Page 155 of Reign

Her steps slow.

I expect a joke. Something sharp enough to keep the question from reaching anywhere important.

Instead, her voice quiets.

“Most of it. Gardening was a good pastime for her. That’s what she called it, at least. A pastime. Like she wasn’t outside every morning telling the staff they were planting things wrong.”

“So that’s where you get it.”

Her lips curve, softer this time. “My mother loved flowers. The house has so many of them because of her.”

“Santo’s estate?”

Her fingers tighten around the notebook.

“It’s Santo’s now.”

“It wasn’t his then,” she continues before I can answer. “It was ours. Hers, mostly. I lived there with her for two years before she died, and she made the gardens beautiful. Daisies, jasmine, hydrangeas, night-blooming flowers along the path near the fountain.”

She looks past me, toward the unfinished planters.

“All the good memories are there.”

The words settle between us.

Her smile begins to fade. I don’t like watching it disappear.

“Which is inconvenient,” she adds lightly, though the lightness doesn’t hold, “because all the bad ones are there too.”

I say nothing.

She turns her attention toward the roses waiting near the terrace, but she isn’t looking at my garden anymore.

She’s back in the estate. Back in the garden her mother made. Back to a version of the house that still belonged to both of them.

“I wish I could take cuttings,” she says. “Not steal them. Just take pieces with enough of the root system to grow somewhere else. For a house of my own someday.”

Hope slips into her voice, small and careful, as though she doesn’t entirely trust the future with it.

“When I’m arranged, maybe my husband will allow it.”

My chest tightens.

Husband.

A harmless word.

It shouldn’t land as hard as it does.

“Although Santo probably wouldn’t let me have any cuttings,” she says with a soft scoff. “He’s such a stickler about his things. Once he owns something, he thinks it belongs to him forever. That house belonged to all of us. Not that he’d ever admit that now.”

Bitterness runs beneath the joke. Grief sits beneath the bitterness.

The idea of her husband bothers me.

The fact that she has no claim to something that was hers bothers me more.

“You want the cuttings.”