Page 68 of The Final Cut

“She was never a lesson,” I say. Dumb, but I can’t stand here and lie just to save myself. I’ve been doing it for fifteen years, and it’s exhausting. I’m exhausted. Every bone of me weeps with it.

The hallway goes colder. Isabel’s hand drops from my face.

For three seconds, she only looks at me. Then she smiles.

“Everything is a lesson—if you survive it.”

She turns toward the dining room. I follow because I’m still trained enough to know when a room has teeth and when they’re about to snap.

Dinner waits at the long table beneath a chandelier of blown glass roses. Two places are set. White china. Silver flatware. Crystal water glasses. A low arrangement of red roses cut short enough that nothing blocks Isabel’s view of me.

The staff serve soup first, tomato bisque with basil cream. I used to love this soup when I was little.

Isabel lifts her spoon. “Eat.”

The first taste is warm and smooth and nearly makes me gag. She watches, satisfied.

“Your sister has always had a talent for inspiring disorder,” she says.

I keep my spoon steady. “She was seven.”

“She is twenty-two now.”

“Same as me—I am aware. And still you want her dead.”

Isabel’s spoon pauses above the bowl. The staff vanish from the room without being dismissed. I hear the door close behind them.

“Careful, Delia,” she says.

I lower my spoon, tired of being careful, too. “You told them to kill Cal.”

“I told them to learn where Reva has been taken.”

“And then?”

“Then Calvin Boudreaux will cease being useful.”

The room blurs at the edges.

Cal. The man who took Reva. The man who kept her safe. The man I hated for years because he had given Reva the life I had been forced to imagine from this lonely hell.

He is real now. He is breakable.

Isabel sees that thought move through me. She sees everything she can use.

“You are fond of him?” she asks.

“I don’t really know him.”

“Fond of the idea of him, then.”

I reach for the water glass and take a careful sip. It gives my hand something respectable to do. Isabel sets her spoon down.

“You disappoint me when you forget where love leads.”

My throat tightens.

“To bargaining,” she says. “To softness. To daughters who believe blood exempts them from consequence.”