be good,dont call me brother!!

chapter two

The house was too big to understand in one day.

Amelia figured that out within the first ten minutes, standing in the marble entryway with her suitcase still in her hand, staring up a staircase that curved out of sight before it even reached the second floor. In the orphanage, you could see every room from the hallway if you knew where to stand. Here, she suspected there were rooms nobody had told her about yet.

"It's a lot, isn't it," Evelyn said, crouching to Amelia's eye level. "I got lost in it myself, the first year I lived here. Richard had to send the housekeeper to find me."

"Who's Richard?"

"My husband. Alexander's father. You'll meet him at dinner — he's away on business today, but he's very excited to meet you." Evelyn straightened and held out her hand again. "Come on. Let's find your room before you decide the whole house is too strange to live in."

Amelia took the hand. Behind them, Alexander trailed a few steps back, saying nothing, his coat still buttoned all the way to the collar as if he hadn't quite decided whether he was staying either.

The room with the yellow blanket was at the end of a hallway on the second floor, next to a window that looked out over a garden Amelia couldn't yet see the end of. The bed was bigger than any bed she'd slept in, and the blanket folded across it was the exact soft yellow of the daffodils that used to grow outside her old house — the real one, the one before the orphanage — and for a second the sight of it hit her so hard in the chest that she had to look away and pretend to study the curtains instead.

"Do you like it?" Evelyn asked.

"It's nice," Amelia said, which was not the same as answering.

Evelyn seemed to understand that. She didn't push. "I'll let you get settled. If you need anything, my room is just down the hall, first door on the left. And Alexander's room is—" she turned, "—Alexander, where's your room, relative to here?"

"Across the hall." His first full sentence since the sitting room. He was standing in the doorway, one shoulder against the frame, not quite inside the room and not quite outside it.

"Across the hall," Evelyn repeated. "So if you ever need anything and I don't hear you, you can always knock on his door too."

Amelia looked at him. He looked back for exactly as long as it took to realize he was being looked at, and then his eyes dropped to the suitcase in her hand instead.

"I can carry that in for you," he said. Not warm, exactly. But not nothing either.

"I can do it," Amelia said, and pulled it a little closer to her side, and something in his face — she wouldn't have been able to name it then, would barely be able to name it years later — flickered and closed again, like a curtain drawn.

"Okay," he said, and left the doorway.

Evelyn watched him go, then looked back at Amelia with an expression that was trying very hard to be patient. "He's not used to sharing his mother's attention," she said quietly, more to herself than to Amelia. "Give him time. He'll come around."

Dinner that night was the first time Amelia understood that this family ate meals the way other people attended church — with rules, with a particular kind of silence, with everyone sitting exactly where they were supposed to sit. Richard Kingsley arrived home just as the soup was being served, still in his suit, and shook Amelia's hand with the same seriousness he might have given a business partner.

"Welcome to our home, Amelia," he said. "Evelyn tells me you like yellow."

"Yes, sir."

"Good. Yellow's an honest color. Doesn't hide anything." He said it like it meant something more than it did, the way adults sometimes said things that were really meant for other adults in the room, and then he sat down and unfolded his napkin and the conversation moved elsewhere, and Amelia was left turning the sentence over privately, the way she turned most things over privately now.

Across the table, Alexander ate without looking up. He answered his father's questions about school in short, complete sentences — yes, the exam went well; no, he didn't need help with the essay — and otherwise said nothing.

"Alexander," Evelyn said, halfway through the meal, "why don't you tell Amelia about your school. She'll be starting somewhere soon too."

He looked up. For a moment Amelia thought he wasn't going to answer at all, that he would let the silence sit there the way he'd let it sit in the sitting room, but then he set down his fork with a small, precise click.

"It's fine," he said. "There's a lot of homework. The teachers are strict." A pause, and then, as if it cost him something: "You'll probably like the art room. They let you paint whatever you want on Fridays."

It wasn't much. But it was the most words he'd said to her all day, and Amelia found herself watching him a beat too long, trying to figure out why a boy who clearly didn't want her here had just gone out of his way to say something she might like.

"I like painting," she said.

"I know," Alexander said, and then seemed to catch himself, as if he'd said too much, and picked his fork back up.

I know. Amelia turned that over too. She hadn't told anyone in this house that she liked painting. She wondered, briefly, whether Evelyn had told him, and decided that was probably it, and let the question go — the way a four-year-old lets most questions go, quickly, without the patience yet to hold onto a mystery.

Later that night, unable to sleep in a bed too soft and a room too quiet, Amelia crept out into the hallway in her nightgown, meaning to find Evelyn's door. Instead she found Alexander sitting on the floor outside his own room, back against the wall, a book open on his knees that he wasn't reading.

He looked up when her door creaked. For a second, neither of them said anything.

"Can't sleep?" he asked.

"The house is too quiet."

"It's always this quiet." He said it like an apology, though she wasn't sure for what. "You get used to it."

Amelia hovered in the doorway of her room, not sure whether to go back in or come closer. "Why are you sitting outside your room?"

He looked down at the book on his knees as though he was surprised to find it there. "I don't know. I just—" He stopped. Started again. "I didn't want you to be alone the first night. In case you needed something. I wasn't going to come in. I was just going to sit here."

It was, Amelia would understand only much later, the single most honest thing he'd say to her for the next thirteen years. In the moment, she simply crossed the hallway — small bare feet on cold marble — and sat down on the floor beside him, close enough that their shoulders nearly touched, and said nothing at all.

He went rigid for a second, as if he hadn't expected her to actually come. Then, slowly, he relaxed, just slightly, and turned a page in the book he wasn't reading, and let her stay.

"You don't have to call me anything," he said eventually, staring straight ahead at the opposite wall. "You don't have to call me brother if you don't want to."

"I don't mind it," Amelia said. "It's better than nothing."

Something crossed his face in the low hallway light — something complicated, something that didn't belong on a nine-year-old, gone before she could read it.

"Yeah," he said quietly. "It's better than nothing."

Neither of them said anything else. They sat there on the cold floor until Amelia's eyes grew heavy against his shoulder, and when Evelyn found them an hour later, she stood in the hallway a long moment before she woke them, something in her chest aching in a way she couldn't yet explain — not quite worry, not quite hope, but close enough to both that she said nothing about it to anyone, not even Richard, and simply carried Amelia back to the room with the yellow blanket and let Alexander wake on his own.