Chapter 3
I had been to Rose House.
I remembered that only after midnight.
One image.
A blue hallway.
A locked white door.
A woman telling me not to cry because crying made parents stay away longer.
I sat upright in bed.
Priscilla slept beside me.
I was eight again for half a second.
Then twenty-eight.
Then furious.
I called my childhood nanny.
Margaret was seventy-three now.
Retired in Maine.
She answered on the fourth ring.
“Ophelia?”
“Was I sent to Rose House?”
Silence.
Enough.
“How old?”
“Four.”
The same age Priscilla would be next year.
“Why?”
My mother had died.
My father remarried eleven months later.
And Huxley elders decided I needed a “transition period” before living with my stepmother.
Thirty days.
Exactly.
Except it became seventy-two.
“Why seventy-two?”
Margaret started crying.
“Because you kept asking to go home.”
I closed my eyes.
Apparently that was interpreted as resistance.
The more distressed I became, the more elders insisted I was not ready to return.
Perfect system.
A child’s reaction to separation became evidence the separation needed to continue.
“Did Dad know?”
“Yes.”
That hurt.
Then Margaret corrected herself.
“Not everything.”
Important.
He believed I was at a country house with cousins.
He visited twice.
Cordelia arranged both visits.
Before each one, staff moved me into the beautiful front rooms.
Clean dress.
Flowers.
Cake.
Performance.
After he left, back to the blue hall.
“What happened there?”
“No one beat you.”
I hated that adults still started defenses that way.
“What happened?”
Discipline.
Silence periods.
Meals alone after crying.
Letters withheld if children were “too emotional.”
No toys from home for the first month.
No using dead parents as excuses for disobedience.
I looked at Priscilla sleeping.
Desmond had told her she was being replaced before she even reached the car.
Rose House would have done the rest.
Then Margaret said:
“Cordelia was there.”
My hand tightened around the phone.
“How often?”
“Every week.”
So my aunt had not merely inherited an old tradition.
May you like
She had helped enforce it on me.
And now she was repeating it with my daughter.
