Wayfarer

“Then she should have returned to us the moment she was able, but she didn’t,” Henry said. “Instead, she concocted a scheme to force you to do the work for her. She endangered your life every step of the way, and somehow, worst of all, she kept you in perfect ignorance. Because—my God, because she needed events to play out the way this special destiny required. She knew that Ironwood would eventually learn of you and try to use you, and she allowed it.”

Etta leaned heavily against the desk, and used her very last defense. “She did it to save my future.”

“Ironwood’s future,” he corrected gently. “I see you struggling with the lack of logic. There’s simply none to be found. Instead of destroying the astrolabe, she created this game to justify—to reinforce—what she believes she saw as a girl. It is the only explanation for this charade.”

“Because if she had wanted to save my future,” Etta said around the knot in her throat, “she would have told me to protect the astrolabe, not destroy it.”

Her mother would have had her be the means of her own future’s destruction, all the while lying about that being the only way to save it. The pain of it stole her breath.

When Etta was young, she had come to understand that loneliness had a pitch—that high whine of static that coated silence. Sometimes, she’d sit at her bedroom door and watch her mother paint in the living room, quiet and lovely. Cool and sharp. Etta would count the wish, wish, wish of the brushstrokes.

She stood in the silence, asking, Do you see me?

She played concert after concert to the empty seat beside Alice’s, asking, Can you hear me?

As a child she went to her bed at night, leaving the covers near her feet, her light on, until her mother’s bedroom door would squeak shut. Etta would cry the question into her pillow. Do you care?

All of her life, Etta had been quiet, and determined, and gifted, and caring, and patient, and so hopeful, even in the unbearable loneliness of her own home. Now she could barely breathe. She could not hear Alice, she could not find her way back to those memories, because then she’d have to see, she’d have to accept, that the one person who’d cared for her, about her, with her, was gone. She would have to see her life not as a seed sprouting into bloom after years of work, but like an orchid her mother had precisely clipped and watered just enough to survive.

“It’s not true,” she said.

But Henry only watched her, a hand rubbing his mouth and jaw. He looked as if there were something else he wanted to say, something that could possibly be worse, but he held it back.

It’s not true, she whispered.

She knew she was crying too late to stop it.

“I don’t—” Henry began, forcing his arms down to his side. His fists clenched, curling with each agonized word. “Please—I don’t even…I don’t even know how to comfort you.” He repeated it, in wrenching disbelief. “I don’t know how to comfort you. She did not even let me have that.”

Etta felt herself dissolve into her own pain, pressing a fist against her throat to lock in her sob. The cruelty of this—the viciousness. How much her mother must have hated her to try to trick her into destroying her own life.

“As it turns out,” she managed to say, “nothing about her has ever been real, except her indifference.”

“Oh, Etta, Etta—” He shook his head, and whatever had held him back before was gone. The warmth of his fingers as they curled around her own reached her, even as she shook. “Etta, you’re wanted, you’re everything, don’t you see? My God, it breaks my heart to see you like this. Tell me what I can do.”

Henry’s anger was real, and it was palpable, building a charge with each word he spoke, until Etta wasn’t sure which of them would explode first. In some strange way, Etta was grateful he was there, that his fury was flaring, mirroring and building upon her own. It validated every doubt. It spoke to all of those times she’d cried herself to sleep, wondering if that would be the night her mother finally heard her, or if the silence would swallow that, too. Etta wasn’t stupid, but like Henry had said, she’d been blinded by her own love, and the pointless pursuit of her mother’s love.

And somehow the worst part of it wasn’t how Etta had been used, but how Rose’s plan for her had created collateral damage. Nicholas. What would he say to this—would he hate her, knowing that her family, not his, had ultimately been the cause of so much of his pain?

She was shaking, and tried to hide it by moving to the other side of the desk, sucking in enough air, smearing the tears from her face, until she found some calm undercurrent in herself to grasp.

“Can you tell me what’s going on? I need to understand what happened. The last I knew, your men had nearly killed me and N—” She caught herself, because her feelings for Nicholas weren’t something she wanted to share, not with this virtual stranger.

“And your…companion?” he supplied carefully, well aware of those feelings regardless.

“Partner,” Etta continued. “And they stole the astrolabe and rode off into the sunset with it. The next thing I knew, I was waking up in another desert and another century. If these men aren’t with you, where are they? And what happened?”

Henry sighed, rising back onto his feet. “I kept your identity and my interest in you secret from the others, and I regret it more than I can say. As for the rest, I realize you’ve been through a trial, but would you consider taking a walk outside with me? It’s far easier to show you.”