Silent Half

CHAPTER FIVE: The House That Loves Her

Saturdays belonged, whenever the schedule allowed, to the other side of the family entirely.

Alina had woken early, before anyone in the main house had stirred, and packed her small canvas bag with the particular deliberateness of someone preparing for the best part of her week — a fresh sketchbook, three pencils, the good eraser that didn't smudge, and a small wrapped parcel of the shortbread Ate Rosa had made specifically because she knew where it was going.

"Tell Ma'am Seraphine I said the sugar's a little less this batch, like she asked," Rosa had said, pressing the tin into her hands at the kitchen door.

"I will."

"And tell your Lolo Alaric to stop sneaking sweets past his doctor's orders. I know it's him eating half of what I send."

Alina had laughed, promising nothing, because everyone in this house understood that Lolo Alaric's doctor's orders were a fiction observed by absolutely no one, least of all Lolo Alaric.

The drive to her paternal grandparents' estate took forty minutes along the coast road, past the point where the town thinned out into older money — houses that had been standing long enough to settle into the land rather than announce themselves against it. Alina always asked to be dropped rather than driven the whole way, the last stretch on foot, because there was something about arriving at that particular gate under her own power that made the whole visit feel more like coming home and less like being delivered somewhere.

She saw Lolo Alaric before he saw her — out on the veranda in his old cardigan despite the warmth of the morning, a cup of something going cold at his elbow, absorbed in whatever book had currently claimed him. He looked up as her footsteps hit the gravel, and his whole face did the thing it always did, the thing she had never once, in sixteen years, gotten tired of seeing: it opened, entirely, without reservation, the particular unguarded delight of someone who had been waiting for exactly this.

"There she is." He was on his feet before she reached the steps, moving with the careful haste of a man whose knees no longer entirely agreed with his enthusiasm. "There's my girl."

"Lolo." She let herself be folded into a hug that smelled like pipe tobacco he wasn't supposed to smoke anymore and the particular soap he'd used her whole life, and felt something in her shoulders that had been tight since Tuesday's dinner finally let go.

"You look thin," he said, holding her back at arm's length to inspect her properly, the way he always did, like she might have changed in some fundamental way in the two weeks since he'd last seen her. "Is that woman feeding you?"

"Ate Rosa feeds me plenty, Lolo. I'm fine."

"I didn't ask about Rosa's cooking, I asked if your mother's noticing whether you eat it." His eyes, sharp despite his seventy-some years, held hers for a moment too long, the way they always did when the subject of her parents came up even glancingly. He never pushed further than that single look. He didn't need to. She understood, and he understood that she understood, and between the two of them that was usually enough.

"Alaric, let the girl inside before you interrogate her on the porch like a customs officer." Lola Seraphine appeared in the doorway, drying her hands on an apron she had absolutely no practical need to wear given the household's full staff, but wore anyway because she liked to be the one who put her own hands into things that mattered to her.

"Lola." Alina crossed to her, and this hug was different from her grandfather's — quieter, longer, Lola Seraphine's hand coming up to cup the back of her head the exact way she'd done since Alina was small enough to be carried on a hip.

"Let me look at you." She held Alina's face between both hands, the way she always did, thumbs brushing lightly along her cheekbones as if checking for something only she could feel. "You've been crying."

"I haven't—"

"Not today. This week, sometime." Her grandmother's eyes, the same pale gray-green Alina saw in her own mirror every morning, didn't waver. "I can always tell. You get a particular tiredness around the eyes that has nothing to do with sleep."

Alina said nothing, which was, between the two of them, its own kind of answer.

"Come," Lola Seraphine said, releasing her at last. "I have shortbread from Rosa to compare against my own batch, and I intend to win, and you're going to judge fairly even though you love me best."

They spent the morning the way they always did — unhurried, low-stakes, entirely without the particular vigilance Alina carried everywhere else. Lolo Alaric told the same three stories he always told, about the shipping business in his day, about the storm of '92 that had nearly taken the old warehouse, about the year he'd met Seraphine at a wedding neither of them had wanted to attend and left engaged within the month, a story Alina had heard perhaps two hundred times and never once minded hearing again, because the joy in his voice telling it hadn't dimmed once across all those retellings.

Lola Seraphine, meanwhile, produced the shortbread — genuinely, marginally better than Rosa's, a fact Alina reported honestly and which delighted her grandmother out of all proportion to the achievement — and then, once the tea things had been cleared, drew Alina out into the garden, to the bench beneath the old frangipani tree that had, over the years, become an unofficial second sanctuary in Alina's life, a sibling to the basement room three towns away.

"Now," Lola Seraphine said, once they were settled, the tree scattering its pale, sweet-smelling flowers intermittently onto the bench between them. "Tell me properly."

Alina looked at her hands. "It's nothing new. Just — the usual. Mama had the Alarics over for Amara's recital photos. Papa said I was going to be late for school, which was the only thing he said to me all morning." She hesitated. "It's stupid to still mind it. It's been like this my whole life."

"It is not stupid to mind being treated as though you matter less than your sister," Lola Seraphine said, with the particular firmness she reserved for exactly this subject, the one place in her otherwise gentle disposition where she allowed herself something like an edge. "It would be stupid not to mind it. Minding it means you still expect better, and I would be a great deal more worried about you the day you stopped."

"Sometimes I think I should stop expecting it, though. It would hurt less."

Her grandmother was quiet for a moment, turning a fallen frangipani blossom over in her fingers.

"Your grandfather and I have loved you since before you could hold your own head up," she said finally. "Not because you're owed it by some accident of birth order, not because we feel sorry for you, though I won't pretend that isn't part of it some days. We love you because of who you actually are, iha — because you notice things other people don't, because you'd rather sit quietly with someone's pain than perform sympathy at it, because you paint a dying flower like it still deserves to be looked at properly. Your parents' blindness to that is their failure. It was never yours to fix by expecting less."

Alina felt her eyes go hot and blinked hard against it, the particular reflex of a girl who had trained herself, out of necessity, not to cry in front of people who might report it back to someone else. But this was Lola Seraphine, and this bench, and the frangipani tree that had heard every version of this conversation across the years without once repeating a word of it to anyone.

So she let herself cry, just a little, and her grandmother simply put an arm around her and let her, without hurrying her toward composure the way her mother would have, without treating the tears as an inconvenience to be resolved.

"Your brothers see it too," Lola Seraphine said eventually. "And Alaric and I see it. That's not nothing, Alina. That's not the sum of a whole life, being unseen by two people who ought to know better. You have more family in this world loving you properly than you sometimes let yourself count."

"I know." Alina wiped her face with the back of her hand. "I just wish it were them too. Just once."

"I know you do, iha." Her grandmother pressed a kiss to the top of her head, the frangipani scent thick and sweet around them both. "I know."

They stayed on the bench a while longer, until the shadows shifted and Lolo Alaric called from the veranda that lunch was ready and he'd found where Rosa's shortbread batch had beaten Seraphine's after all, a claim that was met with immediate and vigorous dispute. Alina let herself be pulled back into the house, back into the particular warmth of a family that had chosen her without being required to, and did not think, for a few more hours yet, about the house she'd have to return to before dark.