Gathering the crinoline of my skirt, I lowered myself to the curb beside Jamison, who grew paler by the second. “What do you remember?”
“I don’t know. My mother, frightened . . .” He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
Sitting this close, it was hard not to offer some sort of comfort as he struggled with the stream of emotions flooding his face. He might not remember his family, but he loved them with his whole heart, just like he did Roger. And Trysta. Brave, to love like that, when he knew all too well how quickly loved ones could be snatched away.
“I brought you here because Nana’s watching the children while my cousin who runs the orphanage is out,” I said. “If there are any records . . .”
He pushed back damp tendrils of dark hair, the ends falling into his bright eyes. “Okay.”
The chain-link gate creaked as we opened it. Even though the orphanage was sorely in need of a handyman, Jamison was awestruck, each step unhurried.
Nana answered the door after the first knock. She slid a hand up the doorjamb, the fabric of her lace-and-satin nightgown riding to her thighs. At least she’d put on a brassiere—or two, judging by the unusually high cleavage proudly displayed by her plunging neckline.
She batted her lashes at Jamison. “I wasn’t expecting company.”
And yet she was in a full face of makeup. I kissed her on the cheek as I pushed past her. “I told you this morning.”
“Did you? It must have slipped my mind.”
White-faced, Jamison accepted Nana’s invitation to sit on the couch. As Nana shut the door, he fidgeted with a loose tufting button.
“Where are the children?” I asked.
She waved a dismissive hand. “Jumping in puddles somewhere. Once the rain stopped, I couldn’t keep them inside.”
Five Revelle children lived in the orphanage. Until my birthday last month, I should have been among them. Nana had certainly threatened it many times, usually after she caught Millie and me sneaking out through our window. Colette always begged us not to disobey Nana. We were so afraid of being separated, even by a few blocks.
I walked toward the bucket catching raindrops near the fireplace. “Leaky roof?”
“Nothing new. Now, where’s this photograph my granddaughter speaks of?”
“Right here, ma’am.” Jamison removed it from a worn leather wallet as if it were as delicate as a rose petal. “Their last name is Port.”
Nana held it with equal reverence, carefully balancing it in her palm as she slipped on her glasses. She squinted at the photograph—and froze.
All the blood rushed from her face.
Jamison and I reached her at the same time, easing her to a sitting position on the couch.
“What is it?” Hope clung to each of his words.
Nana pinned her smile with the practice of someone who’d spent years in the spotlight. “Oh, it was nothing, darling; I stood too quickly when I answered the door.”
Liar.
“Your mother was beautiful. And your father . . .” She smiled knowingly at Jamison. “I see where you get your looks.”
Jamison still held his breath. “So you don’t recognize them?”
“Can’t say that I do.” She handed him the photo. “I wish I could be more helpful.”
I watched her carefully as she adjusted her many rings. She knew something.
“Jamison’s an orphan,” I said, “And he recognizes this orphanage. He knew there was a tire swing out back.”
Only a Revelle could have seen the brief flash of remorse across Nana’s face. “I’ll dig around for any old records. Would that help?”
“Thank you. You have no idea how much this means to me.” He kissed the hand she offered. “If you’d like, I can take a look at that leak.”
“Don’t bother. Every time we fix it, the damn squirrels just find a new place to rip up the shingles.”
“Still, I’ll give it a try. It’s the least I can do.”
“That would be so very kind.” Her smile was a genuine thing, but it was tinged with sadness. I was tempted to tap into my other magic, to see if I could piece together what she was hiding, but I knew I wouldn’t need to—Nana was always forthcoming with me.
Jamison lingered by the door, but I lifted a hand. “I’ll catch up with you in a minute.”
With a hopeful smile that made my chest squeeze a little too much, he headed outside.
Nana rubbed the hand he kissed. “Sweet boy, that one.”
“Mm-hmm.” We watched him take the porch steps two at a time.
“And a looker, too.”
I examined a loose brick on the mantel. “I hadn’t noticed.”
“Sure. And I didn’t have cake for breakfast.” Nana sat back on the couch, closing tired eyes as she sank into the worn cushion. “If you care about that boy at all, wait a few days and tell him I found no records. Or tell him his parents loved him very much but died on the mainland.”
“Who are they?” I leaned closer. “And why won’t you tell him?”
“Because sometimes the past needs to stay buried.” She looked away, eyes watering.
I sat beside her and waited until she looked at me. “He’s Roger’s best friend, Nana. He’s been looking for answers for a long time. Surely he has a right to know the truth, whatever it is.”
“Is it really a good idea for you to be walking around with a handsome boy, so close to the election?” She arched a painted brow. “Dewey doesn’t seem like the sharing type.”
