Chapter 2

The Hartwell estate, Grayridge, sits outside the city on the river. Upstream stood the paper mills the family had risen from three generations back — first paper, then publishing, and only later the Group and the Foundation. The old house had held four generations. Portraits of every past head of the family lined the long gallery, and walking past them, every painted pair of eyes seemed to size me up: Who are you. What gives you the right. Coming in here.

Sebastian gave me a whole suite of east-wing rooms that caught the morning sun, and said only one thing: "Stay. I'll handle the rest." Then he was gone, his footsteps fading down the gallery, leaving me alone in a room full of unfamiliar furniture and unfamiliar quiet.

I unpacked, setting my things out one by one. There wasn't much — a few changes of clothes, a set of restoration tools I'd used for years, and an old tin box that held everything I used to be. The room was big. Big enough that, standing in the middle of it, I didn't know which corner to put myself in.

I thought Vivian had come to gloat. She had.

That night she stood in my doorway with a glass of red wine, leaning against the frame, looking me up and down like a badly priced knockoff. "Nora, is it?" She smiled. "I should thank you. Three years — you took such good care of Ethan for me."

I said nothing. In three years, I'd learned exactly when to answer and when not to.

"Oh — that ring," she said, her eyes dropping to my hand. "You know what it is? It's a Hartwell heirloom. The old man just felt sorry for you and handed it over as a fig leaf. Once this all blows over, it goes back to the real mistress of this house."

She paused, and delivered the rest slowly, like she was teaching a child who hadn't learned any better. "And the real mistress of this house is never going to be someone like you. An orphan who doesn't even know who her own parents are."

I'd heard that line, in three years, in a lot of versions. Some people said it delicately. Some said it with a knife in it. I should have been used to it. But that night, for some reason, I didn't lower my head the way I always had.

Maybe it was the warmth of the jacket still on my shoulders. Maybe it was that I finally didn't have to grind myself down into the dirt just to keep someone.

I walked over and, with one hand, steadied the glass of wine tipping toward my carpet, set it level again. A restorer's hands steady anything.

"Miss Ashford," I said, looking at her. "You're right. I don't know who my parents were. My mother left when I was eight. All she left me was an old silver ring — and one sentence. She said: Nora, a person's dignity isn't handed to you by anyone else. You hold it up yourself."

I let the door swing halfway closed. "So whether this ring ends up back in your hand — I don't know. But tonight, it's on mine. And you're the one standing in my doorway."

"Goodnight."

The door clicked shut, soft. And I heard her heels stay put out there for a long time before, finally, one step after another, walking away.

I didn't sleep well. I lay there touching the strange platinum band on one hand, and then the old, blackened silver ring at my throat that my mother had left me. Two rings, one cold, one warm, against my skin. Outside, the river ran on in the dark, all night, and didn't stop.

The next morning I opened my door. At the end of the gallery stood — not Vivian.

Ethan.