He Taught Me to Obey, So I Learned to Leave

Lucien stood very still for a moment.

Then he turned to the majordomo and said, “Call St. Dymphna. Tell them I may be sending someone back tonight.”

The room went cold around me.

He did not have to say anything else. The name alone was enough. My body knew it before my mind did

“No,” I said.

Lucien looked at me.

I crossed the room too fast, caught his sleeve with both hands, and heard my own voice go thin and ragged.

“Please. Don’t send me back.”

He said nothing.

“I was careless. I frightened the child. I spoke out of turn. It won’t happen again.”

Every word came easily. That was the worst of it.

You learn, after long enough, that confession is just another posture. One that sometimes makes the punishment shorter.

Lucien’s expression changed, but not into mercy.

At last he pulled his sleeve from my hands.

“Go to the blue sitting room,” he said. “And stay there until I decide what to do with you.”

He took Matteo upstairs himself.

I went where I was told.

The blue sitting room was empty except for the fading light, a piano no one played, and the long gilt mirror over the mantel. I stood where he had left me and kept my hands folded.

A minute later, Celeste came in.

She closed the door softly behind her.

“You frightened him,” she said.

I did not answer.

She walked past me, trailing her fingers along the polished edge of the piano.

“He was so gentle with me while you were gone,” she said. “You really should have stayed where he put you.”

Still I said nothing.

She turned then and smiled.

“So why did you come back?”

She crossed the room in two steps.

Before I understood what she meant to do, she caught my wrist, pressed my hand flat against her shoulder, and threw herself backward.

The side of her face struck the corner of the piano with a crack that made my stomach turn.

A porcelain lamp toppled and shattered with her.

She hit the carpet hard, one hand flying to her temple. Blood appeared almost at once, bright against her skin.

Then she screamed.

“Lucien.”

He came in running.

I was still standing over her when he saw us.

Celeste had blood in her hair and on her mouth. My torn sleeve was caught under her hand.

For one wild second, I thought he might see the truth.

Then he crossed the room and shoved me back so hard my hip struck the arm of the settee.

“What did you do?”

“I didn’t touch her,” I said. “She threw herself back.”

Celeste looked up at him through tears.

“She hates me.”

That was enough.

Lucien knelt beside her, his hands suddenly careful, his voice low.

When he looked back at me, there was nothing left in his face I could reach.

“I nearly believed I had been wrong about you,” he said. “That place made me wonder whether I had gone too far.”

He rose slowly.

“I will not make that mistake again.”

I tasted blood where I had bitten the inside of my cheek.

“She did this to herself.”

“And you expect me to believe that?”

He looked at the blood on Celeste’s face, the broken lamp, the room thrown off balance, and then at me.

“Either you get back into their car tonight,” he said, “or you get out of this house and do not come back.”

I stared at him.

He was giving me a choice in words only. The first meant going back to that place. The second meant being cast out with nothing.

My legs shook.

Behind him, Celeste made a small, pained sound.

That finished it.

Lucien turned away from me and called for a doctor.

Servants moved at once. Footsteps filled the corridor. Someone brought towels. Someone else ran for the house physician.

No one was looking at me anymore.

So I walked.

At first only to the door. Then down the corridor. Then faster, because no one stopped me. Past the chapel room. Past the west gallery. Past the side entrance the staff used when they did not want mud on the marble.

By the time someone shouted behind me, I was already outside.

I kept going until the lights of the house were behind me and the private marina opened up ahead, black water shifting against pilings and stone. One of the old service docks ran out into the tide, half-shadowed, the chains along its edge rattling in the wind.

I stepped onto it.

My shoes slipped once on the wet boards. I caught myself on a post and kept moving.

I was not going back.

Not to St. Dymphna. Not to the white rooms and forced prayers and the soft voices that measured every breath. Not to the place that taught me to thank people for hurting me.

I reached the end of the dock and climbed over the chain.

Below me, the tide slammed dark against the seawall.

For one second, I stood there shaking.

Then I jumped.