Chapter 1
The scissors caught the light a half second before they caught her hair.
Nadia saw them in the glass — two bright blades, a woman’s manicured fingers — and her body understood before her mind did. Her shoulders went still. Her hands, folded at the front of her apron, did not lift.
“Hold her still,” Clarissa said.
The two housemaids on either side of Nadia pressed their palms to her shoulders. Rosa, who had worked in the kitchen for eleven years, would not meet her eyes. The other one, a girl hired in September whose name Nadia had not yet learned, was trembling hard enough that Nadia could feel it through her fingers.
She did not struggle. She had learned that lesson early: the weak only hurt more when they fought back.
The orchid house was warm and wet, and the white flowers stood in their pots along the glass like guests at a wedding no one had told them about. Beyond the panes, the lawn ran down toward the water, and the last of the afternoon light lay across it in long, thin sheets. Clarissa Hawthorne Merrill circled her slowly, platinum hair swept back, cream silk dress without a crease, smiling the smile that had sold a hundred thousand lipsticks and would sell a hundred thousand more.
“You think you’re something special?” she whispered, close to Nadia’s ear. Her perfume was expensive and sweet, and it made Nadia’s stomach turn. “You think because you’ve been here seven years, because he remembers your name, you actually matter?”
Nadia looked at the orchids. White, veined with the faintest purple, each one held up on a thin green stem. She thought of Mila at the bakery with flour on her cheek. She thought of rosemary water in a chipped basin, and her mother’s fingers working through her hair in a room that smelled of steam and thread.
She said nothing.
“Seven years,” Clarissa said, “and you still don’t know how to look at me when I speak.”
She lifted a long chestnut curl and held it away from Nadia’s neck, testing its weight. The blades opened with a small, precise click.
“Mrs. Hawthorne arrives on Sunday,” Clarissa said. “Five days. I want this house perfect. I want everyone in it to know their place. And that” — she gave the curl a little tug — “is not a place for hair like this.”
The sound came before the feeling — a clean bright snick, like a door shutting somewhere far away. Then the coolness at her nape, the sudden lightness, and the curl falling past her shoulder to the tile.
Clarissa held the severed length up to the light. She turned it slowly, the way she had once turned a porcelain cup in Theodore’s drawing room, and her lip curled as though she had found a stain.
“Look at that,” she said. “All that fuss.”
She dropped it at Nadia’s feet.
“Now let’s see how special you really are.”
The curl lay among the orchid pots, among fallen white petals and dark scatter of soil. Nadia stared at it. Her hair. The hair her mother had washed with rosemary water in the cramped garment workshop on the second floor of an old building on Pell Street, the only inheritance left from a woman who had gone into smoke and never come out.
She did not cry. She had trained herself out of crying in this house. But something behind her ribs went very quiet, the way a room goes quiet when the electricity fails.
“Clean this up,” Clarissa said. She set the scissors on the potting bench, handles toward herself, precise as a surgeon. “And Nadia. If Mr. Hawthorne asks, you asked me to trim it. You said the ends were dead. Do you understand?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Good.” Clarissa smoothed her own hair with the flat of her hand. “You may go.”
Rosa’s fingers lifted from Nadia’s shoulders. The new girl had tears on her face, and Nadia felt a distant, tired pity for her — for anyone who had not yet learned that tears in this house were currency no one accepted.
She knelt. The tile was cold through her uniform. She gathered the hair with both hands, strand by strand, the way she had once gathered her mother’s sewing pins from the floor after the police had finally let them into the workshop. The chestnut was dark against her palms. It weighed almost nothing.
That was when she noticed the shoes.
May you like
They were black, polished to a hard shine, and they had stopped at the edge of the tile where the gravel path began. Above them, the hem of a charcoal suit. A hand loose at a side, the knuckles marked with old scars.
Nadia looked up.
