“But why?” She’s said this so many times, and today, today, I can’t stand not knowing why. I believe her. She’s said it so many times it’s hard not to believe her. Who else is there to believe? “Why are you so sure he’s going to kill me?”
“Does it matter why?”
“I’m twenty years old now, Mama. I deserve to know the truth.”
“You’re still a child. Far too innocent for the city. Too innocent to face the likes of Luther Hades.” She drops her hand and levels her stare at the mountain like she’s challenging him to try it this minute.
“He’s never met me. Why would he want to kill me?”
“Because that’s what men like him do, all of them, every one. The city crawls with them. You’d never get out in one piece.” She brushes a lock of hair away from her cheek. “Trust me.”
We’re back at the beginning again. Hades will kill me, because men are killers. Because men are rapists. Because men are dangerous. Especially men with money.
I understand a lot of things, but this obsession she has with Luther Hades, this burning hatred shining in her eyes… I don’t understand that. If all men are ruthless killers, why does she hire them to work for her? I have other questions I don’t dare ask. Like what happened when she met Luther Hades. She must have met him. You can’t hate a person you’ve never met. Not like this.
Can you?
Her eyes on mine tug at a far corner of my memory. The day I stitched my first poppy into the dishcloth, following a pattern she ordered from a catalogue. Her face, pale. Get into the closet and don’t make a sound.
I shake it out of my head. Who can count on memories from fourteen years ago? And why, honestly, why would a man I’ve never met want to kill me?
A secret reason? Something I’ve done without knowing I’ve done it?
Impossible. I haven’t done anything. She’s never allowed me to do anything. My heart aches. For so long, I thought my mother knew everything. She doesn’t. She’s a sad, paranoid woman who wants to keep me here so she won’t be lonely, and it’s easier to keep me here if I have nowhere else to go.
I let my shoulders sag. “I trust you. I won’t ask again.”
My mother catches my hand in hers and squeezes. Her fingerprints on my arm smart. She smiles. All is forgiven… for now. “Are you working in the south fields today?”
I return her smile. “No, I finished those yesterday.”
“There’s my good girl.”
Does she buy it? I wonder while I collect the specially made basket I take into the fields, the one with ridges at the bottom to keep the blooms separate from one another. While I wave at her through the dining room window. While she paces with her phone pressed to her ear—the phone she keeps locked in her bedside table at night.
In a way, I told the truth. I do understand why she wants to keep me behind her fifteen-foot fences and away from the world. I’ve read enough books to know that mothers have some base instinct to protect their children, if only a biological one. In my mother’s case, it can’t be emotional. Like a less-valuable flower, I’m meant to be controlled, not treasured.
I told the truth.
But in so many other ways, I lied.
2
Persephone
Decker meets me at a gap in the fence a full two hours later. Not really a gap. No true empty space. At this stretch of the fence, metal slats give way to a chain-link gate. The sight of him hopping to his feet sets off a feeling like beating wings low in my belly. “Persephone.” The late-afternoon sun glows brighter in his eyes, which are as green as the leaves and shot through with the same yellow as the tulips in my mother’s greenhouse. He twines his fingers through the metal. “I almost gave up on you.”
That grin. That joke. He would never.
I abandon my basket into the grass and curl my fingers over his. He looks good in his jeans and white T-shirt. Modern, if not entirely fresh. He’s tall, lanky but muscular, like something out of the historical fiction novels my mother approves of. She’s against romanticizing the dangers in society, which is what she said when I asked her about ordering different books online.
She’d be against Decker, if she knew.
Which is why I’ve never breathed a word about him in the six months we’ve been talking at the fence. In midwinter my mother got a cough, and she asked me to take a last-minute delivery to the platform. And there was Decker in an army-green coat, rubbing his hands together, cheeks pink, watching me. I couldn’t help myself. He’s got this boyish grin that makes me think of the sunrise or pulling the ribbon off a gift.
I wish I could touch him. Really touch him, not with the cold press of metal against my hips. If I close my eyes and imagine it with all my might, I can feel it—the tilt of my head as I leaned it forward. His skin against mine, instead of the frigid kiss of the fence. If I could touch him, I’d know for sure.
It’s probably love. Love can feel uncertain, can’t it? It can be overwhelming and strange and more than a little dangerous.
“I couldn’t come earlier,” I whisper back. “Deck, my mother….”
He draws back, forehead knitted. “You changed your mind.”
I rub a thumb over the base of his knuckle. “No. God, no.” Sparkling adrenaline mixes with breathless heat. “I’m definitely leaving.”
Decker blows a breath out through thin lips, slightly chapped from working out in the sun all day. For most of my life, I was expressly forbidden from talking to any of the people my mother hired to work in the fields or in the greenhouse. For all her photos cradling the dirt, she doesn’t have enough hands to weed, water, and collect her prizewinning blooms. Her flowers have to be tended, though she’d rather people think they sprout naturally from the earth, picked with a gentle smile and a thankful prayer sent up by a woman in a linen outfit. My mother’s customers desperately want them to be pure, whatever that means. So she grows them in open fields and a glassed-in greenhouse, scattering the seeds in fistfuls meant to seem random. As if anything my mother does is random.
Paranoid, yes. Random, no.
The way she plants means there are no tidy plots and rows, which would look bad in her brochure photos. I don’t know why she cares. Nobody ever comes here to see what the fields are like. Why would they? She ships the flowers in tightly wrapped Styrofoam coolers to weddings and events. The blooms travel by train. In a matter of hours, that train will chug to a stop at a wide wooden platform thirty feet beyond where Decker stands at the fence. The night crew will load the coolers, and they’ll be away into the night, the howl of the whistle cutting across the sky to my bedroom window.
Decker leans forward again, angling his face so he can brush his lips against my forehead from the other side. “I’ve been thinking about us. About being together without this damned fence in between us.”
I pull back an inch, skin bristling. Decker is the first person other than my mother to pay any attention to me, but I’m not entirely sure I like his attention either. I’ve lived under my mother’s thumb every waking hour of my life. She’s always watching, always assessing. And I’m always watching her. If I’d done a bad job of reading her, she’d never have squeezed my hand earlier. Most nights, I dream about wide-open fields with no fences and no prying eyes. “Me too,” I murmur toward his smile, and then his words settle into my brain. “When will everything be ready?”