sat row upon row of hand-labeled jars of jams, nut butters, preserved fruits, and cartons of almond milk, and along the floor sat great sacks of dried rice, pulses, flour, potatoes, and a thousand different kinds of dried beans. We certainly wouldn’t starve.
Maren sighed, and again I felt my cheeks flush and my heart stammer, as if I’d done something terribly wrong.
“Is there something you’re not telling me, Sophie?” she said then.
I lifted my gaze to her searching blue eyes. It was hanging in the air, her suspicion of me, her eyes perceiving every inch of my terrible lie as though it was smeared ten inches thick across my face.
“I’m not vegan,” I heard myself say. “I’ve . . . renounced veganism.”
Her eyebrows shot up.
“I’m not convinced veganism is . . . nutritionally adequate,” I continued, or rather my mouth continued. “Studies have shown . . .”
I was glad Maren cut in then, one hand held up as if to say she’d heard all about “studies,” because I had no idea what kind of studies I was about to refer to. “Yes, yes,” she said. “And frankly, I agree. But Tom has . . . Look, I don’t mind if you give Gaia honey.”
“Honey?” I said, incredulous. Nothing I’d read mentioned honey as a carnivorous food. There were three thousand, four hundred and sixty-eight jars of it in the pantry, all from local sources and with intriguing flavors, like clover and acacia. Lavender was Gaia’s favorite.
“I know, I know,” Maren said wearily. “Frankly I’d say honey is perfectly vegan. But Tom doesn’t agree with some of the practices of beekeeping now, so he’d rather we avoided honey altogether.”
I reassured her that of course I would abide by Tom’s wishes going forward, but I could sense she didn’t trust me, and I wondered what I’d done to create a bad impression. And then I realized, and when I did I could barely speak for sheer, ground-opening horror: the window opposite threw back my reflection, a reflection that showed I had rolled up my sleeves and revealed to Maren the long red scars all over my forearms. The cuts had healed and the swelling had gone down, but they were still visible, stark signatures of what I’d done in David’s bathroom. Like a child caught with her hand in the biscuit tin I immediately and not at all subtly swiped both arms behind my back, and although Maren continued chatting about free-range milk, wondering aloud whether goat’s milk could qualify as vegan, there was a moment, wide as the universe, of silence. That silence told me she had seen the scars and knew exactly what they were. Moreover, she knew that those scars did not tally with my counterfeit identity. Sophie Hallerton was not the sort of person who would inflict such injuries on herself. And after all, who would want someone capable of injuring themselves so badly looking after their children—young children whose own mother had recently committed suicide?
I can’t remember what Maren said after that, but I think I mumbled a promise about avoiding honey before heading back to my room, climbing into bed, and crying beneath the covers. I was crying not simply because I was sure the game was up but because I had been reminded that the difference between Lexi Ellis and Sophie Hallerton was a vast gulf that could be measured in light-years. Perhaps my mother had always been right. I didn’t deserve to be here. That was a fact. I was a fraud, a trickster.
That night, a storm broke across the cliff. Rain thick as embroidery swept across the forest, drumming the roof of the house and worming its way through the slates, dripping into the attic. Purple lightning whipped across the skies in tremendous arcs. I was worried that the house would collapse or that the roof might cave in, but when I heard Maren race upstairs with a mop and bucket I was suddenly seized with an idea. I remembered I had used one of Sophie’s references. What was her name? Verity? What if she’d e-mailed the real Sophie to check up on how she was getting on? She would doubtless have e-mailed Maren straightaway once she found out that Sophie had never actually interviewed for the job.
Quickly I tiptoed to the office, where I knew Maren had been working before the rain started. Tom was in his studio at his enormous easel, the floorboards creaking every time he shifted in his seat.