Wrong sister, Right man

chapter 15

**Mia**

It rained all that Sunday, the soft stubborn kind that doesn't fall so much as hang around.

I woke at one in the morning to the sound of it on the roof, and to something else underneath. A smell. Wet earth and green leaves, drifting up from somewhere in the house, as though a window had been left open on a forest.

I'd lived there a month. I knew the smells. Floor polish, coffee, Mrs. Pell's lavender soap, cedar. Never once dirt.

I put on my cardigan and followed my nose.

It took me down the main stairs and through the dark library to the far wall, where the shelves ran floor to ceiling and ended in more books. I stood there feeling like an i***t, sniffing the air. The smell was stronger. I laid my hand on a shelf.

It moved.

Only an inch. But a whole section of the wall swung inward on a hinge I'd never noticed, and a breath of warm damp air rolled out and touched my face, and I stepped through before I could think better of it.

---

I don't know how to describe the room, except to say I forgot to breathe.

Glass first. A curved glass roof, high and arched, with the rain running down it in silver threads and the city lights smeared gold behind. Underneath, green. Ferns spilling over stone planters. A lemon tree in a clay pot, heavy with small hard fruit. A vine climbing an iron trellis. Little lamps tucked among the leaves, throwing amber circles across a floor of old brick.

It was warm. It smelled like a promise.

And in the middle of it, kneeling on the bricks with his sleeves shoved up and his hands in a pot of soil, was my husband.

He hadn't heard me. He'd taken off his shoes. His hair was falling in his eyes, and he was concentrating so hard on something I couldn't see that for a moment I couldn't make myself say anything.

Then I stepped on a loose brick, and he looked up.

I watched it all happen. Surprise. Alarm. That quick familiar shutter coming down. And then, to my astonishment, he stopped it. Halfway down, he stopped, and let it rise again.

"You found it."

"The door was open."

"It never is." He wiped his hands on his thighs. "Mrs. Pell is the only other person who knows this room exists. I told the architect it was a pantry."

"A pantry."

"It was the only word I could think of."

I laughed. I couldn't help it. I was standing in a glass cathedral of ferns at one in the morning in my slippers, and he'd called it a *pantry.*

"What are you doing?" I said.

"Repotting."

"At one a.m.?"

"I can't sleep. This is what I do." He glanced at the pot, and his face went gentle, almost shy. "Come and look."

I knelt beside him on the bricks. The pot held a small, scruffy, deeply unhappy-looking bush, dark glossy leaves, a few going yellow, a thin woody stem that looked like it had been through a war.

"What is it?"

"Tea."

I stared at him.

"*Camellia sinensis.* I've been trying to grow one for four years. This is the fourth. The first three died."

"You've been making terrible tea for a month," I said slowly, "while keeping an actual tea plant in a secret room."

"It doesn't produce anything yet."

"It's a *bush,* Damian."

"It's a very slow bush. It likes shade and acid soil and it hates being watched." He said it with enormous dignity. "Which makes us alike."

I put my hand over my mouth. I was laughing so hard that my eyes were watering, and he was watching me with a look of astonished delight, as if he'd said something funnier than he knew and couldn't work out how.

"Hold this," he said, and put a trowel in my hand.

---

That's how it started. Not a decision. He handed me a trowel.

He showed me how to loosen the roots without tearing them. I showed him I couldn't, and tore two, and he said "It's fine, it's fine," in a voice that meant it wasn't. I got soil under my nails. He packed the new dirt in around the stem with both hands, and when I reached to steady the pot, our fingers met in the dark earth and stayed there a beat too long.

Neither of us said anything. The rain tapped the glass. A drop slid down a leaf above us and landed on the brick with a small clear sound.

"There's a card," he said.

He drew it out of the soil beside the stem. Soft, faded, furred at the edges, with blue ink on it in a woman's slanting hand.

*Water on Sundays. Don't let it see you worry.*

I read it three times.

"She kept one on the windowsill," he said. "It's the only thing I remember her saying about gardens. That anything that grows slowly is worth waiting for."

I couldn't answer. I was holding a dead woman's handwriting in a hand full of dirt, thinking about a thimble, and a thermos, and a man who had been tending a living thing for four years because he couldn't tend anything else.

"It's Sunday," I said, when I could. "Technically."

He glanced at the clock over the door. Ten past one.

"Technically."

I filled the little copper can from the tap by the wall and watered the plant myself, slowly, working around the stem. When I looked up, he was watching me with a face I'll never forget. Not guarded. Not careful. Just open, like a window somebody had finally remembered to unlatch.

"Thank you," he said.

"It's only water."

"No," he said. "It isn't."

---

I don't know when we stopped talking about the plant.

I know I was sitting back on my heels with my cardigan sliding off one shoulder. I know my clip had come loose, and a damp curl had stuck across my cheek. I know there was dirt on my face, because he was looking at it, and the corner of his mouth moved.

"You have—"

"Where?"

