44

44

W hen Flora walks through the front door, she is met with stark silence, and a fear ignites in her gut.

Connor left he's already gone he already took her away

Flora knows, just knows in her bones, that the only thing more dangerous for Iris than being with Flora is being without Flora. The thing set out to destroy Iris is also the only thing that can keep her safe. Flora is the only one who understands what is going on, the only one who knows what danger Iris is in. If Connor leaves here with the baby, Flora's mother will find some other way—and Flora won't be there to protect her daughter.

So, no. He cannot take her.

But he hasn't yet. He is here, at the top of the stairs.

"Iris and I leave tomorrow," he says. "Gives me time to pack."

"Connor, please."

He walks down the steps. "What do you want me to say?"

"Please," Flora repeats, her voice impossibly small, "don't take her."

"She's my daughter, too. It's not like I'm kidnapping her." He comes closer to her, and something in his stance softens. "I tried talking, Flo. I tried that. But it seems like you don't know what you need. So I don't know how to help you. You have to figure this out."

She leans all her weight against the railing. "But why do I have to figure it out alone?"

"Don't put that on me," he says, his softness stiffening again. "I have to protect Iris."

"What do you think I'm doing?!"

He explodes back in her direction. "You almost burnt the house down today!"

"I know, but listen, I talked to Belinda—"

"Belinda?" Connor asks, and his expression is tired, so tired.

"She was my mom's friend, that's who called me just now. She's going to come here, to Vermont. She can do a—"

"I don't have a clue what you're talking about." His eyes are cold. "And honestly, I can't do this right now, Flora," Connor says. He rarely calls her by her full name. "I'm exhausted. It's been a crazy long day. Oh, Iris is fine, by the way." Flora tilts her head in confusion. "I had to take her to the doctor, remember?"

Flora had forgotten. How could she have forgotten?

when this is all over I'll make it all right

Connor shakes his head, heavy with disappointment. "I'm going to sleep in the guest room tonight," he says as he heads back up the steps. "I'll handle the night shifts." He doesn't turn to look at her again before disappearing from view down the hallway.

Flora books an outrageously expensive last-minute flight for Belinda—yet another thing she dreads having to explain to Connor—and then calls her dad. He must know who her mother was trying to contact through those séances. And that has to be important. If her mom was seeking connection with someone, maybe she still is. If Flora can understand what her mother wanted in life, it might help her to understand what she is now seeking in death.

But her dad doesn't answer.

The house is quiet, but Flora's inner world is blaring. She's unable to eat, subsisting alone on the energy generated by her anxiety. Her eye twitch has worsened, and a white, pimple-like bump has appeared on the underside of her lid, right at the lash line. Every time she blinks, it aches, like tapping on a bruise. Her eczema burns, and she isn't sure it is even eczema, after all. Four large, dome-like blisters have sprouted on her underarm, see-through and full of viscous liquid. Smaller dots mark a trail from there up to her neck, a map of future blister constellations.

She just needs to make it to tomorrow morning, when Belinda arrives.

She hides herself in a baggy sweatshirt and returns to the boxes her father sent. Flora runs her hands once again over the dresses, willing them to speak to her. She pulls them out one by one, trying to imagine their importance to her mother. Trying to imagine the body that was meant to fill them.

Then, in the pocket of the second-to-largest one, she feels something. A piece of paper. It crinkles under her touch, and she delicately pulls it from the fragile pocket. When she unfolds it, she sees it is the sewing pattern for the dress she's holding.

There are a few handwritten notes on the instructions. Phrases like shoulder line and center back. Some arrows drawn in the margins. These notes mean nothing to Flora except for one particular detail: they are most definitely written in her mother's handwriting. Which means it was her mother who made these dresses. Were they some kind of tribute to her mom's dead sister? The idea makes Flora sad. That her mother put so much time into something, so much care, only to stow it away in a box to never be seen.

She lays the dresses on the ground, side by side, from smallest to largest. None of the others have patterns with them that she can find, but she does another sweep to be sure. And that's when something else catches her eye. Just on the inside hem of the smallest dress: tiny embroidered letters. In the same color as the dress's fabric so it blends in. A name, no larger than a quarter inch high. Flora's heart catches. She lifts the second dress, running her fingers along the hem, and finds the same name again. She lifts every hem of every dress and finds the same hidden name lovingly sewn on each one: Zephyr.

