Page 30 of Flowerheart

My mother, vanishing from our lives, abandoning Papa and me, leaving him working himself to the bone to support me. The harm she’d done to the community. The Councilmembers watching me, punishing me. My teachers, noting thatShe may be hard to teach, like her mother.The nights I’d heard Papa crying. The gaping hole Mother had left in our household. She’d broken my father’s heart, and now I’d destroyed it with my magic.

“Three.”

I hurled the porcelain rabbit off the lip of the cliff, watching it bounce and then fall apart magnificently against the rocks. Xavier’s teacup joined the mess of pink shards below.

The two of us reached into the basket again—I took a pot meant for serving sugar, and he removed the teacup’s matching plate.

“Shout this time,” he said, his chest heaving. “I’ll do the same.”

I didn’t wait for him to count; I hurled the sugar bowl over the edge with a grunt.

“No, shout,” he pushed. “You can’t hold in your anger, it’ll only hurt—”

“I’m trying!” I snapped, and tossed a glass paperweightas hard as I could. It cracked as it landed, and I took a deep breath and screamed into the abyss. The shrill sound echoed and returned to me and was then matched by another cry of pure rage. I hardly recognized the boy at my side. Red-faced, hands clenched, eyes squeezed shut. This was truly him. His fear, his forced smiles, his weariness—they were all hidingthis.

“Why are you lying to me?” I asked.

His eyes flew open. “I’m not—”

“You are! About that potion. And you’ve been so guarded. Madam Ben Ammar warned me to be careful around you. Why can’t you just tell me what’s wrong?”

He grimaced. “It’s complicated.”

“It’s not right of you”—I threw an old clock down the cliffside—“to keep me in the dark! Not when we’ve made a vow. We aren’t children anymore.”

He snatched a flowerpot from the pile and flicked it with his wrist like a discus. It clattered against the cliffside. “You have nothing to do with this. Not with my anger, not with my past—none of it.”

I heaved a pea-green teapot over the edge with a huff. “But I did, once! Iwasa part of your past—”

“Am I obliged to bare every part of my soul to you?”

“Yes!” I held my hand against my forehead, white, angry heat pulsing behind my eyes. “We were best friends, once! We told each other everything.”

He bowed his head, his eyes closed tight again, like hewas trying to remember something—or forget something. “You’re right. Wearen’tchildren anymore. We’re very different people.” He set his jaw and looked at the brilliant horizon. “Why didn’t you visit me?”

The words were disjointed and ill-fitting, a flower growing in a field full of weeds.

“I—what?”

Xavier turned his head towards me but kept his gaze lowered—half of the gesture of looking at me. “You must have come home to see your father, even during your apprenticeships. For holidays and such. You... you never stopped by.”

His voice was so small. It had deepened since we last visited years ago, but there was a trace of the old cadence of his speech in there. He had always been soft-spoken.

“Youstopped writing to me,” I murmured. “I wrote to you and you never replied. I thought you hated me.”

He flinched like I’d struck him.

There was more he wasn’t saying. I took a step closer. “Why didn’t you write?”

Xavier curled his fingers into tight, black-gloved fists. “Father was worried that you’d be a bad influence on me.”

My brow furrowed. “But my magic wasn’t so wild then—”

“It was your mother,” he said, and this time, he dared to meet my eyes. His mouth was pressed tight.

Part of me had always wondered and feared that this was the case.

He went on, twisting the knife. “She’d... she’d poisoned a hundred people in the district.”

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