The Serving Girl // Book 2 in the Rosie Grey series

Chapter Three

For the next few days, I found it impossible to shake the thought of seeing my brother from my mind. As I completed my daily chores, his face would flash in my mind, the face I remembered from when we were children. For years I had tried to block out everything associated with my family and my life before I had ended up inside those factory gates. Isabel would always talk about what she would do when she saw her parents, what she would say. To her, confronting her parents was one of the first things she would do when she was free of the foreman. Of course, that didn't happen.

I had been given the opportunity Isabel had always dreamed off, and I was throwing it away because I was scared. Scared to know what my brother knew, or didn't know, about what Father had done. Scared to confront my own father for what he had put me through for seven years. When I was younger I wanted answers, I wanted to know why he did it but as I got older I realised it would be a pointless venture. Even if I wanted answers, I wasn't sure I would get the truth and I certainly didn't want to know the reason why my own father had abandoned me just a few months after my mother died.

Trying to complete my daily chores with the thought of my own brother hanging over me became harder and harder as the week went on. My mind was so focused on what I was going to do that none of my work was up to its usual standard and it didn't go unnoticed. At every given opportunity, Mrs Ealing criticised my work and explained how it wasn't up to a high enough quality. Whilst I was inclined to agree with her, she had said the same thing since the factory fire and it started to lose all meaning. It wasn't until someone else noticed it that I realised just how much it was plaguing my mind.

"Rosie? You've been making my bed for almost half an hour, are you alright?" Matilda asked, appearing in the doorway. She had been summoned to breakfast whilst I completed one of my first duties for the day.

"I apologise, Miss, I must have gotten distracted. I'll finish it right away," I said. Grabbing one of the pillows, I set about plumping and fluffing it before laying it back down at the end of the bed. As I went to grab another one, I felt Matilda's hand on my shoulder.

"What's going on? You have been acting strangely for the past few days, ever since you came back from Father's office. It hasn't gone unnoticed. Did something happen?"

"I think I saw my brother, at the office." I perched on the edge of Matilda's bed and she quickly followed suit.

"Your brother? Are you sure?"

"Not entirely. He had the same name and looked almost identical to the person I remember, but he was sixteen when I saw him last and people change. I doubt he recognised me."

"Why do you think that?"

"I'm not the same seven-year-old he last saw. Though he said he knew me but couldn't place me. One of his friends thought he could have seen the burn and read about me in the paper, but he didn't think so."

"What are you going to do about him?"

"I don't know. I can either forget I met him or find out if he is who I think it is. For years I've said I never wanted to see my family again, my brothers included. Isabel always used to say that the one thing she wanted to do more than anything was to find out why. I always thought she was mad."

"Maybe she had the right idea."

"Isabel had a lot of ideas about what she wanted to do when she left the factory, this was the only one I thought to be completely insane."

"If she had a list of things to do, why don't you do them?"

I hadn't thought of that. For six months, Suzanna, Lucy and I had tried to come up with a way to honour Isabel, to remember her. We had yet to come up with something that felt right, something true to who she was and what she may have grown into given the opportunity. Completing the list of things she had wanted to do seemed like the right way to honour her memory and still feel connected to her. The only problem being that it meant coming into contact with my family and trying to understand why I had been left with Mr Thompson and the foreman. That was a line I wasn't entirely sure I wanted to cross, but for Isabel, I would have done anything.