Chapter 3: The Last Place That Still Felt Like Hers

Wren POV

I woke up before the sun did. Old habit. In the quarry, you got up when they told you, and if you weren't already awake and standing, they made sure you regretted it.

Nobody was pounding on my door here. That should've felt like a relief. Mostly it just felt strange, lying there in the quiet, waiting for an order that wasn't coming.

I got dressed and went looking for the greenhouse.

It used to sit off the east wing, past the kitchens, tucked behind a row of hedges Rosalind kept trimmed into perfect squares. She and I spent hours there when I was a kid,mixing salves, drying herbs, her showing me which roots calmed a fever and which ones you never, ever mixed together unless you wanted to poison somebody by accident. It was the one place in that house that had always felt like it belonged to just the two of us.

I told myself I wasn't hoping for anything. I told myself that the whole walk was over, and I still felt my chest go tight when I turned the corner and saw the door.

Same door. Same brass handle, worn smooth from years of use.

I opened it, and it wasn't the greenhouse anymore.

There was a piano against the far wall, sleek and black, sheet music scattered across the bench. Easels lined up along where the herb racks used to be, half-finished paintings drying on a couple of them. Every trace of what that room used to be was just gone. No dried lavender hanging from the rafters. No jars of crushed root on the shelves. The whole place smelled like paint and polish instead of soil.

I stood in the doorway for a long time.

"Wren?"

Damian's voice, behind me. I hadn't heard him come up.

"What happened to the greenhouse?" I asked. I didn't turn around.

"The… oh." A pause. Too long a pause. "Calla needed a space for her music and her art, so we moved it. I think that was... Shit, that was over a year ago."

"You think."

"I wasn't really the one who decided it," he said, which wasn't an answer to anything.

I walked further in, running my hand along the edge of one easel, and something in me just dropped. It wasn't the room. It was everything the room used to mean. Every hour I spent there with Rosalind, every scar on my hands from thorns and stems, every single thing that used to prove I was somebody's daughter and not just somebody's guest. Erased. Painted over. Replaced with sheet music.

"Nobody thought to mention it," I said.

"I didn't even think about it, Wren. I swear, I didn't even remember this used to be…" He stopped himself, dragged a hand down his face. "Damnit. I should've noticed."

"You should've." I wasn't trying to be cruel about it. It was just true.

"Wren? Damian?" Calla's voice, coming down the hall, light and a little breathless. She appeared in the doorway a second later, still in her nightgown, hair loose around her shoulders. Her eyes went straight to me, and I watched the exact moment she understood what I was looking at.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, no. This was your… I didn't know this was your.."

"It's fine," I said.

"It's not fine, I had no idea, nobody told me this room meant anything, I would never have agreed" Her voice cracked right on cue, hand pressed to her chest like the guilt was physically hurting her. "We can move it. All of it. I'll have it cleared out today, I swear, I don't need this room that badly, I can find somewhere else"

"Calla." Damian was already crossing the room toward her, one hand landing on her shoulder, voice gone soft in a way it hadn't been with me since I walked through the gate. "Hey. It's not your fault. Nobody told you."

"But she's clearly upset, and I don't want to be the reason"

"You're not the reason for anything." He said it like he actually believed it.

I watched him comfort her. Watching his whole body angle toward her the second her voice wobbled, the same way it used to angle toward me when we were kids and I'd scraped a knee. It didn't feel like anger, watching that. It felt like standing outside a window looking in at a house I used to live in, watching somebody else sit in my chair at the dinner table.

"I don't want the room," I said.

Both of them looked at me.

"Wren, you don't have to say that," Calla said. "If it's important to you.."

"I don't want it." My voice came out flatter than I meant it to, but I didn't have it in me to soften it. "I'm not here to take anything back. Not the room. Not anything."

"That's not.." Damian started.

"I'm serious." I looked at him, not at her. "I didn't come back here to reclaim my old life, Damian. I don't want the greenhouse. I don't want my old room. I don't want any of it."

"Then what do you want?" he asked, and for a second he actually sounded lost, like the question genuinely confused him.

I thought about lying. Thought about telling him something easier, something that wouldn't make his face do the thing it was about to do.

"I'm staying until Mom's stable," I said instead. "That's it. That's the whole plan. Once she doesn't need me around anymore, I'm gone."

The room went quiet. Calla's mouth opened slightly, like she wanted to say something and thought better of it.

"Gone," Damian repeated. "Gone where?"

"I don't know yet. Doesn't matter." I shrugged, and it wasn't performance, it was just true, it genuinely didn't matter to me where, as long as it was somewhere that wasn't this house. "I'm not planning on staying in this family forever, Damian. I think you should know that now instead of finding out later."

He stared at me like I said it in a different language. Like the idea hadn't even occurred to him as something that could be real.

"You don't mean that," he said finally.

I didn't answer. I just turned and walked back out the way I came, past the piano, past the easels, past the ghost of every hour I used to spend in that room believing I belonged somewhere.

Behind me, I heard Calla's voice, low and careful. "Damian... She's not okay. Is she?"

I didn't wait to hear what he said back.