He did not sleep, not more than a little at a time. When he did sleep, it was shallow and dreamless, the darkness reminding him of all he did not remember.
If he did not dream of this empty place, he dreamed of a cord of heat breaking him open, marking him with all he had done.
When he woke in the dark, his fingers found the blue borraja Estrella had set in his hands, and that he’d left on the bedside table. He grasped at them like they were slices of water. He felt struck with the certainty that they would let him sleep, make him sleep. It overcame how odd he felt putting into his mouth something she’d grown in front of him. He set the first flower on his tongue, the taste clean and cold, more like ice than something living.
He fell asleep with one in his mouth. But it only made him dream of her fingers brushing his lips. He startled awake, shivering like the air had fallen into winter.
How little he slept left the daylight hours in a haze as heavy as smoke. Maybe it was because he wasn’t doing enough for these women who were looking after him. He wasn’t wearing himself out enough by the time night came. His hands wanted to thank them in ways more than peeling potatoes or drying forks.
But the mothers shooed him away from helping them with the laundry, flapping dish towels at him and reminding him that he did not know how to work the machine. The grandmothers took brooms out of his hands in ways that made him remember that this was their house, not his.
His hands still wanted to work. So he worked on things that had gone unnoticed. A crosshatch of wood was crumbling under the weight of rose vines, so he strengthened its base until it did not wobble. The paint on a bench was peeling away, so he searched through dust-covered cans until he found the shade that matched. He replaced a few flat stones that had come loose from a path.
“You’re a good boy, mijo,” the woman who insisted he call her Abuela Magnolia said. “Bay’s grandmother never missed a stone out of place, but ever since she died”—the woman clucked her tongue—“that girl…”
Fel waited for her to finish the sentence. She didn’t. He understood. That was the weight of Bay losing her grandmother, a loss too heavy to name. Bay was mired too deep in it to notice small things falling apart.
He knelt at a crumbling stretch of low wall, checking whether any bricks were missing or if they were just out of place, when Calla grabbed his arm.
“I need a favor,” she said.
She was the first to notice that he understood what she and her cousins were saying. So he didn’t dare stop her when she pulled him toward the house up the hill. When she shoved him through the door and into the hall, he didn’t resist.
The inside of the Briar house looked more museum or palace than home. Portraits of white-haired men and gown-wearing women stared down from the walls. The rugs had been woven so finely Fel didn’t want to walk on them. Even the ashtrays looked like some kind of glittering stone, maybe marble or quartz. Did people really stub out live embers in there?
Everything in the Nomeolvides house looked handled and used. Cast iron pans. Books with worn edges. Even the brass of an old kaleidoscope shined with the oils of their fingers. He liked this about them, about their home.
Calla shoved him down the hall, where Reid was coming toward them, eyes on a set of papers in his hands.
“Go talk to him,” Calla whispered.
“What?” Fel asked.
“You’re a man and he’s a man,” Calla said. “So just talk to him.”
“About what?”
“Do I have to do everything?” Calla took Fel by the shoulders, which made him feel like he was a child she was crouching down to, even though she was younger and shorter. “I just need you to distract him for ten minutes while I go look at something.”
She dashed out of the hall, leaving him in the path of Reid’s stare as soon as he lifted his head.
“Oh,” Reid said. “Hi.”
The space of the few seconds made Fel forget what to do with his hands. Before he’d been sent here, what had he always done with his hands?
“I was”—as soon as the words came, Fel wished he hadn’t said them so fast. If he’d waited to start the sentence, he would’ve had a few more seconds to think of the end—“just looking at these.” He tilted his head up to the portraits.
“Oh,” Reid said again, but this time a laugh brushed the word. “They’re something, aren’t they?”
“Are they all people you know?” Fel asked.
“Sort of,” Reid said. “If our family had a charter, it would have a line about every Briar getting their portrait painted before they die. A few are here, but most are scattered around the other estates.”
Scattered around? Fel imagined paintings left at odd angles like pieces of a shipwreck on a shore.
Reid stood next to Fel, eyes joining his on a painting of a standing woman. Against the wine red of her dress, her neckline looked pale as a pitcher of milk. Her fingers rested on a dark wood table. Her chin tipped up, like her eyes were following a bird the painter did not show.
“It’s an old tradition,” Reid said. “But I guess there’s something charming about it. Thank goodness for pictures, right? Can you imagine the days when you had to stand there that long?”
Reid’s words rushed past Fel. He couldn’t imagine any of this, a family with enough money that every son and daughter was painted onto canvas as tall as they were. He thought most families could not afford a single photograph of themselves, or even mirrors to see their faces in.
He could not remember any photographs he had seen before La Pradera. He could not remember the details of faces caught in shades of brown. But he remembered how rare they were, the silver-plated copper, the flashbulb. And here, on these walls, in every space not covered with portraits or paintings of ships, there were photographs. Dozens just in this hallway.
“Is the one of Bay here?” Fel asked.
Reid’s eyes left the portrait. “Bay?”
“The woman who—”
“I know who she is,” Reid cut him off, the laugh coming back into his words. “Why do you ask?”
Fel shuddered under the feeling that he’d just failed some test of how well he was listening. “I thought you said you all had your pictures painted.”
“Nobody told you?” Reid asked. “She’s not a real Briar.”
He said it without cruelty.
“But I thought,” Fel started, and then paused. “Her last name.”
“Her last name is Briar,” Reid said. “She has some of our blood. But she’s not one of us.”
It was a plain correction, a statement of fact as simple as naming the woman in the dark red dress.
“She acts like she owns this place,” Reid said. “But don’t let her tell you what to do.” He set a palm on Fel’s back. “She has no business ordering anyone around.”
The force of that hand made the hallway seem like it was folding in on itself. The dark walls were crumbling and collapsing toward them, the paintings scattering like shards of a broken window.
Fel shuddered away from it before he could stop himself.
“Okay,” Reid said, lifting his hands as though to promise he would not touch Fel again. “You’re all right.”
This man was lying. Fel wanted to tell the old women this, show it to them like a lost, shining thing he’d found in the grass. But he didn’t know what this man was lying about, and he had no way to prove it other than his own body acting faster than he could think. So the glittering thing he wanted to give the old women evaporated from his hands.