Walks in gardens and timid conversations that only touched on respectable topics had been all that were allowed them. Grace knew that the horrid truths of her nighttime hours would only seem like garish nightmares to these half-formed shadows of their own mothers who parroted manners and giggled behind their hands when boys’ names were mentioned.
That she could tell Elizabeth and Nell the truth of her existence without hesitation if she were allowed to speak, Grace knew without a doubt. Their lives were like her own, flavored with the misery of the past, which made the safety of the present all the more sweet. The bonds grown out of shared suffering were strong indeed, and though forged only that afternoon, Grace felt a closeness to them that had never existed with the well-bred friends handpicked in her former life.
It was easy to shut the doors of her mind on the faces of the past. Grace had done so without hesitation and thrown away the key. But Alice’s voice slipped through the keyhole, echoing into her dreams and bringing with it the image of her little sister’s face, still full with the baby fat of youth and wide, innocent eyes.
“Grace.” Even her name sounded sweeter in those high, childish tones. “Grace, you haven’t eaten your strawberries,” Alice said, her small pink lips stained with the redness of her own dessert.
In her dream, Grace lifted her eyes from the pattern of the lace covering on the dining room table, her stomach turning in revulsion at the red fruit in front of her. “I can’t,” she said weakly, her fingertips barely strong enough to push the china away from her as the nausea swept her body.
“Mother,” Alice said, her thin blond brows creased with worry. “Why does Grace not eat her breakfast anymore?”
“Grace is not feeling well,” their mother said, a permanent line in between her brows darkening as she rose to stand beside her oldest daughter. “Perhaps you had best go to your tutor alone this morning, Alice. Grace and I need to talk.”
“We did talk.” Grace seethed, her words tasting like the vomit she tried so hard to keep down. “I told you and told you and YOU WILL NOT LISTEN.” The rage she’d held on to in reality burst forth in her dream, and Alice’s small face collapsed in tears as Grace grabbed her fork and drove it through her mother’s hand. Mother’s blood flowed and her hand turned to a man’s, the silver tines of the fork exposing bone and gristle while Heedson yowled in pain, and Alice’s cheeks hollowed out, the ends of her lovely hair splitting while she shoved handfuls of it into her mouth in an imitation of Cracked Pat.
“You wouldn’t listen,” Grace cried out, sitting up in her bed and trying to stop the words before they seeped through the walls and betrayed her to her neighbors.
Though she knew she could share parts of her story if she chose, her slate was small and no words were big enough to encompass her past. Grace wiped at her mouth, almost wanting to spit to rid the aftertaste of the nightmare and the memories that had rushed at her unbidden. It seemed safer to lock it away and leave everything behind along with her last name in the murky darkness of a Boston asylum.
And it would be so easy if not for Alice, whose sweet face had greeted her every morning and whose tiny fingers had once wound through Grace’s own. The very fingers that might that moment be pressed to red-rimmed eyes as she mourned for a sister dead at the hands of whatever lies her parents had fed her to cover the trail of the ones before.
Grace flung back her covers, all sleep stolen at the thought of Alice mourning for a death that hadn’t happened. Lies had covered her home for so long that Grace had accepted them as a matter of course, as ever-present as the smell of drink on Mother’s breath and strange perfume on Father’s coat. She’d been born and bred on them, and now she’d turned the tables, using all the tricks and trumperies she’d learned by watching to deliver herself from their web.
But her escape meant a shield was removed from her little sister. Alice had been born too late to foster anything other than resentment for a ruined figure from their mother and grumblings about another wedding to pay for from their father, but those words had never