BRIDGET’S FATHER PULLED AROUND the kitchen drive and cut the engine off.
Clare fumbled for her door handle, found it, and hopped out. She had her mother’s door open before Bridget’s father could get there from the other side. He circled the back of the car just as her mother stepped out.
He had left the headlights on. They called the white curve of the drive up out of the dark, but where the light gave out, Clare couldn’t find a single glint or shadow to prove the yard hadn’t been swallowed up by the same black space that hung between the stars.
She stood stubbornly beside her mother. But to Clare’s surprise, he didn’t look at her mother, but at Clare.
“How old are you?” he asked.
“Twelve,” Clare answered.
Bridget’s father nodded, as if this were a sum he needed to work a complicated calculation. Then he looked at her mother. “Did she ever do anything like this?” he asked. He didn’t wait for an answer. “I just don’t understand,” he went on, “why she would do a thing like that.”
“Robert,” Clare’s mother said. “Why did you do all the things you’ve done?”
He gazed at her with a look of dawning horror.
“This is very late for Clare,” her mother said. “I should take her in.”
“Of course, of course,” Bridget’s father repeated.
Clare’s mother turned her cheek for him to kiss. He tried to nod at Clare but his eyes couldn’t find a place to rest, as if she were an apparition that kept changing shape around the edges. “Good night,” he said to something just over her head.
Inside, Tilda stood at the counter, fully dressed, her gray hair tucked up in its tidy bun. A pie shell stood beside her, filled with paper-thin slices of apple arranged in a precise spiral that wound round on itself like a staircase at the Vatican. From another sheet of dough, she was cutting delicate petals to create a flaky blossom that would cover the whole face of the pie.
“Oh, Tilda,” Clare’s mother said. “You didn’t need to wait up for us.”
Tilda’s fierce expression made it clear that she hadn’t stayed up to wait on them.
“We found Bridget,” Clare told her. “We took her back home.”
Tilda managed to drop her gaze before relief unmanned her.
Clare’s mother gave Tilda a searching glance. “Did you know Bridget?” she asked.
“She tried to take a fifth of whiskey home in her skirt tonight,” Tilda said. “But I caught her before she left.”
She tossed a puff of flour at the round of dough that would become the top crust. “It’s a terrible thing to lose a child,” she added, and lifted the dough over the sugared fruit.
“But your apples,” Clare’s mother protested. “No one will see them.”
When Tilda glanced up this time, her expression was simply startled, as if she couldn’t understand why a fact so obvious bore mentioning. Then she dropped the crust over the intricate spiral, fluted the edge with her fingertips, and distributed the dough petals into a sunburst that nodded at the end of a delicate stem.
She folded her arms across her wiry frame. “I guess you’ve seen better than this,” she said. “In London or Paris.”
“No,” Clare’s mother said. “I haven’t.”
Clare and her mother climbed the stairs to their rooms in silence. At the landing, her mother kissed the top of Clare’s head. Then she slipped into her own room and Clare went on to hers.
Without turning on a lamp, Clare kicked away her damp, gritty shoes, peeled off her stockings, and traded her ruined dress for a clean nightgown. She slipped the chain of the pearl under her collar.
When she turned to crawl into her bed, her mother’s shadow filled the open door.
Clare shuddered.
Her mother gave a low laugh. “Ah, honey,” she said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
She folded back the covers and Clare got into bed. Her mother sat down beside her, pulled the covers back up, and laid her hand on Clare’s face.
“You’ve grown so much,” she said.
A stubborn knot formed in Clare’s chest, just under Jack’s pearl: the same knot that always formed when anyone made the threat that she could not remain a child. But her mother’s words called something up out of the knot, like one of the vines that grew over the glass house, blind but determined to climb.
Clare gave a single nod.
“I was thinking,” her mother said, “that we should go home. How would you feel about that?”
Clare had held her own all night against the dark and fear, but at the mention of home, her eyes filled with tears.
“But what about,” she began, to test the hope against the biggest obstacle she could imagine. “What about Robert?”
In the shadows, her mother’s brow furrowed. Then she began to laugh. She leaned over and kissed Clare’s cheek, still laughing. “Oh, honey,” she said. “Oh no. No, no. He’s been fraternizing with Amanda Bradburn all season. Didn’t you see her at the party? How she came to sit between us?”
“But you’re always—” Clare said.
Her mother bowed to nuzzle Clare’s cheek. “Dear God,” she said. “No. He talks with me because I’m the least likely woman on this whole coast to fall in bed with him, and his wife knows it. She never gives him trouble about me, and nobody bothers me when I’m with him. Honey,” she said, and the amusement in her voice faded to remorse. “I can’t believe you’ve been worried about this.”
Clare linked her fingers with her mother’s in the dark.
“So do you think you’d like it?” her mother asked. “If we went home?”
Clare felt the pull of the glass house in the yard below, but it had already started to grow faint, the way even the loudest sounds faded down to the whisper of the tracks as you pulled away from them on a train.
“Yes,” she said.