Page 29 of The Threads Between

Her fingers tightened painfully on my arm as she steered me toward the entrance. But I could not stop looking back. Couldn’t stop searching for a face that matched. For someone who was simultaneously there and not there at all.

Inside, the air was heavy with sugar and butter and money. Crystal chandeliers scattered the weak daylight into a thousand glittering shards.

Mrs. Sterling began discussing tiers.

I stood where I had been placed and tried to slow my breathing.

Had I imagined it? Had memory conjured ghosts because it could no longer hold the original?

No. The thread still trembled, faint but unmistakable, like a plucked wire settling back into silence.

“Mr. Hawthorne?”

A plate appeared before me, bearing a slice of something pale and immaculate.

“Would you care to taste the lemon?”

The cake might as well have been plaster.

“Whatever Miss Sterling prefers.”

Constance’s smile froze—a hairline crack in porcelain.

Then warmth flooded back in, brighter than before.

“How thoughtful of him,” she said lightly. “You see, Mother? He has complete faith in my judgment.” A delicate laugh. “Though I should dearly love your opinion, August. Lemon or vanilla?”

I said nothing.

Her laugh came again, crystalline and hollow. “Men are so delightfully useless with such matters, are they not?”

The confectioner chuckled uncertainly.

The tremor in her hand as she lifted her teacup was barely visible. No one else in the room would have caught it.

“The vanilla with raspberry filling,” she said at last, voice perfectly composed. “Four tiers. Gold leaf. Something elegant.”

“An excellent choice, Miss Sterling.”

Of course it was.

Everything about Constance Sterling was excellent.

While they discussed delivery dates and payment—Mrs. Sterling producing a calling card from her reticule with the practiced authority of a woman who had been arranging things her entire life—I stood at the window and watched the bookshop door across the street.

It did not open.

The thread lay quiet now, as though exhausted by its own outburst.

Perhaps it had been nothing. Perhaps memory was simply inventing shapes to fill the void. Or perhaps she had been there—close enough to touch—and the world itself had conspired to keep us apart.

I could not tell which possibility was worse.

CHAPTER 10

LILY

Syra’s glamour was cobwebs on my skin—light, barely there, but undeniably present. I caught my reflection in a shop window as we passed and saw a stranger staring back. Rounder face. Different nose. Eyes the wrong shade of blue.