Chapter 4

After that he started in on me again, and he was better at it than he'd been the first time.

At Sunday dinner he put Genevieve on his right, which is where the wife of the man who runs the family sits, and left me down past his uncle.

He took her to the Foundation dinner in November. Then the opera. Then the sit-down in Providence, where the only other women in the room were wives. By spring people were calling my sister the future Mrs. Castellano to her face, and she'd look at the floor and let them finish.

Ruth stopped coming. Nobody told me why. My books went back in the box and the box went down to the basement.

Then the pool. Genevieve said she didn't like looking at it from her window, so he had it drained and a crew came out and filled it in with dirt for a rose garden.

The almond cake never came back either.

Every one of them started with my sister saying she didn't care for something.

She didn't hide it, either. She wanted me worn down enough to step out of the way on my own.

I asked him about Ruth once, in the upstairs hall.

"What does a girl who married her way in want with books?"

"Your mother's the one who—"

"Same mother as Genevieve and you're not half of her." He didn't slow down. "Sit still and look grateful. That's the whole job."

Camilla had given me the Foundation books my first winter. Every check, every invoice, every grant that went out. I was good at it and it was mine.

In March he had my name taken off and my sister's put on. Genevieve can't read a bank statement. He knew that.

He told his mother he wanted three more years before there was any wedding. Camilla's heart put her in the hospital twice that winter, and after the second time he gave her a date.

Then he made sure the house knew what it had cost him.

"Every time I think about the rest of my life with her, it turns my stomach." Eleven people at the table when he said it. "If it was Genevieve I'd do it tomorrow."

He knew his mother. Once she set a thing down she didn't pick it up again, so he could say whatever he wanted and nothing would move.

It went out of me somewhere in the second year. I couldn't tell anyone which week.

My sister kept hers. She wanted him, and she was patient.

In February we were up at the lake house and she asked me to walk out on the dock with her. She went in off the end of it, into water with ice still on the edges, about four seconds after he came around the side of the boathouse.

She said I pushed her.

In July a photograph turned up on her pillow, one of her from the Foundation dinner with the eyes scratched out of it. She said it came from me.

There was never anything for anyone to look at. There was my sister, wet or crying, and there was him deciding.

He believed her both times.

Nell Doyle was seventeen and worked the upstairs rooms. In those three weeks when nobody in that house would answer me, she was the one who asked if I took sugar. She got caught at it, and she'd have been out on the road that night if I hadn't gone down to the housekeeper about it.

After the second year I stopped coming down for anything I wasn't required at. Nell brought my meals up and stayed while I ate them. I was teaching her to read properly, an hour most evenings. She was quick.

Two weeks before the wedding my sister came into my room and sat on the end of my bed.

"He doesn't want you, Nor. You'll be in this house forty years with a man who leaves the room when you come into it."

"Is that all?"

"It doesn't have to go that way. He listens to me." She smoothed the blanket flat with her hand. "And think about Camilla. All she's ever wanted is for him to be happy. You'd be the one giving her that."

She was wrong about nearly all of it and right about that.

Camilla wanted her son back. Three years in the same house and they hadn't finished one conversation without a door closing, and every bit of it ran through me.

That woman came down to the back bay for us when nobody else on this earth was coming. If I stepped out of the middle of it, the two of them had a chance. It was the only thing I had that was worth anything to her.

All of that was still going through me while she stood there holding my arm, waiting on an answer.

"I did," I said. "Not for a long time now."

She kept looking at me.

"If you really think you owe me something, then find me somewhere else to go."

Camilla nodded slowly. "You'll go out of this house properly. A good family, a man I've looked at myself. I'll see to it."

The door opened behind me and he came in without knocking.

He'd heard some of it. I still don't know how much.

"Two weeks," he said. "You couldn't hold out two weeks without running to her about it?"

"I'm not marrying you."

"Then who's taking you?"

He came past me and kissed his mother on the cheek, the way he did every time he walked into a room she was in.

Nell came in behind him with the coffee tray. She had it halfway down on the desk before she saw him, and stopped.

He looked her over.

"Genevieve's been asking for a girl of her own," he said. "This one can go up to her."

"She's not yours to hand around."

"She's staff."

"She's not going anywhere."

He reached out and took Nell by the arm above the elbow.

I got between them and shoved him off her with both hands.

He went back into the doorframe and caught himself on it. It took him a second to straighten his cuff.

"She's a housemaid, Nora." He said it quietly. "Is she worth more to you than I am?"

Then he turned to his mother.

"There it is. That's the wife you picked for me. She won't give her own sister a girl to do her hair."

Camilla didn't answer him.

It went on long enough that Nell stopped breathing beside me.

He'd already turned for the door when she spoke.

"If that's what you think of her," Camilla said, "then I won't hold either of you to it."

He stopped with his hand on the door.