The Devouring Gray(65)

But Juniper appeared in her doorway, and in an instant, those thoughts were gone.

Daria hung between them, a conversational albatross that had weighed on them since the night she’d died. Alongside Juniper, Violet had watched Daria’s ashes slotted beside her younger brother’s in the Saunders section of the town mausoleum earlier that week. A funeral of two.

Violet wanted to talk to her—about Daria and Rosie and Stephen. About her father. But she didn’t even know where to start.

The journal had made her uncle real to her. She’d read it over multiple times since she’d found it in the archives, and each time, she had felt more and more as if she was grieving this boy she’d never known alongside his older sister.

“There’s a storm coming,” her mother said.

“I noticed.” Violet jerked a thumb toward her window. The clouds behind them had blotted out the setting sun, and a thin white fog was beginning to collect at the edge of the trees, sending a shudder of residual panic through Violet’s chest.

Juniper’s lips pursed. “Hail. Wind. Rain. Don’t leave the house.”

“Do I ever go anywhere unless you make me? Like that ridiculous pageant?”

Juniper sighed. “Just help me with the storm shutters.”

They cranked down the safety blinds in front of every window, ancient metal things that groaned as they were unfurled. All the things Violet wasn’t saying churned in her mind the longer she stood next to her mother. But she stayed silent.

Because what good would it do?

Because when had they ever really talked about how they felt?

The wind began to kick up, a harsh, high whisper against the metal blinds that sounded like a whimpering child. Violet pulled the final storm shutter into place, jumping back as it began to rattle and shake against the living room window.

And maybe the unsteady storm shutters had dislodged something in her, too. Because she turned to Juniper, the words waiting in her throat.

The words she’d wanted to say for the last five months.

“Do you even miss them?”

Juniper’s face went still. “Miss who?”

“All the people you’ve lost. Because I don’t understand how you can just keep going. Don’t you realize they’re gone?”

The lamps on the mantelpiece provided the only remaining light in the room, casting a dull glow across the edges of Juniper’s frizzy hair.

It was hard to look at her. Because Violet could see the resemblance between them. In her posture. In the twitching of her long, elegant fingers. And, most of all, in the grief etched into her face.

“You don’t think I miss them?” said Juniper softly. “There isn’t a day where I don’t miss my brother and sister, or your father. And there isn’t a second where I don’t miss Rosie.” She let out a badly concealed sob. “But you need a parent who doesn’t fall apart. So I won’t.”

Violet had a sudden rush of understanding that this was where she’d learned to pull her feelings inside. How to put a tough, neutral facade over pain. Not because she wasn’t hurting, but because if she let herself feel it, it would overwhelm her.

But Violet had started opening up these past few weeks. And it hadn’t made her pain worse—it had made it better. Showed her that she wasn’t alone.

“But you did fall apart.” Suddenly, Violet wasn’t just sad anymore. She was angry. “You were never there for us, after Dad died. You never told me and Rosie anything about your family. And you kept us from Dad’s side of the family, too, even though we asked to see them. You cut me off from a whole bunch of people who could have loved me. That’s not holding it together, Mom—that’s running away.”

Juniper’s face crumpled. “I have been the best parent to you that I know how to be. And I was there for you and Rosie when your father died.”

But that couldn’t be right. Violet had been there, same as Juniper. “You’re lying.”

She whirled around and rushed back to her room, where she lay on her bed, shuffling through her audition program. But her mind wasn’t on her sheet music anymore.

She stared up at the ceiling and thought about her father, her few cloudy memories of him, his wide smile, his kind eyes.

And then Violet let herself remember how painful it had been, after he’d died. The hands that had pulled up the covers on her back and smoothed her hair until she fell asleep. That gave her a perfectly packed lunch each morning. That hovered over her as she practiced the piano, flipping through the pages.

They had always been Rosie’s hands to her—but Rosie had been only six when their father died, and she was startled to remember that these hands were lean and elegant, much like hers.

The memory of her first recital unspooled back into her mind again, but this time, it wasn’t Rosie tugging her up to the piano.

It was Juniper.

I was there for you and Rosie when your father died.

Violet choked back a sob.

Her mother had made mistakes, that much was true. She had hurt Violet and Rosie. She had kept them away from their family, kept secrets, told lies.

Yet Violet had lied to herself, too.

She wanted Rosie to be the perfect sister. She wanted Juniper to be a shitty parent. Because it was easy to make someone perfect when they were gone. And it was so much harder to work through all the complicated messiness of a mother who had cared for her, but imperfectly. Who had been selfish, but not irredeemably so.