Chapter 3 Seraphine's Girl

I did not sleep that night. I sat at my desk with the lamp off and the laptop open, watching the silver letters fade from the screen one by one, as if the page had never said anything at all. When I finally dared to touch the keyboard, a single box appeared, small and plain.

Where do you belong?

There was no time limit and no other question. I stared at the blinking cursor for what felt like an hour. I thought about the tiles, the lasagna, the empty envelope in my drawer. I thought about a woman I had never met, writing in a hurry, her pen torn from her hand. My fingers trembled, and then I typed the only honest answer I had. I don't know. I want to find out. I pressed enter. The screen went dark. For two days nothing happened. I scrubbed floors, folded laundry, and kept my face blank while Mom talked about Brielle's upcoming dance and Dad grumbled about the news. I started to believe I had imagined the whole thing, that the locket had been a trick of tired eyes and a lonely mind.

Then, on the third morning, a single email arrived. No sender. No subject line. Only four lines of text. Congratulations, Aurelia. You have been awarded the Duskmere scholarship. A ticket will be waiting for you at the Harrow Street bus station, Platform Nine. You depart tomorrow at dusk. Bring nothing you cannot carry. Tell no one who cannot be trusted. We look forward to meeting you. I read it three times, then closed the laptop so quickly it nearly slammed. Tell no one who cannot be trusted. That left almost everyone. But I couldn't leave without a word. Some stubborn part of me needed to hear it from their own mouths, the thing I had been circling for eighteen years. If I walked out silently, I would spend the rest of my life wondering whether they would have told me the truth if I had only asked.

So that evening, over dinner, I put down my fork. "I need to ask you something," I said. Mom's smile faltered. Dad looked up from his plate. Brielle kept scrolling on her phone, though I noticed her thumb had stopped moving. I pulled the empty locket from my pocket and set it on the table between the mashed potatoes and the salad bowl. Nobody spoke.

The air in the kitchen changed. I felt it, a drop in the warmth, the way a room goes cold when a window has opened somewhere. "Where did I come from?" I asked. Mom's face drained of color. She looked at Dad. Dad looked at the locket. For a long time the only sound was the ticking of the clock above the stove.  "Mara," Dad began, and then stopped. He rubbed his jaw. When he spoke again, his voice had lost its usual flatness. "We were going to tell you. We just never found the right time." "Found the right time for what?" "Greg," Mom whispered. "She's eighteen, Diane. She deserves to know." Dad exhaled slowly. "We didn't have you, Mara. Not in the way you think." My ears rang. "It was a stormy night," he went on. "Nineteen years ago, almost to the day. We heard a knock, or something like a knock, and when I opened the door there was nobody there. Only a basket on the porch, soaked through, and a baby wrapped in a gray blanket. You weren't crying. You were just looking up at us." "With those eyes," Mom said, so softly I almost missed it. I felt the floor tilt. "There was no note?" "Nothing," Dad said. "Only the necklace on your neck. We called the police the next morning, but no one ever came forward, and no family ever claimed you. After a while, Diane said it was a sign."

"A sign," Mom echoed. Her hands twisted the napkin in her lap. "We had been trying for so long, and then we had Brielle, and then..." Her voice cracked. "We took you in because we didn't know what else to do." We didn't know what else to do. I looked at the two people who had raised me, at the woman who had flinched at my bare neck and the man who had given me a twenty-dollar bill, and I understood something I had never let myself understand.

They had never been cruel on purpose. They had simply never loved me. I was a stranger's child who had arrived on their doorstep, and they had fed me and clothed me and never once let me forget I was a guest. Tears stung my eyes, hot and sudden. I hated that they came.

"Why didn't you tell me?" My voice shook. "You let me think there was something wrong with me. Every day, I thought there was something wrong." "There was nothing wrong," Mom said weakly. "Then why did you never treat me like I was yours?" She didn't answer. She only stared at the table, and the silence told me everything. "Mara," Dad said, "please don't do anything rash. We can still..." "I'm leaving," I said. The words came out calm, which surprised me. I stood, picked up the locket, and closed it in my hand. "Where?" Brielle asked. It was the first time she had spoken, and for once there was no mockery in her voice. Only something small and uncertain.  "A school," I said. "Far away. I got a scholarship." "You can't just..." Mom began. "I'm eighteen," I said, and for the first time in my life I did not lower my eyes. "You said so yourselves." I walked upstairs while three pairs of eyes followed me, and nobody called me back. Packing took ten minutes. Bring nothing you cannot carry. I had never owned much, and I owned even less once I looked at it honestly. Three shirts, two pairs of jeans, a worn sweater, a toothbrush, the empty envelope from my sixteenth birthday, and the letter folded inside my shoe. The locket I hung around my neck again on a thread of black string, because the chain had snapped and I wasn't ready to let it go.

I was zipping the bag when someone knocked. Brielle stood in the doorway in her pajamas, her arms wrapped around herself. She looked younger without her friends around, without the careful makeup. "Is it real?" she asked. "The school?" "I think so." "Are you coming back?" I hesitated. "I don't know." She nodded slowly, her eyes dropping to the floor. "For what it's worth," she said, "I'm sorry. About what I said in the kitchen. I didn't know you could hear." I almost laughed. I can always hear. "It's fine." "It isn't." She bit her lip. "I always thought you were... like, better than us. Like you didn't need us. I think that made it easier not to try." Before I could answer, she turned and walked away, and I stood in the doorway holding my bag, feeling something I couldn't name settle quietly in my chest. The Harrow Street bus station was nearly empty at dusk.

Fluorescent lights buzzed over rows of cracked plastic seats, and a single vending machine glowed in the corner. Platform Nine sat at the far end, under a flickering sign, where a narrow black bus idled with its engine running and its windows dark. There was no driver that I could see. Only a ticket taped to the door, my name written across it in silver ink. Aurelia. I peeled it off, my hands cold, and drew a breath. This is it. "You have her eyes." I spun around. An old woman stood a few feet behind me, though I hadn't heard her approach. She was small and wrapped in a gray shawl, her white hair pinned beneath a faded scarf, her face lined like old paper. She was staring at me as though I were something she had been looking for all her life. "Excuse me?" I whispered. She stepped closer. Her voice dropped so low I would have missed it if I hadn't been born with ears like mine. "Seraphine's girl," she breathed. "You've come home at last." Then a gust of wind swept down the platform, scattering the dead leaves, and when I blinked she was gone. Against my chest, the locket burned hot as a coal.