“Jamison is a friend.” But that wasn’t exactly true, not when I knew the taste of his lips, the softness of his kiss. “He’s more like Roger’s friend. And besides, Revelles are never exclusive to their customers.” It was discouraged, in fact, after what had happened to Roger.
“But Dewey’s not a customer, is he? Not unless he gives you a jewel.”
There it was again: what separated me from the rest of the family. They cozied up to customers for jewels; I cozied up to Dewey for booze—and for that gorgeous winter theater.
I kissed my grandmother on the cheek. “I’ll see you tonight at the show?”
“As if I had anywhere else to be.” She settled back on the couch, still a bit pale. That photograph had truly unsettled her.
She’d do the right thing. In a day or two, I’d ask her about it again.
From the roof, Jamison stopped hammering once I appeared on the porch. “There’s a ladder in the back. Just be careful, it’s—”
In a single jump, I hopped atop the railing, then leaped onto the roof.
“Slippery,” he finished.
“Perhaps for you.” I lowered myself atop the wet tiles. “Why does it smell like dinner?”
“I tied some garlic from the back garden to the eaves. Squirrels hate garlic.”
“Just like vampires.” I rubbed my finger along a clove.
He froze. “Don’t tell me vampires are real.”
“Of course not. But Roger used to give us nightmares with stories of a Chronos Dracula who wanted to suck our magical blood.” How Roger loved to make us squirm. Every time we got a paper cut, he’d tease us about hiding it, or else we’d be hunted down for shadow magic. “Need a hand?”
“Just finished.” He clapped the top of the toolbox. “I found this next to the tire swing.”
“You really have been here.”
“Incredible, isn’t it?” He offered an arm. “Should we go? I don’t want anyone to panic that their star is missing.”
“Trust me, Roger and Trysta are more likely to notice you being gone. You’re closer to them than I am to anyone.”
The foolish words slipped from my mouth, and Jamison turned to look at me, surprise etched across his features. If only I could erase those words. Not that they weren’t true—they were painfully, brutally true—but I sounded ridiculous. Poor Luxe Revelle, complaining to an orphan about not feeling close enough with her fifty-three first cousins, fourteen aunts and uncles, grandmother, countless second cousins, once-removed cousins, and stepcousins.
Those blue eyes pinned me in place. “What about Colette and Millie?”
“I thought we were talking about you, for once,” I said lightly. “You’re very good at getting me to talk about myself.” Maybe that was his trick to winning over my family.
“And you’re very good at getting people not to ask.”
There was a rare curiosity in his questions. He was clever enough not to badger me for answers. Not telling felt like letting him down, somehow.
“I love my cousins like sisters, but we’re all busy these days.”
“You miss them.”
I forced a laugh. “We’ve shared a bedroom for seven years.” It had been my mother’s room, but Millie and Colette didn’t want to share with their fathers, and we couldn’t stand being apart.
“And yet you miss them,” he repeated, this time softer.
The pressure to speak was a quiet ache in my chest. I couldn’t confide in anyone about it. Not Nana, who couldn’t bear to face that we’d grown apart. And certainly not Uncle Wolffe. But there were no words to describe what had gone wrong, not without talking about my magic. “We don’t eat together anymore.”
As if that alone could explain the chasm between us.
“What do you mean?”
I fiddled with a wet leaf on the roof. “After our mothers died, we became obsessed with sitting at a certain mess hall table. It was close to the kitchen, but also far from the aunts and uncles, which made us very adult. I don’t know why I’m talking about this. It’s silly.”
He leaned back, resting against his hands. “There is nothing silly about the superiority of some mess hall tables to others. Trust me, I understand.”
His orphanage must have had communal dining, too. “Those first few months without our mothers, we schemed endlessly about how to get to that table before Roger and the boys did. I know how ridiculous it sounds, to have cared about something like seating arrangements when our mothers had just died. But we were obsessed.”
“You were eleven, right?”
I managed a nod.
“What changed with your cousins?”
“How are you so sure something changed?”
He hesitated. “When you’re with them, you have a guarded smile. You’re glad to be with them, and you care about them, but . . . you’re holding back.”
I gave him a look. “You can tell all that from a smile?”
“I could be wrong,” he admitted. “But I’m particularly sensitive to your smiles.”
My heart skipped a beat. “Oh?”
“At St. Douglas’s, some friars had tempers.” He looked away. “I learned to read faces.”
Bright eyes, dimpled smile . . . Jamison had masks of his own. “Did they hurt you?”
He chuckled. “It’s fine. They gave me drinking stories for years to come.”
I waited until he looked at me again. “Did they hurt you?”
