Chapter Twelve

The guest house had its own kitchen, small but stocked, and that first morning I stood in front of the fridge for a while before making a plate of eggs and sitting down at the little table by the window to eat alone.

From there I could see a slice of the main house,not all of it, just the kitchen window and part of the back terrace,enough to watch my old life keep going without me in it.

By midmorning, Elora was out on that terrace in one of my old robes, the pale blue one nobody had bothered to pack for me.

She had a coffee in her hand, my favorite mug, the one with the small chip near the handle that I had never thrown away and she was laughing at something on her phone like she didn't have a care in the world.

I set my fork down.

It wasn't about the robe or even the mug. It was how naturally she walked through those rooms, as if the two years I spent making that house a home had meant nothing.

I finished the eggs without tasting them and rinsed the plate in the sink. 

When I looked up again, she was gone from the terrace,probably back inside,probably in my kitchen, deciding what she wanted the housekeeper to cook for dinner.

I told myself it didn't matter. 

That week, I told myself a lot of things I didn't fully believe.

By the third day, I started keeping the blinds mostly closed. Not because I couldn't stand to look, though I couldn't, but because I was tired of handing myself reasons to feel smaller.

I worked instead,Esther had given me books, thick ones, full of financial terms I had to look up twice before they made sense, and I spent hours at that table learning the difference between an asset and a liability, between an account that protected me and one that only looked like it did.

Marcus called every evening around seven, same time, like he'd set an alarm for it.

He never asked to come by,he just asked how I was, and waited for the actual answer, which made the day feel less like something I'd survived and more like something I'd lived through.

"You sound different," he said on the fourth night.

"Different how?"

"Steadier."

I looked around the guest house…the books spread open on the table, the folder from Esther tucked in the drawer by my bed where no one would think to look. 

"Maybe I am."

"Good," he said. I could hear the smile in it. "Don't let them take that back from you."

I didn't tell him about the mug, or the robe, or the way I'd started flinching every time I heard Elora's laugh carry across the yard,some things I wasn't ready to say out loud, not even to him.

On the fifth night, I came back from a walk around the property, just to stretch my legs, just to remind myself the world was bigger than one guest house and one locked door, and when I stepped inside, something on my pillow caught the light from the window.

A folded piece of paper,cream-colored and xpensive,the kind Elora had always preferred over anything plain.

My stomach dropped before I even picked it up.

I knew the handwriting,i'd grown up watching her practice it in the margins of school notebooks, rounding her letters just so, dotting her i's with little circles like she was still twelve and showing off for a teacher,It hadn't changed.

I unfolded it slowly, my fingers cold despite the warmth of the room.

Big sister, know your place.

No signature,It didn't need one.

I stood there holding it, the paper trembling slightly, not from fear, I realized, but from something sharper,something that had been building since I watched her drink coffee out of my mug like she'd earned it.

She'd been in here,in the guest house,In the one place that was supposed to be mine even in exile, and she'd walked right in and left this on my pillow like a threat wrapped in perfume and good paper.

For a second I thought about calling Marcus right then,i thought about marching across the yard and pounding on the main house door until someone answered.

Instead, I folded the note back along its creases, slow and deliberate, and set it on the nightstand where I'd see it first thing in the morning.

Because if Elora wanted me to know my place, she'd made one mistake.

She still didn't know I was done accepting the one she'd assigned me.

I sat on the edge of the bed for a long time after that, staring at the folded paper, and somewhere in the quiet my mind went back to the folder in the drawer beneath it,the account number and my name standing alone.

I thought about how easy it would be to let this note win,to shrink back into the woman who served wine without being asked twice, who took the smaller portion, who said thank you for scraps because scraps were all she'd ever been offered.

That woman would have cried over this note,would have hidden it, ashamed, like it was proof of something true.

I wasn't going to cry.

I picked the note back up, unfolded it once more, and read it a second time, slower, the way you reread something to make sure you understood exactly what it was asking of you. Know your place.

"I do," I said out loud, to the empty room, to the main house lit up beyond the window, to the sister currently sleeping in my old bed under my old ceiling. "I'm learning it every single day."

I turned the lamp off and lay back against the pillow, the note still in my hand, and for the first time since Nathaniel had told me to stay away from the main house, I didn't feel like I was being punished.

I felt like I was being underestimated.

And there was a difference, I was starting to understand, between the two.

One made you smaller while the other, if you let it, made you dangerous.

Outside, the light in the master bedroom window clicked off, and the property went dark and quiet around me, and I lay there a long while longer, turning the note over and over in my hands until the edges went soft.

Tomorrow, I decided, I wouldn't hide behind the blinds. 

Tomorrow I'd let her see me watching, too.