Page 89 of Thrall
Lucy sighed back, though she allowed it. It was Jillian’s second day at Rollins, and now that she was reasonably confident that nothing was fatally wrong in her daughter’s life, she’d consented to a tour. Lucy, in turn, wasn’t sure she had consented to a comprehensive rundown of all the dangers of the Rollins campus. But to know Jillian Easting was to understand all the different ways that life could kill you. And strangely enough, it was a little comforting to think of all the much more normal ways she could die.
Jillian, for her part, was settling back into the typical spectrum of worrying as well. Lucy still wasn’t entirely sure that Jillian had bought the “panic attack” cover story. But Jillian had, at great length, accepted that everything seemed fine, at least for now. Of course, the long conversation she’d had with Lucy’s extremely competent and devastatingly ripped RA had gone a long way toward all that.
All of that was likely to change when Jillian knew that her daughter’s roommate had disappeared just before classes began. But even if it was inevitable that she’d find that out eventually, she wasn’t going to find out that day.
And speaking of which…“You’re okay with waiting here while I get my books?” she said. “I just need to have a quick meeting with the reference librarian.”
“I’ll entertain myself, don’t you worry. Although…” The ever-present crease in Jillian’s forehead smoothed as she saw a tall blond figure disappear into the office in the back. “I’d be much more entertained if he stuck around.”
“He’s married,” Lucy called over her shoulder as she made her way across the floor. “And ew, by the way.”
Jillian’s laugh was always quick when it came over her. Like a fish skimming the top of deep water: just a flicker of scales, and then gone. “Your mom is old, Luce. She’s not dead.”
Lucy turned her own smile forward as she crossed the room, then stepped into that office herself. Laurentius and Hiro watched her shut the door as if they had long heard her coming. But then again, she was sure they had.
“Your mother?” Hiro said.
Lucy didn’t quite feel the faint strain in her legs until she collapsed into the chair opposite Hiro. She was still a bit shaky from Vanya’s final drink—and dragging Jillian up and down the mountain wasn’t exactly helping matters. “She wants to see that I’m okay,” she said. “I’m trying to demonstrate with visual aids.”
Laurentius, standing just a little behind Hiro’s perch on the tufted velvet stool, made a faintly judgmental sound at that. “Nearly fifty years working in higher education,” he said dryly. “And the only thing that never changes is children lying to their parents.”
“You realize that’s a little parental of you to say yourself, darling,” Hiro said sweetly.
“Oh, hush,” Laurentius said, to which Hiro threw his head back and cackled.
“I’m not lying so much as excluding distracting details,” Lucy said. “There’s just a lot of distracting details in this particular instance.” Which was partially why she’d stopped by the library in the first place. “Have you worked out your terms with Dr. Horne?”
“Indeed. As you guessed, it seems that I set those terms now—or my money does, at the very least,” he said. “I’ve convinced her to think of a story for Whitney Fielding’s family. Not the usual runaway story, as you specified.”
“She didn’t say what the story would be?” Lucy said. At Laurentius’s raised eyebrow, she said, “Whitney was close to her family. She…didn’t want to leave them without any answers.”
Lucy knew that there would never be a way to give them full closure. It was one of the things that had kept her awake in the nights since she’d killed Vanya. But they deserved to know that she was gone, in whatever way Dr. Horne could convince them.
“She said she would think of something,” Laurentius said. “I don’t envy her the task. To say a child ran away is easy. That’s what children do. To say a child is dead, and yet have no body to show…It will be difficult to convince her parents of that.”
The thought settled hard in her stomach. “She’d better think of something,” she said. “She gave Sadie’s and Addison’s loved ones false hope. This is the least of what she owes.”
“Speaking of Sadie and Addison,” Hiro said. “Are you still feeling hopeful about them?”
Lucy scoffed. “Depends on the day,”
Granted, it had only been two days. Two days wasn’t much time to cause a lot of chaos. But Sadie and Addison had been starved for years. They had to be out there looking for food. Wherever they were looking for it, though, it wasn’t Rollins—not yet.
Maybe Sadie was still looking for Addison. Or maybe they’d found each other, and they were biding their time. Or maybe…Well. As Sadie had said, in her parting words, she didn’t know what it was she planned to do. Maybe she still didn’t know.
“That aside,” Laurentius said. “When you said you wanted to meet…I thought it would be for the other reason.”
Ah, Lucy thought. There was also that. “The other reason was also on my mind,” she said. “But I wasn’t sure whether to bring it up.”
“As I told you, I’ve only made that offer before once,” Laurentius said. “I wasn’t expecting to be ‘left hanging.’”
“Not all of that was my fault,” Lucy said. “I told you I’d think about it. I got interrupted halfway through thinking about it.”
Laurentius was characteristically unimpressed by that. Hiro reached up to pat at his arm. “You can’t expect her to decide as quickly as I did,” he said. “She’s not in love with you.”
“Yes, well.” Laurentius cleared his throat loudly. “I suppose if you’d like to keep thinking about it, that’s all right. I just imagined that you’d like to complete the transformation quickly, with those two girls on the loose.”
“That’s the thing.” Lucy paused. Not because she wasn’t sure of her decision. She’d talked Mila’s ear off about it all night. But the one thing she hadn’t considered was how to say it to them. “I was hoping I could keep thinking about it…indefinitely.”