Silence. I didn’t need my secondary magic to see how deep those scars ran. What sort of religious men struck children, let alone one as inquisitive and kind as Jamison must have been?
“Let’s just say,” he finally said, “my orphanage was nothing like this one.” With a quick shake of his head, he forced a smile. “Anyway, what was I saying?”
He didn’t like to feel pitied. I leaned closer, lifting my brows in challenge. “I believe you were comparing my smile to a mean old priest’s.”
His laughter lit his face. Despite my rain-soaked dress, my entire body warmed at the deep, throaty sound. Nana was right. This felt a bit like playing with fire.
“Well, it’s not my fault you have a dozen fake smiles,” he teased.
“Fake smiles?” The warm feeling slipped away.
“Mm-hmm.” He twisted his lips and batted his lashes. “This is your stage smile, see?”
He looked so ridiculous, I couldn’t help but laugh. “I’d better not look like that onstage.”
“Of course it’s terrible when I do it, but when you do it, the tourists fall to their knees.”
I rolled my eyes. “Okay, so I have a stage smile. That’s not unusual.”
He ticked off on his fingers. “You have a particular smile around Roger. That one’s real, but it’s still hesitant. An entirely different one when Trys is around. Very forced. Let me see . . . there’s the one when you’re being polite, another when you’re clearly tired but trying to look awake. When you’re charming Dewey, of course.”
I almost fell off the roof. “Excuse me?”
He didn’t seem as though he was trying to upset me. But he’d just casually mentioned the secret that could ruin everything. “You have a specific smile for when you’re charming Dewey.”
“What makes you think I’m charming him?”
There was that scrunch of his brows again—his concentration face. “You sometimes look like you’re focusing really hard when you’re around him. Like it hurts.”
“I’m not in pain. I just . . . What makes you think I’m doing that?” If Jamison could tell, then anyone could tell.
He brushed his pointer finger on one side of my mouth. Then the other. “Your muscles here tighten when you’re in pain. I saw it after your accident, too. The, ah, first time we met.”
The heat of his fingers lingered on my lips, stealing away whatever point I was about to make. That gentle touch—it was the same as it’d been that first night, when my mouth had captured his, surprise freezing him for a blissful moment.
I stood, turning my back on him. “I get migraines. That’s all.”
“The point is, something changed between you and your cousins.”
That was an understatement. “We all wanted to be the star. I was never even in the running until . . . well, until I was, I suppose.”
“So they’re jealous?”
Sometimes I pretended it was as simple as jealousy. But Colette wasn’t jealous; she was bursting with righteous indignation. Through sheer talent and determination, she’d earned the right to be the star, but I’d robbed her of it. No one had even given her a plausible explanation.
No, it wasn’t jealousy that had come between us. It was my secrets. My magic.
I scooted down the roof, toward the ladder in the back. “Everything changed. For instance, Uncle Wolffe wanted me to eat double portions so I didn’t look meek to our audience. I couldn’t stuff my face in front of them, especially not that winter. So I started eating alone.”
How I missed those shared meals, the absurdly complex plans we created to slip away unnoticed and save our favorite table. In a world without our mothers, that was everything.
“Can you still have fun with them?”
“Fun?”
“Surely there’s no rule against the star having fun.”
There was an accusation buried there. “I have fun.”
He leaned over the top of the ladder, a challenge sparking in those bright eyes. “I’ve never seen your ‘fun’ smile.”
“I have many ‘fun’ smiles! You just don’t see them because you haven’t come to a show since . . .”
His cheeks flushed. Ducking his head, he climbed down the ladder. “Roger and Trys didn’t think it was wise. With a concussion, I mean.”
He was a terrible liar. His friends didn’t want a repeat of his attempts to leap over the balcony. “I have plenty of fun at the shows,” I called down to him. “Saturday, for instance, is a big one. It’s Millie’s birthday, and it’s going to be a lot of fun.”
“Well, I guess I’ll have to see for myself.”
“I suppose you will. Being that you’ve appointed yourself the Smile Police.”
He laughed as he stepped off the last rung. “Are you going to use the ladder or do one of those fancy Revelle jumps?”
I stood at the edge of the roof. “Is this some sort of test?”
“It’s just a question.” He slid his hands into his back pockets. “Go ahead. Have fun.”
How ridiculous. Fun wasn’t jumping off the roof while Nana was watching our every move from the kitchen. Fun was a sold-out election night show at our brand-new winter theater. Fifteen days away.
I climbed down the ladder like the responsible person I needed to be, one who didn’t slip and break her neck to make a point.
I had fun, didn’t I?
It didn’t matter. As the star, my job was to ensure everyone else was safe and cared for, so they’d have fun.
With a family of time travelers gunning for us, fun was not a priority.
