Page 59 of The Manor of Dreams

She sat there for a few moments in silence. She heard Ada’s footsteps on the stairs and in the hall, pausing outside Rennie’s room. Rennie stayed hunched on the ground until Ada walked away.

Rennie let out the breath she was holding. She rose to the balls of her feet and scooped up the pearls in the darkness, trying to slip them back onto the string. But it was no use: the holes were too small and the chain was torn from the clasp. She stuffed what was left of the necklace into a drawer.

Maybe Ma wouldn’t notice it was gone, she thought ruefully as she climbed back onto her bed. She wrapped her blankets tight around her and tried again to sleep.

LUCILLEknew she was sometimes difficult. Stubborn and judgmental, too. Even her own mother said so. Lucille was just honest. Sometimes she knew what Ada was thinking and she would say it for her, because she knew Ada didn’t want to say it herself. Lucille would do anything for the people she cared about. Especially for her twin sister.

But something was going on with Ada and Sophie. A strange tensionhad settled between the two of them, like they were fighting. Over what, Lucille had no clue. They no longer looked each other in the eye. Her sister had always been the lighter sleeper between the two of them, but now she was going to bed later and later. Lucille had had to nudge her awake in the mornings for the last days of school.

Ada also seemed nervous around their parents. Lucille was, too, to an extent. Before her parents left for Cannes, she’d tried asking her mother what was going on with Dad, and Ma had been short with her. “We’re just figuring out what to do in France,” she said curtly, and turned in a way that signaled to Lucille she was done with the conversation. Was that marriage? At a certain point their parents seemed to get so sick of each other that there wasn’t anything they couldn’t fight about. She wanted to talk to Dad about it. She missed him. They no longer spent afternoons together in the library. He always came home late and seemed on edge and distracted. He’d become too busy for his family, and that annoyed her.

She also needed to figure out what Ada and Sophie were fighting about. Late at night, after Rennie’s birthday, she’d come downstairs to sneak some birthday cake and heard something coming from the library. Ada hadn’t been in her room. Lucille had checked. She slotted her body next to the hinge of the door and heard Ada and Sophie talking and laughing.

She stepped closer. A split second later, she backed away, a layer of ice forming inside her. They weren’t fighting. They weren’t speaking to each other in front of Lucille because they wanted to talk, just the two of them. To tell each other things they didn’t want her to know. All at once it made sense. Their strange glances. Their silences. In the hallway, Lucille’s limbs became leaden. She almost wanted to barge in so Ada could see the hurt in her eyes and crumble and apologize, like she always did, sweet as Ada was. But Lucille stayed there. After a moment more she turned around and headed back up the stairs.

Lucille was no longer her sister’s confidante. Sophie was.

Lucille spent the night strategizing. She was going to be precise about this. She wasn’t going to lash out. She would let silences linger and refuse to talk over them. She would wait for Ada to confess.

Instead, infuriatingly, over the past month, Lucille watched her sister slip away from her. When Ada and Sophie exchanged glances over something Dad said at the dinner table, a bitter fury curled at the pit of her stomach and the rice felt like glue in her mouth.

During the second to last week of junior year, when they got let out of school that Friday, they all got ice cream to celebrate. But that night, Lucille heard hushed voices in the hallway. She peeked outside her room and saw headlights diminish from the driveway.

Ada’s door was open, and she wasn’t in her room.

Lucille had been the one who first invited Sophie to play with them as kids. Who was the gardener’s daughter, now, to try to break them apart? To exclude Lucille?

Lucille paced around the house. She went downstairs to Sophie and Elaine’s room. It was empty. She marched back to her room and sat on her bed. An hour later, she heard the car pull into the driveway.

She asked her sister about it the next morning, when they were making breakfast. Sophie had already gone to the library. Ada just shrugged. “Sophie and I couldn’t sleep. So she went for a drive and I went with.”

“You didn’t ask me?” Lucille had said. “What’s going on between you two?”

And then her sister stopped buttering her toast. She was going to apologize now, Lucille thought. She would tell her everything. “You were asleep,” Ada said. And then a pause. “You and I don’t have to doeverythingtogether, you know.”

Lucille’s face grew hot. She retreated into her room and felt like a scolded child.

ADAdidn’t see Sophie much during the day because of Sophie’s job, so at first it was nothing more than pressed flowers tucked between pages. It was almost as if they saved their thoughts for each other, carefully compressing them in the pages of their favorite books. Ada would wait until after dinner to go into the library, and as she slipped through the door, she’d thrill at the feel of Sophie’s gaze on her back.

Today, she reached for the copy ofThe Great Gatsby, its blue spine sticking out slightly on the shelf. A sprig of lavender fell out when sheopened it. Ada searched for a note, but there was none. Back in the kitchen, where Sophie, Rennie, and Lucille were talking over bowls of ice cream, Sophie slid her a secretive smile that slipped away as soon as Lucille looked over. Ada turned and went upstairs, holding the book. She looked at it for a long time in her room, trying to figure out what it meant. In the morning, she put it back.

“You’re being kind of weird these days,” Lucille said. She sat on the floor of Ada’s room while she was taking in a shimmery satin slip dress that she’d bought for her party. “Why aren’t you and Sophie talking?”

Ada shrugged.

“Are you guys fighting? I could talk to her.” Lucille’s finger slipped and she let out a hiss of pain. “Ow.” She sucked on her thumb and shook it out.

“It’s nothing.” Ada usually told her sister everything, but she wanted this for herself.

“Fine,” Lucille said tersely. She gathered up her dress and thread and went back into her own room.

The weekdays passed; the flowers were secret messages, and it was Ada’s job to decode them. She’d deduced that the pale pink daisies symbolized joy, lavender a sense of calm, bright red poppies a sort of anxiety. They were always tucked between the first page and the inside cover, so she couldn’t miss them.

She kept thinking about the time she kissed Sophie’s cheek. She kept waiting for Sophie to make a move, but she didn’t. At school it was so simple. Boys asked girls out to prom with elaborate posters and passed notes scrawled on binder paper. They made out against lockers and in front of classrooms before the bell rang for everyone to see.

In the mornings before school, Sophie helped her dad out in the garden. She’d been doing it for years; working alongside him as he transplanted a new species of roses, or constructed a trellis for the bougainvillea, or clipped hedges around the stone terrace. Sophie was particularly deft in taking care of the jasmine, which was best tended to late at night. Josiah always talked about it at dinner, praising his daughter easily. Sophie tried to suppress her smile. After the hottest mornings she spent in the garden, she’d come in for a glass of iced water with hercheeks flushed and damp, her tank top stretched tight against her collarbones and chest. Ada would watch her tip the glass back, a strange sort of anxiety twisting up in her.

That night, a book of poems by Emily Dickinson had been pulled forward. Between the pages lay a violet. The violet was new. And this time, something was penciled on the page.

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