Unraveled (Turner, #3)

“I’m no good at this, Robbie. If I were your mother, I’d know what to say. I’d make you laugh and feel better, and you’d never have need to complain.”


“Sure,” he agreed bitterly.

“But I’m not. I don’t know how to be a mother. What role do you want me to play instead?”

Another shrug of his scrawny shoulders. “Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

His shoulders stiffened. But he didn’t look at her. After a few moments, he shrugged again. “I suppose,” he said.

Oh, that hurt. To have all her care, all her work, tossed aside in one insouciant shrug of his shoulders. Years of looking after him had culminated in this bored rejection.

“Best to get on with it,” Robbie said. But his voice broke on the last word, and his shoulders quivered. And that was when Miranda realized that he was crying—quietly, but crying nonetheless.

She stared at him, absolutely flummoxed. Surly, sullen, and…sad? What was she supposed to do?

She stood and walked down the steps to the window. “Hey, now,” she whispered. “It’s not so bad as that.”

He wiped furiously at his eyes. “Sure. Wait ’til you hear.”

“Hear what?”

“I was arrested today.”

“What? Oh, no. But…but you didn’t… Oh.” A knot in her belly tightened. “You did, didn’t you?”

“Maybe.” He hunched. “Maybe I just tried. I did it wrong, in any event.”

“And they brought you in.”

“Made me talk to some fellow, who was supposed to determine if…um, something. It wasn’t a trial. I wasn’t really paying attention.”

Wasn’t really paying attention Miranda translated as too scared to ask questions.

“Was he a constable?” Miranda asked.

“I guess,” Robbie said. “He let me go. But he yelled at me afterward.”

“Yelled?” Miranda said. “What afterward?” Thank God the man he’d talked to had some compassion. It was a rare enough quality in the constables.

“He said, because I didn’t actually manage to steal the watch, he couldn’t prove what I meant to do, and he could treat it as…as something. I don’t remember.”

“What do you remember?” Miranda tried to ask the question as gently as she could.

“He said he could get me an apprenticeship at a shipwright.”

Miranda held her breath, hardly daring to believe what she was hearing. It was more than she could have given him—a good start at life, a chance for solid work doing something Robbie enjoyed. It also cost more than she could imagine. That kind of favor, held over her head by some unknown person... “And what did you say? Did you accept?”

He shrugged. “I suppose. I didn’t really have much choice. After this, you won’t want anything to do with me, anyway.”

His shoulders hunched even more, and Miranda stared at his back in puzzlement.

“Why wouldn’t I want anything to do with you?”

“You always told me that if I ever risked hanging, you would never speak to me again. I know you never wanted me. You tried to get rid of me.” His matter-of-fact tone broke her heart—as if he were recounting unalterable truths.

Maybe that’s the way it had seemed to him. After his mother had disappeared, Miranda had tried to get someone—anyone—to take the boy. Of course she had. She’d been a child herself.

She hadn’t wanted the responsibility. To Robbie, no doubt it had seemed that she hadn’t wanted him.

“Oh,” she breathed. She’d told a boy who’d been abandoned by his mother that she was going to leave him, too, unless he listened to her. He’d thought she’d meant it.

Slowly she set her hand on his shoulder.

He leaned away an inch and only gave one solitary half-hearted grunt in protest. It was practically encouragement. So she made a fist and rubbed his hair until it stood up on end.

“Stop that,” he muttered, but he didn’t pull away.

“Do you want to be a shipwright?”

Another shrug. “I guess.”

“It’s a good profession. And you’re good at arithmetic. You were always good working with the carpenter when you were little.” More practically, shipwrights could speak in two-word sentences and still get paid.

He slouched further. “You want me to go.”

“I’d still get to see you sometimes, wouldn’t I? On Sabbaths and holidays. I’d miss you the rest of the time, but I suppose I’d manage.”

“You’d miss me?”

Miranda sighed, and dropped her voice into a gravelly imitation of his. “I guess,” she intoned.

It took him a moment to realize she was mocking him, but he let out an exasperated sigh and punched her, lightly, on the arm. And then, leaving the rest unspoken, he pulled his legs in, slid off the sill, and started up the stairs.

Halfway to their garret, Robbie stopped. “Oh, I had a message for you. From the fellow who talked to me.”

“A message? For me?”

“He said to meet him…um…somewhere. By a castle. Or a church. Something like that. Tomorrow at six in the morning.”