“What I meant was I know a little bit about what a debt to your family feels like,” he said.
She thought of the candelabra. The rare books, the antique piano, the irreplaceable art. All up in flames.
“You do, don’t you?” she asked.
He gave her a pained smile. “So you’ve heard.”
Without looking at the glasses, he poured amber alcohol that smelled as strong as nail polish remover.
“So Bay,” Reid said, and the muscles in Estrella’s shoulders clenched. “It’s true, the rumors about all of you and disappearing.”
It didn’t sound like a question, so Estrella didn’t answer it.
Bay was nothing to Reid. Reid was not Estrella and Azalea, folding Bay’s laugh into their jewelry boxes like beaded hairpins. He was not Calla, sharing marzipan plums with Bay because they were the only ones who liked things that sweet. He was not Dalia and Gloria, their wrists smelling of orange blossom perfume as Bay kissed the back of their hands, the younger cousins imagining the brush of her lips just below their own knuckles.
“Doesn’t that make you worry about your boyfriend?” Reid asked.
Who? She was so close to saying it out loud she had to bite her lip to keep the word from coming out. Then she remembered, the lie told about the boy she’d found in the sunken garden. She and her cousins had guarded the secret of his appearing as much for their mothers’ and grandmothers’ sake as for his. More.
“Fel,” Estrella said. “His name is Fel.”
She was cutting this off. Reid’s questions held not concern but the curiosity of a tourist.
“Please don’t ask Dalia about what happened,” Estrella said. Dalia slept less than Fel did now. Estrella heard the hallway floor creaking under her steps at midnight. “Don’t make her live through that again.”
Reid held his hands up, a gesture of surrender.
If he meant to hide his smile, he gave it so little effort that it only flattened into a smirk. How charmed he must have considered himself. What golden luck he must have thought was his that even a family’s legacy conspired to give him these gardens, free from Bay’s objections. Of course he would think the whole glittering universe existed to spin anything he wanted out of stardust.
He was a man, and a rich one, and these together made him believe the planets and moons orbited around the single point of his desires.
“So you and your family,” he said. “You make flowers.”
Estrella’s lungs eased at the subject change.
He knew the answer. Everyone did, as least as far as the rumors carried. They either loved the Nomeolvides women because Marjorie Briar had loved them, or they whispered behind their hands that they were all cursed witches, and that they were glad to see them keeping to these hills. They passed stories back and forth about how the women on the hill could grow flowers in the harshest winters, out of frozen ground or on trellises covered in hoarfrost or even out of icicles themselves.
Reid held out a second glass to her.
“I’m going to give you a chance to pay this back,” he said. “Just you. Your family doesn’t have to be involved.”
She waved the glass away, but a ribbon of gratitude folded in her chest. This was the one human, yielding thing about Reid, his understanding of the burden children felt when they owed their families more than they could repay.
“You do want to stay here, don’t you?” he asked. “All of you? You don’t want to be las hijas del aire again do you?”
Even in his awful accent, the words stilled the air in Estrella’s throat.
“Towns have long memories,” Reid said. “If you know who to ask.”
The back of Estrella’s neck pinched with wondering how much this town remembered. Did they remember the Nomeolvides women who took out apartments above the dress shops and antiques dealers, who set out wreaths made not of flowers but of lemons? Or the girls who found jobs as bookkeepers or cake decorators, who crossed the street rather than pass by the flower shop?
Estrella could imagine being one of those girls, hopeful and hiding, wanting homes where the only flowers were ones patterning the curtains. She could feel the heat and chill of their shame and their fear when hundreds of alliums or carnations were found crowding an employer’s desk, or splitting open pallets of cake flour, or, worst of all, filling a child’s crib. In every town before, these things had gotten the Nomeolvides women fired, or chased from their homes, or killed.
The world outside these gardens held two kinds of death, the vengeance of La Pradera, and the knives of a world that did not want them.
“If you want to stay, that’s good news to me,” Reid said. “Because I want you to.”
The chill of La Pradera’s hold prickled over Estrella’s skin.
Don’t go out there, La Pradera whispered. Don’t wander. Don’t stray. For women like you, the world offers only death.
Abuela Mimosa’s words echoed through her. We stay here, or we die. If Reid or anyone else threw them off this land, Estrella had no faith La Pradera would show them mercy.
“What do you want, Reid?” Estrella asked.
“Not as much as you’re worried I want,” he said. “Just something for our guests at the ball. Do that, and we’ll call all this forgiven. We’ll pretend it never happened.”
“What kind of something?” she asked.
“It’ll be easy.” He shook his head, like the thing was so minor it wasn’t worth naming. “You could do it with your eyes closed.”
EIGHTEEN
Each day, Reid gave Fel the tasks he wanted done. The bulbs in the lanterns looked dull, and Fel should check them. Lichen was dulling the stone on the fountains, and Fel should polish it away. The copper benches were growing a patina, and Fel should scrub them clean.
This last one he hated most. Fel knew the grandmothers liked the green on the copper, that they thought of it as the breath of some far sea.
Fel scoured rough cloths over the metal. When the green did not fade, he wondered if it was defying him. It was clinging to remind him he was rubbing away a thing loved by women who looked after him.
With sweat dampening his hair, he looked up and saw the grandmothers standing on the grass, handing him the salt, vinegar, flour, and olive oil.
“You’ll need this,” Abuela Mimosa told him. “It’ll strip it, then you’ll shine it.”
He wanted to make apologies for the fact that he had no will in him except to do as he was told. So at night, with the sun down and Reid’s tasks for him done, he did small things for the ground around the Nomeolvides house.
Light from the stone house spilled out, the upturned leaves catching it. The plots here weren’t as thickly or brightly flowered as the garden valley or the courtyards, but they sat close to the house, crowding the windowsills with green, and they grew not only petals but things the women ate.