Page 17 of The Invisible Hour

“Thank you for showing me her room,” Mia said.

“She was only a girl,” Helen said. “Remember that. But she should have had the choice to decide what to do with her own body and her own fate.”

Helen threw her arms around Mia’s shoulders, then quickly backed away.

After the door closed, Mia stood outside for a while wearing the green coat, eyes fixed on the house. She saw that the black paint on the window shutters was peeling. Pigeons were nesting on the rooftop, and no one had bothered to chase them off. She couldn’t imagine what it might have been like to grow up here and what limits had been placed on her mother, she only knew that she was glad she had come, and even happier to be walking away with a message from her mother. She went to the Boston Common, sat on a bench, and watched the leaves fall and be carried away by the rising wind, and then she unfolded the letter.

Dearest Mia,

If you are reading this letter you have left the Community, and for that I am grateful. Perhaps I am about to tell you too much, but perhaps it is better than too little. Perhaps I should have told you while we were together, but I am hoping it’s not too late. My parents thought they knew what was best, and because I was sixteen and had no legal rights, they made plans for me to give you away. They planned to steal everything I cared about. My freedom, my ability to make choices, and you. More than anything, you.

I let you grow up believing things that weren’t true because I thought the outside world was dangerous. I let you believe that we were safe where we were, and that wasn’t true either. But I want more for you than I wanted for myself.

Here is the truth: There was a boy I loved, who I thought loved me, but when I told him about my situation, he said it was my problem. But you were never my problem. You were my joy. He was at Harvard and had a bright future, and he cared what other people thought. He begged me to keep his secret and tell no one who the father was. I could have gone to his parents, I could have destroyed him in their eyes, but what good would that have done?

You were mine and mine alone. You were the best thing that ever happened to me.

It was a time when unmarried girls were shamed for getting pregnant, as if pregnancy was a crime they had to pay for with their suffering. I pray that by the time you read this letter, the world will have changed, and girls can make their own choices about what they do with their bodies.

I went to Western Massachusetts, where the Community said that kindness was the only rule. That wasn’t true, but I didn’t know that evil can look like something it is not. I did not know that until I saw it right before me. I had a hole in my heart and Joel Davis filled it. I believed I had fallen in love. I gave my life over to him because I was too young and too exhausted to do anything else. To the untrue man, the whole universe is false, and he convinced me of that so that I could not trust a single person outside the gates of the farm. He was not your father, but he promised he would always be there for us. He told me that if I ever left him, he would keep you. He would find you and take you from me, and that wasn’t a bargain I was willing to make. You were mine and mine alone.

I don’t know what your future will be, but if you’re reading this letter you need to know I stayed because of you. I stayed because I was afraid to lose you, and for that, and for a thousand other things, I am so sorry. I made one mistake after another, but I wanted you to know the truth.

Once upon a time, I loved you more than anything. I loved you more than life itself.

MIA CELEBRATED HER FIRST Thanksgiving at Miss Allen’s. She didn’t know what to expect, for holidays were ignored at the Community. She had changed since she read the letter, which she kept in a shoebox beneath her bed, along with her copy of The Scarlet Letter and Carrie’s painting. She understood what she and her mother had between them had never been invisible. It had been there all the time. From the very beginning she had been loved.

Sarah had finally come to visit. For several weeks Joel Davis had taken to sitting in his parked truck on the other side of the green, but that had stopped, and Sarah assumed he’d given up the thought that Mia was somehow hidden away in the library. She finally decided it safe to visit Concord. Sarah had never missed spending a holiday with Constance, and she left at four in the morning, when the streets were empty, and she was certain she’d know if she was being followed.

The weather was glorious and crisp, and they had a wonderful dinner, then walked around Walden Pond. It was there that Mia thought she saw the figure of a man beneath the trees. When she blinked, he disappeared, and she assumed it was likely the same vision she saw when she thought Joel was in the garden at night. She told herself that he was a nightmare and nothing more. But later that day, she found a red leaf on the table in the garden with a stone holding it in place. She picked it up. The leaves were not yet changing in Concord, but they always turned early in Blackwell, and Look-No-Furthers had a vein of red down the center of each leaf. Mia threw the rock toward the river and tore the leaf into shreds, her pulse thrumming too fast. After that she didn’t go out by herself at night.

Mia had come to fear the dark, but it was a sunny afternoon when she saw him outside the library. He was not a goblin or a shadow, but a real live man. He’d followed Sarah Mott on Thanksgiving but had bided his time. He liked to do things his way. He liked to be in control and he liked the element of surprise. Just a hint of what he might do was all that was needed, a rule, a threat, a red leaf. It was the first weekend of December, and there was a thin coat of frost on the grass. Mia had slept in and was now coming to volunteer at the library as she did most Saturdays, and there he was waiting for her at the door. Inside the library, Miss Allen was reading Edward Eager’s Half Magic at story time. Mia glanced through the glass door and saw Miss Allen and the ten or so children gathered around her. It was as if they existed in another world, one where children weren’t locked into barns, and women weren’t branded, and men didn’t do whatever they were told to do.

“Let’s go,” Joel said. “Your antics have wasted enough of my time. When a man can’t control his own daughter, people start to talk, and I can’t have that.”

“I’m not your daughter,” Mia said. She was shaking, but she looked right at him.

Joel smiled at her then. “You’re whatever I say you are,” he told her. “You were then, and you still are now.”

Mia was grateful that a group of teenage boys were tossing a football around on the lawn. Their sweaty, cheerful presence reminded her that she, too, lived in that different world now.

“I’m not going anywhere with you,” Mia told Joel. Her voice sounded perfectly calm, except for the last word, which cracked as she spoke.

“That librarian of yours led me right here. She’s not as smart as you think she is.” Joel came to take Mia’s arm.

Mia tried to pull away, but his grasp was tight. She felt as if he would be willing to break her arm if she fought him too hard. She remembered those inky blue bruises.

“Just walk,” Joel told her. One of the Community’s old pickup trucks was parked nearby. “I’m taking you home and you’re going to do as I say. I’m serious, Mia. I will break you if you fight me on this. You’re setting a bad example for everyone else.”

“What do you think you’re doing?” Mia heard Constance shout. She had raced out of the library door as soon as she spied Mia with a man she didn’t recognize. He wasn’t tall, but he cast a shadow across the frozen lawn.

Joel pulled Mia along. “Don’t give me any trouble,” he told her.

“You there!” Mia heard Constance call. “You had better stop right now.”

Joel turned and faced Constance. She was slight with a fair complexion, and now her face was blotchy and flushed. She hadn’t even had time to put down her book, and she carried Half Magic before her as if it were her shield. “I don’t know where you think you are, but this is Concord, Massachusetts,” Constance said. “You can’t just come here and abduct people in broad daylight.”

“She doesn’t belong to you,” Joel told her. He had never liked to be thwarted, and when he was, there was a price to pay. He turned to Mia, his eyes burning with anger. “Your mother would have wanted you to come with me.”