Marguerite
Caden
I asked Marguerite to come to the house.
Not the phone. Not a conversation I was going to have secondhand through a speaker while everything else burned around us. If she had something to tell me about my mother, eleven years late, I needed to be in the room for it.
She arrived at one. Older than I remembered — she’d been in her fifties when she worked for my mother, which made her close to seventy now, hair fully white, hands trembling slightly as Mrs. Dalton showed her into the study. She looked at me and her eyes filled immediately.
“You look so much like her,” she said. “Around the eyes.”
I gestured to the chair across from me. Aria sat beside me, quiet, present, her hand finding mine on the armrest between us without either of us deciding it.
“Marguerite,” I sa
