he must have been a little old for it. I can almost hear the voices she did for each character and see the light in her eyes. But the cozy images are accompanied by too much pain to look at straight on.
If I were her, where would I have hidden something precious?
After a moment of pondering, I cross over to the closet and open the door. Whoever oiled the door to the suite neglected to do the same here. It squeaks loudly—but then the sight of her clothes hits me, and it’s like a blow to the chest. Even in the moonlight all the colors are discernible—reds, blues, greens, yellows, pinks. I’d forgotten that about Mom, how much she loved bright colors.
Just as she had in her closet back at our old house, there’s a box full of old shoes and belts and knickknacks on the floor beneath the hems of the dresses. I plop down on the carpet, feeling like I want to cry as another small dust cloud rises around me. But the tears don’t come. Something else has taken over.
I reach into the box and extract a sweater I vaguely recognize, worn thin, its once wine-red color now caked gray with dust. I shake as much free as I can and press the cleanest part of the sweater to my face, breathing in, trying to find some smell of Mom or of home. But there’s nothing there. Just mustiness.
I drop the sweater, feeling crushed and frantic, and reach back into the box. Maybe something buried deeper will have been kept safe from the dust. If I were Mom, and I had a secret—something I wanted no one else to find—this is where I would put it, buried among mundane things. And sure enough, the next thing my fingers touch is a square leather edge. A book cover.
I extricate it from the box, careful not to tear what I can tell by touch are age-worn pages. Tilting my phone so the light shines over the cover, I feel something snag in my chest. It’s a photo book, the kind you buy at a craft store. The red leather cover and the page edges are gilded to lend an air of fanciness. There’s a little plastic sleeve embedded on the front cover, one small spot to give a photo prime placement. And in it is a shot of me and Mom and Nate in Havenfall’s gardens, her arms around our shoulders, flowers rioting all around us. She is wearing a yellow dress, and her hair is long and loose, held back only by a pair of sunglasses pushed to the top of her head. Next to her, Nate and I have big, hammy smiles. Havenfall’s front door stands open in the background, ready to welcome us home.
In a daze, I bring the scrapbook over to the bed and sit down on the side, reaching for the lamp switch on the nightstand. The bulb sputters and flickers worryingly at first, but then holds, casting the room in dusty yellow light. I page through the pictures, feeling like I’m in a trance. Me and Mom and Nate on a hiking trail. Me and Mom and Nate at the doughnut shop in town. Me and Mom and Nate in the Havenfall kitchen, baking something.
Then the pictures start to change. They feature the same places, but instead of us, of Mom, they feature a man. I can tell that he’s a Fiorden, tall and handsome with aristocratic features and fine clothes made of velvet and silk. He has short dark hair, bright brown eyes, and a slightly wicked smile. There are pictures of him and of my mom, but never of the two of them together. When I look closely at the crystal pin fastening his cloak at his shoulder, I see it’s carved in the shape of a bird.
I can’t stop staring at his face. It’s less than an inch high in these pictures, faded after more than ten years. But my mother loved him, this Cadius. Who was he?
Suddenly, it’s too much, his handsome smile and what it represents—this huge secret Mom kept from me. I go back to the box in the closet and keep digging. This time, my fingers close on silk, and I pull—but something heavy comes loose and clangs to the floor, making me jump almost out of my skin. Something that was wrapped in the fabric. I sit totally still, heart pounding, sure at any moment