Chương 2
“You’re allowing an employee to turn this into theater.”
Mara looked at her then.
She had spent eleven weeks lowering her gaze, softening answers, and making herself smaller whenever Celeste entered the nursery. She had told herself it was professionalism. She had called it prudence when Celeste criticized the way Lila held a spoon, the way Mara tied a sash, the way laughter traveled through the upstairs corridor. Each time Celeste’s impatience edged close to cruelty, Mara had found a less threatening word.
Strict.
Tired.
Unaccustomed to children.
She could not find a smaller word for what had just happened.
“Please leave the room,” Mara said.
The request came out quietly, but Celeste stared as if she had been struck.
Julian rose.
“You heard her.”
“This is my house too.”
“No,” he said. “It is not.”
The words landed without force and altered the room more completely than a shout would have.
Celeste’s silver earrings trembled when she turned her head.
“You don’t mean that.”
“I mean that you are to go upstairs, ask Nina to help you pack what you need for tonight, and wait in the east sitting room until your car arrives.”
“You are expelling me because a frightened servant tells you a story?”
“I watched you release a child onto the floor.”
Celeste’s face tightened at the word servant, though she had been the one to use it.
“She had the brooch in her hand.”
“And you had her in yours.”
For several seconds, no one moved.
Then Celeste bent as if to retrieve the swan.
Julian stepped between her and the brooch.
“Leave it.”
“It belongs to me.”
“It belongs to the Vale estate.”
“You gave it to me.”
“I gave you permission to wear it at the Winter Museum dinner. That was four months ago.”
A silence followed, different from the others. This one contained information.
Celeste looked toward the doorway and found only Mrs. Lenox and Dr. Pritchard. Elise had gone. No one offered her rescue.
She gathered the navy satin skirt with one hand and walked past them. Her dark heels made clipped sounds across the marble. At the threshold, she paused beside Julian without looking at him.
“You will regret conducting a family matter in front of people who confuse shock with truth.”
Julian did not answer.
After she left, Mrs. Lenox released a breath.
“My God.”
Lila began to cry in earnest then, though even that came without noise at first. Her face crumpled against Mara’s collar. Mara rocked her once and immediately stopped, afraid movement might hurt her.
Julian crouched again.
“I’m going to call Dr. Feld.”
Elise returned before he could take out his phone.
“Mr. Keating is bringing the car, but I called emergency services too. I thought—” She looked at Mara. “I didn’t know if moving her was safe.”
“You did right,” Mara said.
Julian nodded, but his attention remained on Lila.
The child lifted her face enough to see him.
“Uncle Jules?”
“Yes.”
“Am I bad?”
The question crossed the room and found every adult in it.
Julian’s expression failed him. For a moment he looked not like the owner of Bellweather House, not like the chairman of the Vale Family Arts Foundation, not like the man who could close a museum wing with one phone call, but like someone who had arrived too late to stop an injury he had been warned about in smaller ways.
“No,” he said.
Lila watched him with wet, doubtful eyes.
“No,” he repeated. “You are not bad.”
“I touched the bird.”
“That isn’t the same thing.”
“The blue lady said I steal.”
Mara closed her eyes for half a second.
Julian glanced toward the empty doorway through which Celeste had gone.
“The blue lady was wrong.”
Lila considered this. Four-year-olds did not possess the adult skill of accepting reassurance because it was socially convenient.
“Why?”
“I don’t know yet.”
It was the first honest answer anyone had given her.
The paramedics arrived seven minutes later. Those seven minutes stretched across the room with the slow, unbearable precision of a clock in a hospital corridor.
Mrs. Lenox sat on the piano bench without asking. Dr. Pritchard paced once from the cream curtains to the doorway and back, then appeared embarrassed by the movement and stood beside the wall. Elise knelt several feet from Mara and made a little tent from Lila’s fallen hair ribbon, shaping it between her fingers until the child’s eyes followed.
Julian called the estate manager, the family attorney, and then someone named Henry, whom Mara later learned was the head of security. He did not leave the salon. He stood close enough that Lila could see him whenever she looked up, but he did not try to take her.
The silver swan remained on the floor.
No one touched it until the paramedics had examined Lila’s neck, scalp, pupils, shoulder, ribs, and hip. She cried when one of them pressed the outer edge of her left arm. The sound was sharp, and Mara’s stomach tightened.
“Likely bruising,” the paramedic said. “I’m not feeling anything unstable, but we should image the shoulder and check her for a mild head injury.”
Julian crouched beside them.
“Can she go in the car?”
“I’d prefer the ambulance, given her age and the mechanism.”
Mechanism.
The word was clinical enough to be useful and ugly enough to make Julian turn his face away.
Mara rode with Lila.
At the front doors, she saw Celeste standing at an upstairs window in the east wing. The navy gown was unmistakable against the pale interior. Celeste did not raise a hand or step back from the glass.
The ambulance pulled away beneath the iron gates.
May you like
Only then did Mara realize that her apron was stained with dust from the salon floor and that one of its pearl buttons had torn loose.
At St. Catherine’s, a nurse cut off Lila’s olive-green dress because the child would not release Mara long enough for them to ease it over her head. The fabric parted beneath silver scissors. Lila watched with solemn alarm.
