“Stop it.”
“You should have seen the way he paced those halls, looking for you. The way he stood at the windows, watching for you. The way he sat near the phone for hours on end. But you never even called.”
A hot coal simmered within her. She wanted to shove him. She wanted to sink to the floor and cry.
“Why call him when he doesn’t even know who I am!” she shouted. “He doesn’t remember me! Last night, when I accidently woke him up, he was terrified. Ofme.His own granddaughter.” Her hands balled into trembling fists. “He thought I was a stranger coming to hurt him.”
The tension in the room snapped like a too-tight guitar string. Hawthorne stepped back as hot tears tracked down Emeline’s cheeks. She spun away, walking out of the kitchen, palming her face in swift strokes.
“Pa asked me to put him in that care home,” she whispered. “It was his decision.”
It was true and not true. Pa had asked—for her sake. He wanted his granddaughter to be free of the burden of him.
“Emeline …”
She couldn’t stay here, in his house, knowing that Hawthorne thought her a selfish, coldhearted girl—and wasn’t she exactly that? Wasn’t that why she felt so guilty?
“Emeline, wait.”
Moving for the door, she said, “I’ll let myself out.”
Slamming it behind her, she escaped into the night.
SEVENTEEN
THE NEXT MORNING, ASshe awaited her lesson beneath the crystal dome, Emeline paced the room, her nerves flickering. She hadn’t slept at all last night. She kept going over their argument in her mind.
She’d drank too much. Gotten too bold. She never should have pressed him.
Her face heated as she remembered the words he’d thrown in her face.
I took him because he begged me to.
The shame of it scorched her. Pa, forced to tithe himself because she’d abandoned him in that place. Because being imprisoned in the Wood King’s palace was better than being alone.
Sorrow welled like a rising tide. Emeline stopped pacing to press her hands to her face.
Her phone buzzed, jolting her back to the present.
She pulled it swiftly out, thinking maybe,miraculously,a text had come in. That she had stepped into some kind of magical hot spot and Joel was trying to get through to her, worried to death and wanting to know where she was.
When she glanced at the cracked screen, her heart sank.
It was only an automatic notification from Elegy, her music app.
She glanced to the upper corner of the screen. There were still no bars. No way to contact Joel. And her battery was almost completely dead.
At the sight of the background image, Emeline gripped the screen hard, staring. An old photo of her and Pa stared back. He sat in the driver’s seat of a tractor and the trailer behind him was piled high with sun-bleached baskets of grapes, green and glistening. A five-year-old Emeline sat on his lap, turning towards him. Her small tanned hands were cupped to his ear while Pa grinned at whatever secret she was telling him.
Emeline swallowed down the lump in her throat.
How can so much change in so little time?
Marring the image was the notification from Elegy. It read:Chloe Demarche uploaded a new file to SHARED FOLDER 3 days ago.
She’d ignored the notification when it first came in. But since she was trapped here, waiting for her lesson to start, Emeline opened the app—which made its files accessible offline—and started to scroll.
All of the music files were written by Chloe, her songwriter.