The room spins. Flora doesn't know how to make sense of this. She thinks of Zephie and tries to remember how she came up with that name for her imaginary friend. But of course, she can't remember; she was too young. Did her mother give her the idea? Plant the name in her mind for some reason? It would be strange, surely, to think Jodi would suggest her dead sister's name as the name for Flora's imaginary friend. But then, Flora rarely understood her mother's motivations.

She pulls out her phone and searches under her mother's maiden name. Zephyr Martin death certificate. The name is unique enough that, mercifully, she doesn't have a lot to sift through. She clicks around on various ancestry sites, just shy of coughing over $9.99 to "read more," but none of the results are relevant. Flora frowns.

And then a devastating thought comes to her.

Maybe the person Jodi was trying to reach wasn't her sister at all. Maybe Jodi really did sew these dresses for a child. A child she lost. Could she have lost a baby before Flora?

She looks again at the hand-stitched dresses and pictures her mother choosing a pattern, shopping for threads, and sitting down to assemble a new dress for her dead child. A dress that would never be worn. Maybe she did it every year on what would have been the little girl's birthday. Or perhaps the anniversary of her death. And when she was done, she packed it carefully into this box, away with the others, hiding not only the clothes but also her love for sewing, preserving that hobby only for the little girl she lost.

As a mother now herself, Flora can barely entertain the thought that her parents could have been harboring such heavy grief for so long.

This time, Flora enters her own maiden name in the search bar. Zephyr Graham death certificate.

And there it is. Within a few clicks and a couple of long loading bars, Flora's world comes into focus. Zephyr Graham. Parents: Jodi and Michael Graham. Age at death: six weeks.

The same age Iris is now.

But the most shocking piece of all is Zephyr's birth date.

Flora takes breath in through her teeth and clutches the muscles around her heart, afraid they might seize or spasm. She massages her chest, as if she could massage the very hurt now loosening and running wild within her.

Zephyr had Flora's same birthday. Which means Zephyr was Flora's twin sister.

Flora drives thirty miles per hour over the speed limit. It's almost midnight, and the roads are nearly empty. Her dad's house is normally a three-hour drive, but she bets she can do it in two.

She has taken the family car. Iris's empty car seat is in the back. This is by design: Connor won't be able to leave the house with the baby until Flora returns. He was sleeping when she left, but she knows to expect a scathing call when he realizes that she and the car are gone.

when this is all over I'll make it all right

As she drives, her mind travels great distances to imagine how her twin sister might have died. A sickness: some kind of rare infant disease. An accident: a fall from the changing table that resulted in instant, painless death. An allergy: a routine vaccine or antibiotic that shut down her organs.

Flora is not entirely surprised that her mother kept such a secret from her. Her mother always had a private life, one into which Flora was never welcomed. It was like Jodi had given something up to be a mother, and she was just waiting for the moment to reclaim what she had left behind. As a result, there was a hole in Jodi—one that Flora spent her life trying to guess the shape of in order to fit herself into it. She never succeeded, of course.

No, her mother having a secret is not a shock. In fact, her mother probably had many more. But her father is another thing entirely. The idea that he lied to Flora for her entire life is enough to slice the foundation out from under her world. It's enough to brew a storm of rage within her, and it's that anger that presses her foot even harder onto the gas pedal now, nudging the needle of the speedometer up and up and up.

When she arrives, she parks haphazardly in the driveway, barely turning off the car before running toward the front door, setting off a handful of motion-detector lights in the process. The perimeter of her father's house lights up to announce her arrival. A neighbor's dog barks at the sudden middle-of-the-night commotion.

Flora bangs the door with both fists, and it is only now she realizes she is crying. The banging becomes cathartic, echoing down the street, under doorframes, through open windows. A light flicks on from the upper floor of her dad's house. Then another near the staircase. She maps his movements with the flow of electricity.

When the door finally opens, Flora is still leaning her weight against it, banging with a force she didn't know she had, and she loses her balance and falls into the house. Her father's face is a portrait of confusion and worry. He reaches a hand toward her, but she smacks it away. Her tears are fierce and taste sour in her mouth.

"I know," she says. "I know. " Then, wielding the words like a sharp knife, she says, "About Zephyr."

He backs up as if he has been shot in the chest, and sits on the bottom of the nearby staircase. He leans forward, digging his elbows into his knees and rubbing his eyes with fervor. His voice is hollow.

"I figured this was coming. When I sent those boxes… maybe I wanted you to know."

"Tell me," Flora says. She's not begging. She's demanding. "Tell me what happened."

Her father looks up—a different man entirely, a face she has never seen—and nods.