I watched her fingers begin working the fabric between them. It seemed like something a real girl would do.
“If I start seeing things, they’ll send me away,” I told her. “I’ll never find out what happened here.”
She said nothing, but I saw her fingers freeze.
“Do you have any idea what it’s like, not knowing what’s real?” I felt my chin quivering. The tears were now falling freely. “It feels like you’re trapped in a place where nothing means anything. I came here to escape, and I won’t let you stop me.”
I couldn’t see her anymore, but I knew she was there.
“Go away,” I sobbed. “Please. I have too much to do.”
Blind from tears, I turned my back to the girl in the doorway, crawled into bed, and cried until I fell asleep.
I woke to the sound of someone opening the door. The room was flooded with sun, and the combination of bright light and noise made my head throb.
“What are you doing in here?” I demanded as Miriam made her way to my bedside.
By the time the last word left my lips, I was fully awake.
“Was my bedroom door open just now?”
“No. I’m sorry. I knocked, but you didn’t answer.” Miriam waited for a response, but I was struggling to make sense of what I recalled of the previous night. I was sure I’d fallen asleep with the door wide open, but now it seemed that I hadn’t. Which meant that, as vivid as she’d seemed to me, the ghostly girl in the doorway must have been just a dream.
“Bram?”
“What time is it?” I asked, pushing the girl out of my mind. There was no point in questioning my mental health. I had no choice but to trust myself. I was the only person on earth I could truly depend on.
“Seven-thirty. I wouldn’t have bothered you so early—I know you had a rough night—but you have a guest downstairs.”
“How can I have a guest? I don’t have any friends,” I groused.
“Apparently you have a friend you didn’t know about. She brought you breakfast. I let her in and sent her down to the kitchen.”
I sat up in bed. “It’s Maisie, isn’t it?”
“How did you know?” Miriam asked.
“Wild guess.” After she’d seen me with Nolan the previous day, I wasn’t surprised that she’d hunted me down. If I was lucky, she’d brought more than breakfast. I was hoping Maisie had beans to spill.
I got dressed and hurried down to the kitchen. Maisie was wearing her black fur coat again, and the lipstick she’d chosen was too red for daytime. But somehow the effect seemed sweet rather than sexy—like an eight-year-old girl playing dress-up.
“Hey there!” she said, holding up a brown bag with a grease-stained bottom. “I brought croissants!”
I stood and stared at her, not quite sure if she might be an impostor. The chipper attitude was definitely phony. I preferred doom-and-gloom Maisie.
“Do you usually make croissant deliveries at the crack of dawn?”
“Sorry!” She clearly wasn’t. “I just wanted to catch you before you went out.”
“Out? This is Louth. Where would I go?” As far as I knew, I didn’t have any social plans for the next few months.
Maisie smiled in response, and we experienced one of those weird psychic moments that girls sometimes share. I suddenly knew exactly why she was in my kitchen at seven-thirty in the morning. She wanted to catch me before I set out to find Nolan. She shook the bag of croissants she was carrying. “These go great with coffee. Mind if I make us some?”
Where were my manners? “Knock yourself out,” I told her.
“Fabulous.” She filled the kettle and lit the stove before she stripped off her coat and tossed it over the back of a chair. The body-hugging black jumpsuit she wore underneath would have turned heads down in town. I had a hunch she knew that better than anyone else. Maisie’s wardrobe was a language all its own. Each outfit seemed chosen to send a message.
She pulled two plates from the cupboard and placed a croissant on each. The perfectly browned crescents were still warm to the touch.
“Wait—did you make these?” I marveled.
“I’m sure I don’t look like the kind of girl who knows her way around an oven,” she said. “But I’ve got baking in my blood. There have been plenty of cooks in my family. A few of them even worked here at the manor.” Maisie’s eyes roamed the room. “You know, back in the day, a girl like me would spend her whole day slaving away in an underground kitchen. Only rich girls like you got to see the sun.”
Rich girls like you. It wasn’t exactly something I’d expected to hear from someone wearing what I would have bet was a two-thousand-dollar jumpsuit. I was pissed she’d assigned a stereotype to me, and I wondered how she would feel if I did the same to her. Had the girl in front of me been anyone else, I might have asked. Instead I chose to ignore the insult.
“So, you really grew up here in Louth?”
“Yep. My mom grew up here, too,” she said as she rooted through the fridge in search of jam. She seemed perfectly at home in the manor’s kitchen.
I found it hard to believe Maisie was related to anyone from Louth. “And your dad?”
She pulled her head out of the fridge. “I don’t have a dad,” she told me.
“Me either,” I said.
Maisie stood there with her hand on the fridge handle, and another long look passed between us. We both knew just how much was being left unsaid. I let it go for the moment. There were a few other subjects I was eager to get to right away.
“What did you come here to talk about, Maisie?” I asked her. “How much you hate Nolan?”
I saw her smirk before she stuck her head back into the fridge. “ ‘Hate’ is such a strong word, don’t you think?”
“Despise? Loathe? Fantasize about chopping into itty-bitty pieces?”
She was laughing when she turned around and set a jar of jam down on the table. I think she enjoyed the picture I’d drawn. “Okay, fine. I hate him.”
“Why?” I smeared jam onto a piece of croissant and popped it into my mouth. It was a hundred times better than the one I’d bought at the bakery. “He seems relatively inoffensive for a guy our age.”
“You don’t know the Turners like I do,” Maisie said. “They’re womanizing assholes. Gavin’s been married three times, and the last wife left him after she caught him messing with an intern. They think being rich gives them the right to treat women any way they want.”