For a short, witching moment, I’d thought she was actually there, in the flesh. The infamous Grey Hollow.
In the four years since she’d left home, my eldest sister had grown into a gossamer slip of a woman with hair like spun sugar and a face out of Greek mythology. Even in still pictures there was something vaporous and hyaline about her, like she might ascend into the ether at any moment. It was perhaps why journalists were forever describing her as ethereal, though I’d always thought of Grey as more earthy. No articles ever mentioned that she felt most at home in the woods, or how good she was at making things grow. Plants loved her. The wisteria outside her childhood bedroom had often snaked in through the open window and coiled around her fingers in the night.
I picked up the magazine and flicked to the cover story.
Grey Hollow wears her secrets like silk.
When I meet her in the lobby of the Lanesborough (Hollow never allows journalists near her apartment, nor, it’s rumored, does she host parties or entertain guests), she’s dressed in one of her hallmark enigmatic creations. Think heavy embroidery, hundreds of beads, thread spun from actual gold, and tulle so light it drifts like smoke. Hollow’s couture has been described as a fairy tale meeting a nightmare inside a fever dream. Gowns drip with leaves and decaying petals, her catwalk models wear antlers scavenged from deer carcasses and the pelts of skinned mice, and she insists on wood-smoking her fabric before it’s cut so her fashion shows smell like forest fires.
Hollow’s creations are beautiful and decadent and strange, but it’s the clandestine nature of her pieces that has made them so famous so quickly. There are secret messages hand-stitched into the lining of each of her gowns—but that’s not all. Celebrities have reported finding scraps of rolled-up paper sewn into the boning of their bodices, or shards of engraved animal bone affixed alongside precious gems, or runic symbols painted in invisible ink, or minuscule vials of perfume that crack like glow sticks when the wearer moves, releasing Hollow’s heady eponymous scent. The imagery that features in her embroidery is alien, sometimes disturbingly so. Think gene-spliced flowers and skeletal Minotaurs, their faces stripped of flesh.
Much like their creator, each piece is a puzzle box, begging to be solved.
I stopped reading there, because I knew what the rest of the article would say. I knew it would talk about the thing that happened to us as children, the thing none of us could remember. I knew it would talk about my father, the way he’d died.
I touched my fingertips to the scar at my throat. The same half-moon scar I shared with Grey, with Vivi. The scar none of us could remember getting.
I took the magazine up to my bedroom and slipped it under my pillow so my mother wouldn’t find it, wouldn’t burn it in the kitchen sink like the last one.
Before I left, I opened my Find Friends app and checked that it was turned on and transmitting my location. It was a requirement of my daily morning runs that my mother could track my little orange avatar as it bobbed around Hampstead Heath. Actually, it was a requirement if I wanted to leave the house at all that my mother could track my little orange avatar as it bobbed around . . . wherever. Cate’s own avatar still hovered south, at the Royal Free Hospital, her nursing shift in the emergency room dragging—as per usual—into overtime.
Leaving now, I messaged her.
Okay, I will watch you, she pinged back immediately. Message me when you’re home safe.
I set off into the predawn winter cold.
We lived in a tall, pointed house, covered in white stucco and wrapped with leadlight windows that reminded me of dragonfly wings. Remnants of night still clung to the eaves and collected in pools beneath the tree in our front yard. It was not the kind of place a single mother on a nurse’s salary could usually afford, but it had once belonged to my mother’s parents, who both died in a car accident when she was pregnant with Grey. They’d bought it at the start of their marriage, during World War II, when property prices in London had crashed because of the Blitz. They were teenagers then, barely older than I was now. The house had been grand once, though it had sagged and sunken with time.
In my favorite old photograph of the place, taken in the kitchen sometime in the sixties, the room was fat with lazy sunlight, the kind that lingers for hours in the summer months, sticking to the tops of trees in golden halos. My grandmother was squinting at the camera, a kaleidoscope of glittering green cast across her skin from a stained glass window that had since been broken. My grandfather stood with his arm around her, a cigar in his mouth, his pants belted high and a pair of Coke-bottle glasses on his nose. The air looked warm and smoky, and my grandparents were both smiling. They were cool, relaxed. If you didn’t know their story, you might think they were happy.
From the four pregnancies she’d carried to term, my grandmother had given birth to only one living child, quite late in her life: my mother, Cate. The rooms of this house that had been earmarked for children had been left empty, and my grandparents had not lived long enough to see any of their grandchildren born. There are things in every family that are not talked about. Stories you know without really knowing how you know them, tales of terrible things that cast long shadows over generations. Adelaide Fairlight’s three stillborn babies was one of those stories.
Another was the thing that had happened to us when I was seven.
Vivi called before I’d even reached the end of the street. I took the call on my AirPods, knowing without even looking at my screen that it was her.
“Hey,” I said. “You’re up early. It can’t even be lunchtime in Budapest.”
“Ha ha.” Vivi’s voice sounded muffled, distracted. “What are you doing?”
“I’m out for a run. You know, the thing I do every morning.” I turned left and ran along the footpath, past empty sports fields and the carcasses of trees that stood tall and stripped in the cold. It was a gray morning, the sun yawning sluggishly into the sky behind a pall of clouds. The chill needled my exposed skin, drawing tears from my eyes and making my ears ache with each heartbeat.
“Ew,” Vivi said. I heard an airline announcement in the background. “Why would you do that to yourself?”
“It’s the latest rage for cardiovascular health. Are you at an airport?”
“I’m flying in for a gig tonight, remember? I just landed in London.”
“No, I do not remember. Because you definitely didn’t tell me.”
“I’m sure I told you.”
“That would be a negative.”
“Anyway, I’m here, and Grey’s flying in from Paris for some photo shoot today, and we’re all hanging out in Camden before the gig. I’ll pick you up when I get out of this god-awful airport.”
“Vivi, it’s a school day.”