A Lesson in Thorns (Thornchapel #1)(70)

“But instead I used you,” Auden interrupts. “Yes, yes, I get it. Well, I did tell you that you deserved better, didn’t I?”

I grip the blanket harder around myself, staring at him like I’m seeing him for the first time. “Everything I said and did, I did it out of complete honesty.”

“Oh, is that right,” he says scornfully.

“Except one thing,” I continue, so furious and itchy with humiliation that I can’t even look at him. “I said I knew who you were. And now I realize that I have no fucking idea.”

That seems to break something in him.

“I was telling the truth too, Proserpina,” he says. “Yes, maybe I’m gutted. Maybe I’m raw and angry and sad as fuck. That doesn’t mean I lied.”

“It means,” I say, going to the stairs, “that everything we did tonight was about you and about how you feel. I don’t kneel for selfish men, Auden.”

“But you’ll kneel for an engaged one?”

“Fuck you,” I spit.

“Maybe tomorrow,” he says coolly.

Oh my God. I narrow my eyes. “You’re a bastard.”

He stares at me a moment, mouth tight, his tall, powerful body strained with rage and pain. “If only that were true,” he says finally, turning away from me.

“If only that were fucking true.”





Chapter 21





“Dad?”

I wince at the sunlight as I sit up in bed with my phone pressed to my ear. Pale and wintery as the day is, I’m still exhausted and bleary from fractured sleep and too many dreams. And from too many waking moments when I re-lived what happened between Auden and me and then had to scream into the pillow.

“Poe,” my dad says, the p sound a little clumsy, the oe sound a little choked off.

I pull my phone away from my ear and squint at the time. It’s late morning here, which means it’s late back home. Or very fucking early, depending on your perspective.

“Dad, are you drunk?”

I hear the sound of my father getting out of his favorite leather chair—a combination of human grunts and leather squeaks. “Just had a little,” he says. Slurs, more like. “Just enough to get to sleep.”

“It’s got to be like four a.m. there,” I say. “You should already be asleep.”

“Wanted to call,” he mumbles. “Wanted to tell you.”

Which is when the last of the sleep-fog burns off and I remember the text I’d sent last week.

“Is it about Mom’s family?” I ask eagerly. “The Kernstows?”

“Should’ve known you’d find out,” he tells me. “Such a smart girl. She was always so proud of you, you know. She’d hang up your report cards in her office at the university. Bragged about you skipping grades to anyone who would listen.”

This is the most he’s talked about my mother since she left, and I don’t want him ever to stop, but I’m also dying to know about my ancestors. “Dad. Mom’s family. I asked you about them, remember?”

“I remember,” he says tiredly. “I just didn’t want to tell you.”

“Don’t I have a right to know?”

“Don’t I have a right to keep you safe?”

I kick off my blankets and stand up, grumpy. “Dad.”

Somewhere on the other end, there’s the sound of a bottle clinking into a glass. “I know, I know. But talking about your mom’s family meant talking about your mom—”

He breaks off, and my heart twists. I can’t forget that he’s been hurt too, that his life ended the same day mine did.

He takes an audible drink, and I pace up and down the length of my bed twice. Then he says, “You’re right. Your mother was a Kernstow.”

“From here?”

“From the far side of the Thorne Valley. North of Thorncombe.” When he speaks again, his voice is less wobbly, more certain, as if relaying the bare facts makes speaking easier. “Can you guess which Kernstow alienated her family and beloved twin brother in the 1860s by marrying the wrong man?”

I have a guess. “Estamond?”

“Estamond.” A hiccup. “She married a Guest.”

I stop pacing, thinking about Estamond and her happy, fruitful marriage. About Ralph Guest and how much he wanted me to marry Auden. Kernstows and Guests, now and then.

“Was that a problem?”

“The Kernstows were forbidden to marry the Guests from time out of mind,” Dad says. “That was the story your mother found. So when Estamond married into the Guest family, it caused a major rift, and led to her twin brother selling the Kernstow farmstead and moving to America with his son after their parents died. He never saw his sister again, or so the legend goes.”

“I see,” I say, going over to the window again. The sky has grayed over, silvering the air with rain.

“It should be a boring story,” he says. There’s a tired sort of irritation to his voice now. “There should be nothing to it. My ancestors left Yorkshire in 1901 and came to America, and there’s no mythos around it. It shouldn’t have mattered that your mother’s family came from near Thornchapel, it shouldn’t have made a difference to anyone or anything.”