He lifted his hand. Slowly, so I could stop him. His thumb touched my cheekbone, just under the eye, and wiped the smudge away, and didn't leave.

I stopped breathing.

His palm came to rest against the side of my face, warm and rough, and his thumb moved once along my skin as if he were checking I was real.

"Mia," he said.

Just my name. But he said it the way you say a word in a language you've only just learned and aren't sure you're pronouncing right.

I couldn't see the lamplight. I couldn't see the glass or the green. I could see the gold flecks in his eyes, the tiny scar through his eyebrow, the line of his mouth, which had stopped being hard and was just a mouth.

"I'd like to," he said, very low. "If you'd let me."

It was so small. So unguarded. Nothing like the Damian Blackwood on the front pages. I nodded. My whole body was nodding.

He leaned down. I tipped my face up. An inch. Less. I felt his breath on my lips, and I closed my eyes, and in the dark behind them I heard a voice as clear as if someone had spoken it in my ear.

*Ask your husband where the Harlow Street money went.*

I jerked back.

It was so sudden he nearly lost his balance. His hand fell away. I scrambled to my feet with my heart going so hard I thought it would crack something.

"I can't."

"Mia—"

"I want to. I want to so much that it's—" I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth. "But I can't do this while I'm lying to you."

The whole room went still.

I watched the shutter start to come down, slow, almost reluctant, and I couldn't stand it.

"Don't," I said. "Please. Don't close the door."

"I'm not."

"You are. I can see you doing it."

His hands opened and closed at his sides. "What are you lying about?"

*Say it.* It was all right there. The note. The tablet. The mirrored hall. The café on Linden Street, and a girl in a gray sweater who cried so beautifully. I couldn't say all of it. If I did, I'd have to watch his face, and I'd already seen what it looked like when something he trusted turned out to be a trap.

But I could say one.

"Arthur Voss," I said. "At the ball. He didn't just ask to buy the land. He told me to ask you what you paid for it. He gave me his card." My voice shook. "I said that's all he wanted. I lied."

I saw it land. A stillness went through him, absolute, like a pond when a stone goes in.

"I know," he said.

"You *know?*"

"I knew at the ball. You had it in your hand." He looked at the floor. "I let you."

"Why?"

"Because I'd promised you wouldn't be a parcel." He lifted his eyes. "And because I was afraid that if I pushed, you'd tell me. And I don't have an answer I'm allowed to give you."

The rain went on. A leaf dripped.

"Not yet," he said. "I can't, not yet. But I will. I swear it. When it's mine to tell, you'll be the first person who hears it."

"That's not enough," I whispered.

"I know." He didn't look away. "I'm sorry. It's all I have."

I stood there with dirt on my hands and my face wet, and I thought: *He's right. It's not enough. And it's the most honest thing anyone's said to me in a month.*

"There are two more," I said. "Things I haven't told you."

"All right."

"I'm going to. I need a little time."

"Take it." He rubbed his thumb across his empty palm. "I've waited eleven years for a lot less."

I went out through the door in the bookshelf. I didn't run. I didn't look back.

---

I sat on my bed in the dark for an hour. My lips still felt the place where his breath had been. My cheek still felt his thumb. I was furious with myself, and I'd never been so scared, and under both of those there was something quiet and warm I didn't dare examine.

My phone buzzed at 2:40.

*Ms. Adler.*

*Mrs. Blackwood. Forgive the hour. I think it's time we had lunch. Tomorrow, 12:30, the Ferris Street dumpling shop. Come alone. He needn't know.*

I read it twice. Then I lay back and stared at the ceiling, and I thought: *Everyone in this city has been telling me what to ask.*

*Not one of them has told me what to do with the answers.*

---

**Damian**

I stayed in the conservatory after she left.

I didn't turn on any more lights. I sat on the brick where she'd knelt, with my back against the planter, and looked at the little tea bush, and thought about nothing for a long time.

I'd nearly kissed my wife.

She'd nearly let me. I knew it the way you know the second before a glass breaks. And then she'd pulled back, and told me about Voss, and I'd said *I know,* and what I had wanted most in the world was to tell her the rest. All of it. Eleven years of it, on the floor between us.

I didn't.

I'd promised a man. In a hospital corridor when I was twenty-two and shaking, he took my hand and said, *Whatever happens, protect her. Protect the family. Never let them be hurt by what I did.* I'd said yes, because I'd have said yes to anything. Because he'd bought my first suit. Because he'd given a kid with a sewing basket and no father a desk in the corner of his office.

I'd kept it every day since.

I picked up the card again. *Don't let it see you worry.*

"I'm trying," I told the plant.

It didn't answer. It was a tea bush. But as I reached to switch off the lamp, I noticed something small and pale among the dark leaves, low down, where the stem met the soil.

A bud.

The first it had ever grown. Tight and white and no bigger than a pea.

I looked at it for a long time. Then I turned off the light, and went upstairs, and for the first time in four years, I slept.