“Listen, Opal. All we’re looking for is a little help. We don’t want anyone to get hurt, but there are a lot of very serious parties with an interest in the Starling property. They hired us to get results, and I don’t intend to let them down. You understand, don’t you?”
Arthur and all his predecessors had fought and fallen for generations rather than let the Beasts loose on the world; Elizabeth Baine would stand aside and watch with a clipboard and a smile.
“You don’t know what you’re messing with,” I tell her, cliché-ly.
“But you do?” Quick and eager.
“Can’t you just let it alone?” I can tell from her quizzical half smile that the question doesn’t make sense to her. It’s the same expression a Gravely might have worn if someone had asked them to stop digging when they knew there was still coal under Eden.
Baine checks her watch again. “Let me be clear about your situation. There was an act of arson committed tonight, and a reliable eyewitness with no reason to lie and a clean criminal record is willing to swear under oath that he saw you do it.”
“Tell Hal thanks from me.”
She ignores me. “Add arson to identity fraud, and no judge would find you a fit guardian for your brother.”
Panic twists in my belly, familiar as a toothache. I want to shout You can’t do this or He needs me, but I hear Charlotte’s voice in my ear: Does he? I hear Jasper himself: I’m not your job. Maybe it’s time to trust him a little more, to stop selling my soul for something that never belonged to me in the first place.
I swallow sour spit. “So? He’s a big kid now, and his future is taken care of.”
Her head tilts very slightly. “And what if his new guardians choose a different future for him?”
“What new guardians?”
Baine is tapping at her phone. “Well, his family, of course.”
“I’m his family, you—”
Which is when the door opens, and the CEO of Gravely Power walks into the room.
The last time I saw Don Gravely he wasn’t anything to me. He was a sweaty handshake and a polyester suit coat, and the only thing I noticed about him was the way he flinched away from me. I remember glaring at him, not out of any personal grudge, but just out of solidarity with Bev and her luna moths.
Now I find myself staring, trying to force his features to assemble into something or someone familiar. But there’s nothing of Mom in this man, nothing of me, except maybe the eyes: gravel-gray, cold.
He pulls out a seat and sits with a harassed sigh. I don’t think he’s even noticed me yet. “Look, Liz”—Baine’s face gives an imperceptible twitch—“you can’t just order me around. I’m a busy man.”
“Thank you for your patience, Mr. Gravely.” She smiles at him; he doesn’t seem to see the malice in it. “I was just talking to your great-niece here about her future.”
For the first time since he walked into the room, Gravely faces me. His entire body recoils, his head retracting into his collar. I have the childish urge to stamp my foot at him, just to see if he’d fall out of his chair.
He produces a smile that makes me think of a stray dog licking its canines. “Delilah’s girl. How are you?”
So: it’s all true. This man is my family, my history, my roots, and everyone knew it but me. Hot shame floods me, the sense that the whole town must have been laughing at me as soon as I turned the corner.
I work hard to make my voice come out flat. “Been better.” I rattle the handcuffs against the back of the chair.
“Ah, well.” Don Gravely isn’t looking at me anymore. “We always meant to reach out, of course, since Delilah finally went and did it. We—my wife and kids—we’d love to have you over sometime. You could meet the rest of the family. We could take care of you.” Baine widens her eyes very slightly at him, and he adds, “And the boy, your brother. You’re Gravelys, after all.”
Scenes flash through my head, a montage of shaky home videos that never happened: Jasper and me eating dry chicken on a big suburban patio, sitting across the table from a set of blond cousins in name-brand clothes. My picture in the family album, right next to Mom’s. A present under the Christmas tree with my name on the tag in pretty cursive: Opal Delilah Gravely.
So ordinary. So tempting. It’s everything I’ve ever wanted, the list I thought I burned a long time ago: a home, a name, a family. I know there’s a catch, a price—I know nothing is free for people like me—but for a minute I can’t move, can’t breathe, for wanting.
Baine interjects, smoothly, “After all this is wrapped up, of course.”
I pry my teeth apart. “All what?”
Gravely makes a gesture suggesting there are gnats in the room. “This fuss over the Starling property. You’ve heard about the plant expansion? Well, it all depends on a new coalfield opening up. Picture it—real mining in Eden again, for the first time since we buried Big Jack. My surveyors tell me there’s a good seam on the Starling property. We hold the mineral rights—always have, since the eighteen-somethings—but the Starlings won’t budge. Liz here”—he nods at Elizabeth Baine, whose eyelid gives another twitch—“has a reputation for solving this kind of problem.”
Baine looks coolly back at me, and I know if I announced that she was actually investigating a doorway to Hell she would deny it very convincingly.
“So we’d all be grateful,” Gravely concludes, “real grateful, if you could help her out.”
And there’s the price tag. It doesn’t seem like a bad trade, to be honest. I give them Starling House—I let them paw through an old mansion that isn’t mine and never will be, I betray one brave, stupid boy—and in exchange, I get everything.
A home, a name, a family.
The word “family” sets another montage off in my head, except this one isn’t imaginary. I see Bev, jabbing her finger in Constable Mayhew’s face; Charlotte, asking me to come with her; Jasper, pretending to sleep so that I can pretend to sleep. Arthur’s coat neatly folded on the couch. Arthur’s hands tangled in chicory and Queen Anne’s lace. Arthur’s face turning up to mine while the poppies bow around us.
I tilt my head, studying Don Gravely—my great-uncle, I guess. This man who looked away while we lived on ramen noodles for eleven years, who would have kept on looking away if it weren’t for his bank account and his business plans. And why not? We share a little blood, maybe a curse, but he’s never stayed in town long enough to know what it’s like when the mist rises. There’s nothing that ties us together except a name I didn’t even know I had.
It occurs to me, looking at those eyes, chips of cold limestone, that the Starlings probably had it right. That the only name worth having is the one you choose.
Gravely is getting impatient, his jaw working, his fingers tap-tapping. I smile at him, and from the way he flinches I think it must be my real smile, mean and crooked. I lean across the table, shoulders screaming in their sockets. “Go fish, asshole.”
The change comes quick: Gravely’s genial good-old-boy act disappears. His hands go still, upper lip peeling away from his teeth. “God, you’re just like her. Leon spoiled her rotten, gave her every little thing she wanted, and it wasn’t enough.” It was never enough, for Mom. She was all hunger, all want, insatiable. I’ve always hated her for that appetite, just a little, but now I feel a strange sympathy. It turns out I’m hungry, too.
Gravely’s face is turning a blotchy mauve. “She goes and gets herself knocked up—insists on keeping it, refuses to marry the man—shames the Gravely name—” His sentences are fragmenting, cracking under the weight of a twenty-six-year-old grudge. “And then still, after all those years, after everything she did, Leon was going to give it all to her. She didn’t work for it, she didn’t deserve it—I was the one who—”