Chapter 4
I confronted Cordelia the next morning.
No audience.
No Desmond.
She walked into my office and saw the old photograph Margaret had sent me.
Four-year-old Ophelia.
Blue hallway.
Hands folded.
No smile.
Cordelia stopped.
“You remembered.”
“Enough.”
She sat slowly.
“I was twenty-nine.”
“So?”
“I believed what they told me.”
“That children needed to be isolated until they stopped asking for their parents?”
Her face tightened.
“It wasn’t described that way.”
Of course.
It never is.
Rose House was called a stabilization residence.
Children were taught routine.
Respect.
Independence.
Every cruel system becomes elegant after enough adults rename the verbs.
I asked:
“Why did you extend my stay?”
“You were inconsolable.”
I almost laughed.
“My mother died.”
Cordelia looked away.
“You were disrupting the other children.”
There.
Children.
Plural.
Rose House had not only held me.
“How many?”
She hesitated.
“Over the years?”
“Yes.”
“Twenty-three.”
My stomach turned.
Some stayed weeks.
Some months.
Children from different Huxley branches.
Orphans.
Stepchildren.
Children whose parents remarried.
Children considered too attached to grandparents.
Children who witnessed family conflict.
Instead of adults fixing the environment, they relocated the smallest person.
Efficient.
Cowardly.
“Why is the house still operational?”
“It isn’t.”
“Then where were you sending Priscilla?”
Silence.
A caretaker still maintained one wing.
Cordelia planned to reopen it privately.
Just for thirty days.
One child.
My child.
No staff history.
No committee.
Just Cordelia, Desmond, and an old caregiver named Helen Price.
“Why Priscilla?”
Cordelia’s answer came softly.
“Because Desmond needs a chance.”
“To do what?”
“To become your husband before he becomes second place forever.”
There.
My daughter was competition.
Not to me.
To the man marrying me.
Cordelia believed a husband who entered a household already centered around a child would never develop true authority.
I stared.
“Then he should marry someone without a child.”
Cordelia flinched.
Simple truths often offend complicated traditions.
Then she said:
“There’s something else.”
Of course.
“There always is.”
She looked toward the family signet ring on my hand.
May you like
“The old council believes Priscilla should not remain your presumed successor.”
Now we had reached the real reason Rose House mattered.
