A Lesson in Thorns (Thornchapel #1)(30)

“Point taken.” Hiss. Pulse.

“I know what we could do!” Delphine says after a minute, so suddenly and so loudly that I nearly tear a page clean off.

“About my Instagram?”

“What? No.” She sounds exasperated that I haven’t followed her to her new train of thought. “We should have a party for you! Tomorrow night. We’ll get some champagne, have Abby make something special.”

Abby . . . I search my memory and come up with nothing. “Abby?”

“She does the dinners. She’s marvelous, really. Like a one-woman wonder.” Delphine says marvelous in only two syllables, but the continued swinging of her feet keeps it from sounding too much like she’s fresh off the set of The Crown. “She had some time away, a sick sister or something, but she’s back now. Making dinner tonight, actually.”

“Ah.” Of course this all seems perfectly natural to Delphine. Of course there’s just someone to make the dinners, of course that’s totally normal. I chew on the inside of my lip so that I don’t blurt out anything idiotic or totally déclassé.

“Anyway, it’ll be just a cozy, fun thing here at the house, and we’ll get Becky in too, of course.”

Becky, I’d learned earlier, is their pet name for Becket, not a nickname for Rebecca—who is Bex. Auden is Audey, but only from Delphine, and sometimes he’s simply Guest to Rebecca and she is Quartey to him, in that collegiate way of theirs. Delphine is Delly—except sometimes she’s also Delph or Dee or—inexplicably—Pickles. It seems like the one rule is that you aren’t allowed to make the ridiculous nicknames for yourself; they must be awarded to you by your friends who have their own ridiculous nicknames—which explains their shock at my declaring that I wanted to go by Poe, I guess. I should have waited until they decided to call me Prosey or PoPo or Patches or whatever.

“That sounds delightful,” I say. I wasn’t lying to Saint—I really do love parties.

I’m toward the end of scanning the book now, and when I move to flip a page, it falls open with barely any help from me. I have only a brief second to think spine damage? before the cause becomes clear.

There’s a picture wedged inside. Not an old one either. At least, not as old as the book would lead one to believe.

I lift the glass plate a little higher while Delphine chatters behind me about what she’ll have Abby throw together and what I should wear and how much champagne she should get. I pull the picture out and study it.

The corner bears the time-stamp common to digital cameras of a certain age, and it’s stamped with the date of that summer, the summer.

The summer we were all here.

There are nine adults in the picture. My parents, Auden’s parents, Delphine’s parents, Becket’s parents. Rebecca’s father alone because her mother had already moved back to Accra by that point. Neither of Saint’s parents because they weren’t part of the strange little house party; his father was already dead, and his mother lived in the village. He’d joined our troupe by sheer accident of proximity.

The adults are smiling in the picture, all of them smiling like they have a secret. And they’re here in the library, standing in front of the huge windows, bathed in light and alive. My mother is near the center of the group, something narrow and circular glinting in her hand that she’s trying to put around Auden’s father’s neck. My own father watches fondly, one hand at the small of her back, his other hand laced with Rebecca’s father’s. Auden’s mother watches her husband and my mother with a pained smile, but the way she leans into Becket’s parents suggests familiarity, just as the way they have their arms entangled with Delphine’s parents’ suggests possession.

It’s a strangely intimate scene, and yet I can only look at my mother, laughing and alive. Keeping whatever secrets that would lead her right back to Thornchapel a couple months after this picture was taken. Secrets that would lead her to her death.

Have hope, Poe.

Everything is possible.

I stare at her, my teeth digging so hard into my lower lip that the pain there is almost a counterpoint to the sharp, lonely pain in my chest.

Almost.

Closure isn’t too much to hope for, I remind myself. I might not find her, I may never see the grass growing over her grave, but I might learn why. I might learn how.

I might discover how a Latin word scrawled in her handwriting ended up in my mailbox.

“ . . . and I’ll take some pictures of you and you’ll see what I mean by posting more of yourself. Poe? Are you listening?”

I extend the picture to her, and she slides off the table to investigate. She takes it and examines it, her honey-brown eyes soft when she looks up at me. “Where did you find it?”

“In this book,” I say, looking back down at the Amateur History of Thornchapel. “Stuck in the pages.”

Delphine steps closer and peers over the glass plate at the book below. “There’s the thorn chapel,” she says quietly. “Golly. I haven’t thought of that place in so long.”

She’s right, the thorn chapel’s right there and I missed it, absorbed as I was with the picture itself. On the pages below, there’s a colorless sketch of the ruins, looking much the same as I remember it—standing stones and rubble covered in thorns and roses.