Chapter 3 The Bible in the Box

POV: Ivy

Margaret's study smelled like lemon polish and old money. She  quietly sat behind her desk, hands folded, waiting for me the way a spider waits at the edge of a web.

"Close the door," she said.

I closed it.

"That locket." She did not raise her voice. She never needed to. "Where did you get it?"

My mind raced through every answer I had rehearsed for this exact moment, and somehow none of them came out fast enough.

"It was my mother's, ma'am."

"Was it." She tilted her head, studying me the way she studied a stain on good linen. "I could have sworn I have seen that clasp before."

The room felt smaller than it was. I kept my hands still at my sides, though every part of me wanted to reach up and cover the locket with my palm but l refused.

"I hear that a lot," I said. "People say it looks familiar. It is an old style, I think."

She did not answer right away. She let the silence lingered there, heavy, the way she let most things sit until they cracked on their own.

"You are jumpy this morning," she said instead. "I will have Rosa go over the schedule with you. I expect the west wing spotless before the engagement party. Vanessa's family will be touring the estate."

"Yes, ma'am."

She dismissed me with a small wave of her hand as if l am not 

Nothing was already reaching for a folder on her desk. I left before she could change her mind about the questions.

I did not breathe properly again until I reached my room and shut the door quietly behind me.

My room was small but cosy.A bed, a dresser, a narrow window that looked out over the garden hedges. I had lived in it for five months and still could not call it mine, not the way I once called a tiny apartment near the water mine, back when Damian and I still had a life no one else knew about.

I knelt beside my bed and pulled out the box hidden underneath it.

Inside sat a cracked leather Bible, its spine split down the middle, thread hanging loose from a repair I had started and never finished. Beside it, a small set of tools. A bone folder and a needle. Thread waxed and coiled neat, the way my old teacher had taught me to keep it.

I used to be good with my hands. Before all of this, I trained under a bookbinder named Mr. Hale, three days a week, learning how to save old things instead of throwing them away. I loved it. I was becoming something back then, piece by piece, the same way I repaired those broken spines.

I picked up the needle and

my fingers remembered the rhythm before my mind caught up, the old motion smooth and certain. For one small, dangerous moment, I let myself imagine finishing it. Sitting somewhere with sunlight on the pages, no lies waiting for me outside the door.

Then I thought about Margaret's eyes on my collar, and my hands went still.

Hope was so expensive that l could not afford it right now.

I put the needle down and closed the box, sliding it back under the bed exactly where it had been all this time.

A soft knock sounded at my door.

"It's me," Rosa whispered.

I let her in. She looked tired and this  kind of tiredness came from carrying other people's secrets on top of her own long day.

"You look pale," she said. "What happened?"

"She saw the locket."

Rosa's hands went still on the doorframe. "Did she say anything?"

"She asked where I got it. I told her it was my mother's." My voice cracked on the last word. "Rosa, she looked at me like she already knew the truth and was just waiting for me to say it first."

"She might." Rosa's voice was gentle, but there was iron underneath it, the way there always was when she talked about this family. "That woman does not forget a face. Especially one she worked hard to erase."

"I cannot lose this job." My throat tightened. "Not because of the money. Because if I am gone, there is no one left in this house who remembers the truth. No one to protect him from her."

Rosa reached over and squeezed my hand, her palm rough and warm from decades of work no one at that table ever thanked her for.

"You have done more for that man in three months than his own family has done in five years," she said. "Do not forget that."

I wanted to believe her completely but belief felt like another thing I could not manage in this house, not with Margaret's eyes on me like a blade waiting for the right moment to slice me into two.

"There is something else," Rosa said, lowering her voice further. "I heard Margaret on the phone this afternoon. She is planning a staff background review. This week."

My stomach dropped.

"A review of what, exactly?"

"Employment records. References. Old addresses." Rosa's eyes were steady on mine, careful and afraid at once. "Ivy, if she digs into your file the way she is planning to, she is going to find gaps. Gaps she will ask questions about."

I sat down slowly on the edge of my bed, the box with the Bible still warm from my hands only minutes ago.

"When does it start?"

"I don't know exactly. Soon. Maybe days." Rosa reached for my shoulder. "You need to think about what you are going to do if she asks the wrong question and you don't have the right lie ready."

I opened my mouth to answer but nothing came out.

Footsteps sounded in the hallway outside my door.

Heavy ones. Slow and deliberate. Not the light, quick steps of the other staff hurrying to finish their evening rounds.

Rosa's eyes went wide, and her hand tightened on my arm.

It was far too late at night for anyone innocent to be walking these halls.