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BACK AT THE MANOR, Caroline tries to lock herself in solitude. (Besides the fact that her bedroom door lacks a lock, she knows this won't work for other reasons; i.e., the fact that the girls lack personal boundaries).
Queen's weather is hellish that night, with rain dropping in large increments and flooding the streets. Caroline watches the chaos through her window; the water ebbs and flows across the sidewalks, washing away debris.
She's so caught up in the crashing of the rising waters that she doesn't register the hopeless irritation that swells within her when Lilac steps through her door without invitation.
"You're making this a habit," Caroline says without looking up. "Please don't."
"How are you?"
Lilac's using a tone of voice Caroline knows all too well—a tone that's seen the darkness in someone who emits light, and is trying not to say the wrong thing to hurt them. Caroline's foster parents used to use that same tone of voice when the Kingston girls first moved in with them.
"I'm fine."
Lilac comes to sit on the window seat beside Caroline. She watches the raindrops race down the pane and Caroline can tell because she's got the same smitten expression on her face as Madeline, whom practices the same sport. Kids and racing raindrops—Caroline will never understand the correlation.
"I hope everyone stays safe," says Lilac after a while. "I heard it's a tropical storm."
Caroline looks from the window to her visitor. There's probably a desolate chagrin in her eyes, one that prods at Lilac's heart, saying, 'why are you doing this?'; Lilac stammers and looks away, smiling sheepishly as she says, "Sasha sent me. She wanted me to give you this—says writing keeps the demons at bay, or something like that."
She hands over a pristine leather journal with a set of gilded initials encrypted in the bottom left-hand corner. S.E.G. Caroline turns it over in her hands once, twice, three times, trying to get a feel of something so massive. Not in size—but in gratitude.
Caroline smiles despite the mounting reasons not to.
It's a moment before Lilac says it—the string of words that turn the knife in Caroline's chest. But she does. Say them, that is. She pushes them out from her pink glossed lips like she's afraid that if she doesn't say them now, they'll die there in her throat.
"Your family—how were they before?"
"Before what?"
"Before you died."
Caroline barely thinks before saying, "They weren't. We haven't been a family since I was ten."
"Why?"
"That man you saw today—that's not my real father. He's just a foster parent. My sister and I.... We've been through a lot in the last few years."
