Chapter 3
The apartment was three blocks from the bakery, above a laundromat that closed at eight, and by the time Nadia climbed the stairs the streetlights had come on. She had wrapped a scarf around her head. The wool scratched her neck where the hair had been, and the cold touched the skin there in a way that felt indecent.
Mila was at the kitchen table with a bowl of dough and flour to her elbows. She looked up when the door opened, and her hands stopped.
Nadia set down her bag. “I’m home.”
Mila couldn’t hear her. She read lips, and she read faces better than anyone Nadia had ever known. Her eyes went to the scarf, then to Nadia’s face, and something in her expression changed — a stillness, the way water goes still before it freezes.
She crossed the room. Her hands were gentle on Nadia’s shoulders, and then on the scarf, lifting it away.
The air touched Nadia’s neck. Mila looked at the ragged ends, the uneven line, the places where the blades had slipped. Her eyes filled.
She didn’t ask who. She didn’t need to. She had lived in the world long enough to know what kind of woman held scissors like that.
She pulled Nadia into her arms and held her, and Nadia, who had not cried in the orchid house, who had not cried in the scullery, who had trained herself for seven years to keep her face as smooth as a made bed, felt something in her chest give way. She cried without sound. Mila’s hand moved slowly up and down her back, the way their mother used to do.
After a while, Mila stepped back and raised her hands.
*It will grow.*
Nadia wiped her face. “I know.”
*You’re still beautiful.*
“Don’t lie to me.”
Mila smiled, and signed: *I never lie. I’m the honest one.*
Nadia laughed, and it hurt.
Later, after Mila had gone to bed, Nadia sat by the window with a blanket around her shoulders and looked down at the empty street. The laundromat’s sign buzzed. A car passed. She touched the scar on her left wrist and let herself remember.
She was seventeen the year the garment workshop on Pell Street burned. Her mother had worked there for nine years, at a machine by the window, sewing sleeves for coats that would be sold in stores she would never enter. She came home with thread in her hair and a tiredness that lived behind her eyes. In the weeks before the fire, she had begun to complain about the owner. He had locked the back door, she said, so the workers couldn’t slip out for air. The exit was bolted shut. The fire marshal would never know.
Nadia had listened. She had felt something wrong turn over in her stomach. But she was seventeen, and her mother was the adult, and the owner was a man with money and a lawyer and a name that people said carefully. Who was she to make trouble? She had said nothing.
The night the workshop burned, she had been at home with Mila, who was ten and asleep. She heard the sirens. She ran. By the time she reached Pell Street, the second floor was a wall of orange, and the crowd stood behind a rope, and she could hear people screaming behind the glass. She ran to the side door and grabbed the handle, and the handle was hot, and it did not move. It did not move. The scar on her wrist was the shape of that handle.
Her mother never came home.
For ten years, Nadia had carried the guilt like a stone in her coat pocket. If she had spoken, she told herself, someone might have listened. If she had asked one question, one official might have come. Her silence had not saved anyone. It had only left her with a question that had no answer.
The next morning, she went back to the mansion with the scarf around her head. Mr. Oswald was in the pantry, counting silver. He looked at her once, and his old eyes understood everything, and he said nothing. But that night, in his room above the garage, he took out a leather-covered notebook, turned on the desk lamp, and wrote in his neat hand: *Tuesday. The orchid house. The girl’s hair.*
He had served this family for forty years. He had learned that some storms could not be stopped with words. They could only be recorded, detail by detail, until the day the truth was needed.
On Thursday, Clarissa gathered the staff in the main hall. Mrs. Hawthorne would arrive on Sunday. The house would be perfect. There would be no mistakes.
She handed out a list of rules. At the bottom, in her elegant hand, was a line that made Nadia’s blood go slow:
May you like
*Nadia — not to be seen.*
And beneath it, smaller: *After Sunday, we will discuss whether you still have a place here.*
