get one thing I wanted.

But not Father—he turns his face away from me, but I caught it before it turned out of the light. The grimace.

“It is disappointing,” he concedes. “I hoped… Olivia, you must understand what your disappearance has done.” He looks at me. “You cannot tell your mother that you know about the rituals and your blood. It stays between us.”

The swerve in topic startles me.

I frown at him. “Why?”

“Your mother and I have not… We have not been as close as we should be. Your disappearance has strained our relationship in a way that I have never known with her. Your mother has suffered greatly in the time that you have been gone This is not to blame you, because you did not know what you were doing, what you were putting at risk.”

I sit up, but the brew still has me too relaxed, and so I’m slow, lethargic, until I sink into my stacked pillows. “What’s wrong with Mother?”

Father does not look at me. He runs his hands through his dark hair, and stares at the floor. “Nothing is particularly wrong with your mother—but her… presence has been altered. Most days she struggles to leave her bed.”

Her bed.

Not ours.

I notice the wording.

Father continues, “If she does get out of bed, it is to receive a solemn visit from Amelia. She receives no other guests, including her own mother, who, your mother believes might have been assisting you.”

“She wasn’t.” The answer comes out of me, sharp and offended. “I never spoke to Nonna about running away. I never talked to her when I was out there.”

Father’s stare is intense—it considers me, every muscle on my face, every flicker of my eyes. He reads me, closely, and searches for any hint of a lie.

He seems satisfied as he nods, very slightly, then says, “Your mother does not appreciate Mila’s attachment to you, therefore she is particularly offended by your nonna’s protection of Mila. Perhaps that is where the blame came from.”

“So Mother’s… depressed?”

Not leaving her bed, not sleeping in the same bed as Father, and not talking to her own mother?

It sounds like she isn’t totally well.

And Father nods.

“But she’ll get better now that I’m home, right?”

Again, he nods—but it’s slight, and his smile is forced. It’s hopeful, but pained.

So much pain in this family.

So many secrets and resentments.

“Truthfully, I had my own suspicions,” Father says. “I doubted my own mother, too.”

“You thought Grandmother Ethel helped me?”

He shrugs, and parts his hands. “We could not get close to you out there. Trackers would lead us to towns that you had never been in. The shield around you was too strong, it disorientated the trackers for years.” Father clasps his hands together. “That was the sort of shield that required a strong shield witch—or a very experienced ritualist.”

Grandmother Ethel’s print.

Though she’s old as hell now, so I doubt she’s keeping up with the rituals—except the one she needs to stay alive for as long as she has. There’s no other explanation for her ridiculously long life.

“Grandmother is at the end of her life,” Father says, as though reading my mind. “And any rituals she might perform will come at a great cost for her. My suspicions raised when, a year into your disappearance, I returned from a search, and found my mother unconscious at Craven Cottage. She took a fall down the stairs in the night, and the staff were in bed, so I happened to be the first to find her. The fall was… severe.” Doubt shimmers in his eyes, and he pauses, as if to find the right words. “Severe enough that we had to move her into the pink cottage on the grounds here, and that it took months before she could walk again. Witchdoctor Dolios believes a ritual ate through the cartilage in her hips, and that is where her recovery was halted.”

“So you think she performed rituals to keep me hidden out there, and she paid the price for them?”