The Butterfly Garden (The Collector #1)(64)

Desmond paled, but nodded to show he understood. Then he promptly changed the subject. If you don’t look at the bad thing, the bad thing can’t see you, right? “Bliss has some sort of project spread out over the rock. She told me if I sat on any of the clay, she’d shove it up my nose.”

“What was she working on?”

“I have no idea; she was still softening the clays.”

Summer afternoons were almost unbearably warm in the Garden, the heat soaking through the glass. Most girls spent the afternoons in the water or the shade to escape it, or in their rooms where they could actually feel the cooler air moving through the vents. I wasn’t going to disturb Bliss if she was working on something, especially if she was doing it in the hottest part of the Garden, so I took Desmond’s hand and led him down the hall. It was cooler in the back corner, where the base of the cliff stood directly against the hall glass and blocked the sunlight.

I turned in to my room and Desmond immediately began studying the shelf above my bed. He tapped the carousel to make it spin. “For some reason I don’t really see you as a carousel person,” he said, turning to look at me.

“I’m not.”

“Then why—”

“Someone else was.”

He looked back at the carousel and didn’t say anything. He couldn’t ask for more without hitting things he tried so hard not to think about.

“The gifts we give say as much about us as the gifts we get and keep,” he murmured eventually. He touched the muzzle of the sad little dragon, which now had a tiny pajama-clad teddy bear to keep him company. “Is it the things that are important, or the people?”

“I thought classes were over for the summer.”

He gave me a sheepish grin. “Habit?”

“Right.”

My room had changed a bit from that first day. My sheets were a deep rose, the blanket a rich, brilliant purple, with stacks of pillows in a pale fawn-brown. My toilet and shower were both concealed by drapes of a matching brown, rose and purple sashes hanging loose against the walls in case I wanted to clip them back for any reason. There were two short bookcases along one wall with the various books the Gardener had given me personally, rather than adding into the library, and the knickknacks spilled over onto these shelves, the most important—or at least the most personal—staying on the shelf above the bed.

Other than the knickknacks, it was hard to say the room reflected anything about me, as I hadn’t chosen anything about it. Even the trinkets were hard to pin down, really. Evita had once painted me a lovely chrysanthemum on a rock, but that showed her sunny personality, not mine. My keeping it just meant that she was important to me.

And then there was the thing that made me ever conscious of just how not mine the space was: the blinking red camera light above the door.

I sat on the bed, my back against the wall, and watched him bend sideways to read the spines of the books. “How many of these were my father’s choice?”

“Maybe half.”

“The Brothers Karamazov?”

“No, that one was mine.”

“Really?” He grinned at me over his shoulder. “Dense, isn’t it?”

“On the surface. It’s fun to discuss.”

I discussed a lot of books with Zara, but never the classics. That was something Noémie and I had done, dissecting them, getting into debates that could last for days or even weeks without ever fully being resolved. Rereading Dostoevsky kept Noémie fresh in my mind in a way that wasn’t as painful as directly reminding myself of her and the others in New York. There was a book for each of the girls from the apartment. It was subtler than Nazira’s drawings or Bliss’s figures, but the same impulse.

“Why am I not surprised that you like books with layers?” He finished his perusal and stood next to the bed, hands in his pockets.

“You can sit on the bed, you know.”

“I, uh . . . this is your space,” he said awkwardly. “I don’t want to presume.”

“You can sit on the bed, you know.”

He smiled this time and toed off his shoes, sitting next to me on top of the blankets. We’d kissed a few times since that first one, each one tentative and just a little overwhelming. His father, and to a lesser extent his brother, hovered between us whenever it seemed it might go a little further, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

Actually, I wasn’t sure about much of anything when it came to Desmond.

We talked a bit about his friends, about his school, but even that was hard sometimes. I’d been in the Garden long enough that the outside world had become somewhat surreal, like a half-believed legend. Eventually, it was time for dinner, time for him to go back to the house for a while so his mother didn’t wonder where he was all the time, and we walked down the hall hand in hand. If I walked him to the entrance, would he send me away before he punched his code into the lock? I wondered whether that precaution was one his father had drilled into him. If I ran through the door, would he take pity and let me go?

Could I get the police back here for the other girls before anything happened to them?

If I hadn’t been absorbed with the problem of the door, I might have noticed right away, might have recognized how strange the silence was, but it took me a minute to realize we should have been hearing piano music down this entire stretch of hallway. I dropped his hand, not caring that he followed, and ran to the music room, terrified of what I might see.