Chapter 42

CHAPTER 42

W e had dinner together that night, the three of us, and it was cozy, companionable, right. It was too soon to call it love—I wasn't eighteen anymore, I didn't have rash feelings about men, Malachi had cured me of that—but it just felt right to be together like that, talking about the will, laughing about Reggie and Marley trying to deal with Max (Max calls them "the Weed Brothers," which is kind of harsh and yet so true), teasing Poppy about being a rich woman, me sneaking Maggs mustard chicken when Max wasn't looking until he said, "Stop spoiling her, Rose, that's her third piece," so he'd known all along, and then cleaning up the kitchen together until Poppy went upstairs to do homework (but really probably to call Darius) and Max went upstairs to search Ozzie's back room again.

I stayed downstairs in the quiet of my cleaned-up kitchen and tried to think. Everything was different, everything had changed, except me.

Well, I'd changed a little.

I went and got my bottle portrait out of the shop and put it on the kitchen table and stared at it. It was shaping up (those roses were too big, but Max had looked at it and said, "Needs bigger roses if that's you," and the wings were fabulous), but there was still that blank face .

Which is when Poppy came down to the kitchen with something in her hand and said, "The self-portrait needs this," and dropped a beat-up silverish charm in my hand, dented and tarnished in places but still intact.

It was another heart.

"Because you are all heart," she said.

I almost cried again, very weepy kind of day, and then she kissed me and went back upstairs, and I looked at that beat-up heart and thought, Okay, it has some dents but it's not broken.

My daughter is a genius.

I glued the heart between the rose boobs.

And then I thought about how much more clearly I was seeing my life— That bottle needs eyes— of how I was feeling my life now, about kissing Max, about how I'd defied Serena, talked back to her yesterday when she'd thought I was a nobody, and how I'd told Poppy about how Oz loved her, about how I loved her, and I looked at the blank face on top of the bottle and thought, That mouth does good things, and I sorted through the box of old earrings and charms that Oz had given me over the years and found two silver god's eye charms and then got my paints out and put some great red lips on that blank face and glued the eyes above them.

I may be no good with guns and knives, but I can see clearly now and my mouth is wide and powerful.

Then I went back upstairs to Max to show him what clear-eyed and wide-and-powerful could do.