“Your father has always been just—it is what the Landrys pride themselves on.” She answered quickly enough, but I could see her hands balled in her skirt. I stood and went to her, staying silent.
She pulled me into a fierce embrace, pressing my cheek against hers. I could feel the lingering tears on her face.
“I hope you never know what it is like to love a man like your father,” she whispered. With a swift kiss, she left, the silk skirt of her dress making a pleasant swishing on the marble floor.
I stayed in the room, watching snow drift idly outside. That Mother loved Father, I had always known. But that she felt it a burden, I had never considered. Under her plum-colored dress, under the silk chemises and fragrant oils and lotions, beat a heart that I realized I barely knew.
Laughter echoed in the hallway—a girl’s laughter—and a shh! noise that was followed by scuffling feet. Curious, I got up and walked into the hallway to see Cara pressed against the wall, kissing someone with ferocious intensity. Someone who was decidedly not David.
I gasped, and she heard me, breaking apart from her paramour.
“Ewan?” I asked, flabbergasted. “Cara? Why are you here?”
“Oh, I spent the night last night,” she said, as if that answered all my questions.
“I should go,” Ewan told Cara, and pressed his lips to her cheek. “Bye, love.”
She smiled her stunning smile and moved her fingertips in a wave. “Good-bye.”
Grinning, Ewan walked past me. “Cousin,” he greeted me with a nod.
Shocked, I turned to Cara, waiting until Ewan was out of earshot before I erupted. “Cara, what on earth is going on? Ewan is Rootless! And you’re dating David!”
“That did not stop you from kissing him yesterday in the park.”
I blushed, ashamed and a little grateful that she didn’t know about the other kiss. “I didn’t mean for that to happen—we were scared and he was about to save Charlie and it took me by surprise,” I tried to explain.
“Like I care.” Cara started walking, and I scurried to walk beside her. “David told me himself after everything settled down. I can’t believe it took this long, either. I would have gone for it ages ago if I were you.”
“What?” I was so confused.
“Please. Did you think I was really dating David Dana?” she scoffed.
“Yes! You debuted with him. And at the Lodge, you kissed—”
“And other than that, how often did we kiss? Did we ever seem like we were madly in love?”
“While he was gone, you were so withdrawn. Everybody said you were heartbroken over David being in the mountains. I just assumed…”
“You assumed wrong.” We stopped at a window and looked out at the snow. Ewan was trudging down the driveway, already covered in white dust. “Look, David came to me, okay? Last spring. He knew. He knew.”
“He knew about what?” I watched her follow Ewan down the path with her eyes, and then the truth began to connect. “You and Ewan.”
“David found out when he started meeting with Jack that Jack’s son was in love with a gentry girl. We each had something the other needed. I needed him to keep his mouth shut about Ewan, and he needed the appearance of being a normal gentry boy. He needed to look happy and carefree, and I could help him with that. In public, of course, which ended up backfiring once Ewan heard that we were dating. You saw him at his house. I thought he was going to throw me into that laundry vat. He wrote me a letter telling me never to speak or write to him again. After that, I—I was upset. I didn’t care about anything else if I didn’t have Ewan.”
Cara and Ewan. The idea was ridiculous, and yet it fit together with everything that had happened this year. “How did you meet?”
“The first time he came to change the Westoff charges, he couldn’t find his way into the house, and we met face-to-face on the patio. I didn’t realize he was Rootless at first because he was so healthy and strong. I thought he was a servant and I teased him a little about being so quiet. He told me that it was because he had heard I talked enough for an entire city. Then I dared him to kiss me.”
“Did he?”
“Of course.”
“Like that poor servant boy when we were girls.”
She shrugged. “Ewan’s the only person who has never treated me like a princess or a concubine. He made me feel strong. He made me feel like I could do anything I wanted.” She sighed. “He made every boy that wasn’t him seem frivolous and spoiled. After we ran into each other two or three more times on my estate, we started meeting in secret.”
I struggled to imagine Ewan—the tense revolutionary, the angry rebel—falling in love with a spoiled girl like Cara. And Cara—who had never once expressed any sympathy for anyone less fortunate than her—how had she found herself craving the company of a charge changer?
She noticed my expression. “What?”
“It is just that you two… do not seem to have much in common,” I said delicately.
Ewan was long gone, but Cara continued staring out the window, as if she had vision that could penetrate through all the snow and houses and trees that separated the sight of Ewan from her eyes. “You know, at first, I think we hated each other. There wasn’t much, um, conversing when we were first meeting up, and neither of us wanted to talk about it or us or anything at all. And not only would I walk away resenting him, but I would feel ashamed of myself. All those things they tell us as children, about our responsibility to marry someone of good gentry stock, about how purity of breeding is what kept our world from sinking into another war—” She shook her head, brushing away the echoes of her memories. “I believed it my whole life. But there was nothing weak or craven about Ewan—not at all like how they describe the Rootless in school. He was strong and gentle and before I knew it, I wanted to do more than touch him. I wanted to know him. And you know what? I don’t think anyone, not even one of his fellow Rootless, had ever wanted to know him. To them, he was a soldier. A strong body. But to me, he is so much more.”
I felt a heaviness weigh on me as I thought of all the unfair things I’d thought—and said—about Cara. This whole year, she’d been risking everything to see the man she loved.
“So you were meeting secretly. And then you were going to see him at the Wilder debut. Wearing your pink coat.”
“It was supposed to be easy,” she said, suddenly flaring into emotion. “He took a friend’s job that day to collect the Wilder charges. No one would miss me at the ball, and I had already hinted to a few people that I would be occupied with Philip Wilder. We would be able to spend a few moments alone together, while the rest of the city was occupied.”
“What happened?”
Cara sat down on the bench under the window. When she looked up at me, her eyes were wet. “Mother.”
“Addison?”
“She followed me. She had noticed that I’d been acting differently, sneaking out at strange times. She followed me to the grove and found me with Ewan.” Tears clung to her eyelashes and dripped down her cheeks. “I made him run as soon as we heard footsteps, but he left his bag, and he still had my coat in his arms… . Mother was so angry. Said I was destroying my chances of having a healthy gentry heir. Said I was disgusting. That Ewan was vermin. She hit me, and I fell into the brambles nearby. She hit me again and again.”
I shuddered. I couldn’t imagine living with someone who had hurt me so viciously, who continued to hurt me afterward. And I couldn’t believe that there were times when I had almost liked Addison, with her acerbic wit and keen observations. But then again, there were times when I loved my father, and he left lacerations of his own, even if they couldn’t be seen.