Page 90 of The Manor of Dreams

“Hold on. Wait, wait, wait. You can’t just—”

“Listen,” Sophie yelled, then brought her voice under control again. “Your mother had me grow something for her. I didn’t know what it was at the time.”

“What was it?”

“This flower.” Sophie’s voice started to quiver. “They use it in—in traditional medicine.” Sophie lowered herself to the bed, grimacing.“It’s all poisonous. The roots, the flower…” She looked up. “I swear I didn’t know, Ada. Until after…”

Ada became very still. “After?”

“Until after your dad’s funeral.”

The room expanded and contracted in front of her. Sophie seemed to get farther away. “What?”

“It wasn’t an overdose.”

Ada dropped Sophie’s hand and stepped away. “You’re not making sense.”

Sophie’s words were rushed. “Your dad was abusing her, Ada. She said he was going to kill her. So she needed to…” Her words were coming out faster than Ada could process them. “I didn’t know any of this. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” She was trembling uncontrollably now. “And she found out about us. She was so kind to me, and I thought… maybe… we could be together for real.” Her voice dissolved into a sob as she clapped the heels of her palms over her eyes. “But I didn’t know what the flowers were! She was just using me. I didn’t know what she was planning, I swear—”

She stopped mid-sentence, her hands clenched around her own waist.

Ada remembered the night when she stood in the doorway of the library. Somethinghadbeen going on between Ma and Dad. She remembered the glazed look in Dad’s eyes, as if something had possessed him; how he had lunged for her. It all made sense now: the rising voices, the distance between them, the terror on Ma’s face.

Had he hurt her? How had they not seen the signs? The bruises? Maybe Ma had covered them up. She knew how to do stage makeup. Ma had endured this all alone, and Ada had never asked. Ada was always the one who noticed things. But this time had been different; Ma had needed her, and she had been preoccupied with her own fantasy. It broke her to think about her mother living in fear like that. She remembered how quickly her mother wanted to leave the funeral and sink into her own grief.

If Sophie was telling the truth—

If.

Then everything in her family was a lie.

Her father was an abuser who had threatened her mother until she had killed him. Her mother had used Sophie to do it.

Ada wished, desperately, to go back to earlier in the summer. She could have talked to her mother. She could have stopped those fights. She didn’t know how bad it was. She should have known.

Finally, what she’d overheard made sense:Everything will be fine. Do as I say. We keep this to ourselves.

Sophie watched Ada as the pieces came together in her mind. “Now you understand. And now I’m going to disappear. I promise. I’m so sorry.”

She zipped her bag and looked at Ada, her eyes imploring. “Please don’t tell your mother that I told you the truth. Please. For me. I don’t know what she’ll do to my parents. Just pretend I never existed.”

“What will your parents say?”

“I told them I’m going to stay with my sister for a bit. She has an apartment.”

Sophie was going to be gone. Ada couldn’t stay behind. No, she couldn’t possibly wake up in the morning and continue her life as it was. The walls were closing in on her. She couldn’t stay here knowing this.

“I’m going with you,” she told Sophie.

“You can’t,” Sophie said. “They’ll come looking for us—”

“Your parents were going to come looking for you anyway,” Ada said. “We’ll go to San Francisco. Both of us.”

“You can’t leave them. Your family.”

To stay here and say nothing was unbearable. But so was confronting Ma with the truth. Who knew what she would do? There was no other way forward.

“I can’t stay either,” Ada said. “We’ll be eighteen soon. They can’t force us to come back here then.” She clutched Sophie’s hands. “I’m going to get some money and pack a bag of my own. Meet me downstairs in an hour.”

---