“Yeah, yeah.” I set the tray on the low table and straighten the pot while Mrs. Divs eases into the couch. She pours me a cup, and it takes all my willpower not to gulp it down.
On-screen, the couple has transferred to a garden area beside the bake shop. Green trees, green grass, even green tables and chairs. The girl talks about something and sets her sticky roll down to make shapes in the air with her hands. The boy’s in a hood, but he must be listening because she responds to his responses. And they must be the right responses, because she shares her pastry.
Then it hits me.
“It’s a restaurant review,” I say. “Or a travel show.” Prescheduled programming to give the newsfeeds time to evaluate Mom’s latest stunt. Make a plan.
Mrs. Divs glances at the screen and barks a laugh. “Travel, I’ll grant you. That, my girl, is a Westlet newscast.”
“Westlet?” My cup freezes halfway to my mouth. “The House of Westlet?”
Inter-House network boxes are expensive. More than expensive. She’d have to get a communicator and a transfeed adaptor, and together those would cost more than her suite. Hell, more than our whole tower.
She nods, smug. “And live, too.”
“No,” I moan. “You didn’t rob somebody, did you?” I can almost see it, Mrs. Divs on the slow sneak attack, cane raised. Or worse, pulling the Poor Little Old Ancient routine on a very rich somebody. “Don’t tell me you conned a lordling.”
Dad tried that, once. It did not end well.
Mrs. Divs lifts the silver remote from her table, and the screen blacks out. “Of course not! It may surprise you, but my family used to have money back in the day. Quite a lot of it.”
I knew that, her furniture nearly screams “heirlooms,” but an inter-House box? That’s another level entirely. Lordling level. Missa level.
I raise my cup and swallow my questions back with my tea. It’s warm, and a little bitter.
She watches, her saucer perched between spider fingers. “Aren’t you going to ask what happened?”
“Do you want me to?”
“Not particularly.”
I shrug. “All right then.”
Another gulp and my tea’s gone. These cups are like thimbles, but snagging a refill probably won’t net me a cookie.
Mrs. Divs doesn’t move, a statue in a red robe and curled locks, gaze steady and cataloging.
Tea-gulping was a bad idea. I’m so not getting a cookie.
She almost smiles. “Ah, Kit. Sometimes you are very . . . reminiscent of your line.”
“Dad’s gone.” I meet her still gray eyes. “If that’s what you’re asking.”
She shifts somehow, her whole demeanor easing into a shrug that never quite happens. “Now that is nice to hear. A real mistake, that. Sullies the blood.”
Dad was Yonni’s blood.
I set down my cup with easy, measured grace. Otherwise, I’d slam it. “What did Mom say?”
Her eyebrows rise. “You don’t know? What with her pretty face broadcast planetwide? However did you manage that?”
“Does it matter?” I ask. “Do you remember what she said?”
“Perhaps. Though since you’re so interested, maybe you can tell me what she meant to say.” Soft and conversational. “Especially as you were seeing so much of her.”
Especially since you probably knew what she intended and didn’t stop it, she doesn’t say.
I sink forward, elbows on knees, fingers laced behind my head. “It wasn’t want you think.”
“And what would that be?”
I close my eyes. “Please, Mrs. Divs. Just tell me.”
Her bony fingers crawl over and pat my shoulder. “Now then, Kit dear, you know that’s not how this works.”
“This?” I push upright, her hand falling away as my own rises to my hair. “What this? It’s not a game!”
She nods at the dark wall-screen. “Well, your mother seems to think so.”
“I can’t help that!”
“Can’t you?” Mrs. Divs lowers her cup to her lap. “Forgive me, Kit, but I do find it odd that after Yonni cursed your mother’s name for absence and abandonment, the moment Yonni’s dead you run out and track the woman down.”
“No, I didn’t.”
Her jaw sets. “Don’t you come running to me for information, then turn around and lie about—”
“It was before, all right?” I say, half rising off the couch. But there’s nowhere to go, and I need to know what Mom said. I sit, breathe, and lower my voice. “Yonni needed meds. I knew Mom worked at the Archive though—through one of Yonni’s lovers. She’d tracked Mom down for me, because she had the resources and she was—she was kind.”
She’d come to visit once, years ago, when I was a bawling mess on the couch and Yonni rocked me. I thought I’d seen Mom in the street, but it’d turned out to be a stranger, and then the tears wouldn’t stop.
Two weeks later, Missa arrived with a thin digisheet of information, which she handed to Yonni with a soft, if she ever wants to know.
Mrs. Divs doesn’t comment, not through body or expression, an ancient impartial wall.