Page 6 of Rejected Hollow

“Keep me ordinary,” I repeated. A laugh slipped out, brittle and wrong. “Well, I guess you managed that.”

“Don’t.” Marion’s voice snapped into the sharp tone she used at the ward. “Don’t you dare belittle yourself like that in my kitchen.”

“Then tell me what’s going on.” I put the drawing down before I crushed it in my hands. “Who sent this? What is Ironmoor? What does assessment mean? Why have I been drawing this deer and it had something to do with my mother…?”

Marion picked up the photograph but said nothing. Her tea sat untouched in front of her, the surface gone still as it cooled. In all the years I had known her, I could not remember seeing Marion let a cup of tea go cold.

At last, she set the photograph back on the table.

“There are secrets which are not mine to tell you,” she said. She spoke slowly, as if she had to force each sentence past something lodged in her throat. “I’m sorry, Wren, but they aren’t. I made promises, and there are people who can explain this far better than I can. If I try to tell you myself, I’m afraid I’ll get something wrong, and if I get the wrong thing wrong, it could—”

She stopped before finishing the sentence.

For several seconds, she simply sat there. Then some of the strain went out of her face, leaving her looking suddenly older than she had when she came into the kitchen.

“I’m frightened, Wren,” she said quietly. “I have been frightened since the day they put you in my arms. I’ve spent eighteen years pretending I wasn’t, but now… Now it’s all coming back.”

They.

Not my mother. They.

I should have asked who had put me in Marion’s arms. I should have asked what she meant about getting something wrong, and what exactly might happen if she did. The questions were there, all of them, but Marion was shaking, and I couldn’t bring myself to ask any of them.

That was when the anger went out of me.

I had wanted to shout. I had wanted to stand up in that kitchen and tell her, You burned my drawings. I wanted to know how many other things she had hidden from me, how many pieces of my mother had been sitting somewhere in that house while I spent years searching for anything I could find. I wanted to know how many times Marion had watched me look and had chosen, once again, not to tell me the truth.

I had eighteen years of anger waiting to come out, and every bit of it felt justified.

But Marion was sitting across from me with both hands pressed flat against the table because she couldn’t stop them from shaking. She was fifty-eight years old, and she had just admitted that she was afraid.

So I did what I always do.

I swallowed it.

I took everything I was feeling and pushed it down until I could speak without letting any of it show. Then I made my voice pleasant. Sometimes I think it might be the only thing I’ve ever been genuinely gifted at.

I hated myself a little for doing it.

“It’s probably a mistake anyway,” I said. “They’ll take one look at me and send me home. I’m hardly anyone’s idea of special. I’m just too much of everything that doesn’t matter and not enough of anything that does.”

Marion reached across the table and took my hand in both of hers. She held on tightly, the same way she used to when I was little and thunder kept me awake.

“Listen to me,” she said. “You were never too much, love. You are special. You don’t even know how much yet.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

I looked down at our hands, then back at the white deer with its silver antlers. Beside it was the photograph of my mother laughing on a cold beach, a white streak running through her hair in the same place as mine.

Then something outside caught my eye.

The kitchen window looked out over the street, where dawn was only beginning to thin the darkness. Most of the streetlamps had already gone out, though the one outside number fourteen had been dead for as long as I could remember.

A black car was parked beneath it.

I knew that car.

I had seen it outside Marion's house more times than I could count over the years. Sometimes it stayed for twenty minutes. Sometimes an hour. Sometimes it disappeared for weeks and then turned up again in exactly the same place. I had never thought much about it. There were always cars coming and going on the street, and after a while this one had become part of the scenery.