Chapter 14
Lucille lasted a month without household authority before asking to see me.
She arrived without pearls.
Interesting.
I said nothing about it.
She sat across from my desk.
“I hate you a little.”
“Progress.”
Her mouth twitched.
Almost.
Then silence.
Finally:
“Your mother used to say the same thing.”
“What?”
“That consequence didn’t require humiliation.”
My chest tightened.
I had never heard that.
Lucille looked toward the window.
“Isabella believed dignity made people more loyal.”
“She was right.”
“Maybe.”
For Lucille, that word was enormous.
Then she admitted something else.
When she was six, her own mother rejected her First Plate.
Not playfully.
Publicly.
Lucille had baked bread with a servant.
Her mother called it peasant food and threw it into the garden.
I stared.
History again.
“What did you feel?”
Lucille’s eyes hardened automatically.
Then softened.
“Humiliated.”
“Then why Emmett?”
She looked away.
“Because when I was finally accepted the next year, it mattered.”
There.
Pain retroactively justified by relief.
“If the first humiliation had never happened?”
She said nothing.
Exactly.
The acceptance only felt valuable because an adult first made belonging uncertain.
A manufactured problem celebrated when partially removed.
I leaned back.
“You taught yourself the pain was necessary because otherwise someone hurt you for nothing.”
Her eyes filled.
She hated the sentence.
Probably because it sounded true.
“That does not excuse what you did.”
“I know.”
First time she said it.
No but.
No tradition.
No family.
Just I know.
I nodded.
“What happens now?”
She asked like someone unused to not deciding.
“You stay away from Emmett until he asks about you.”
Her face tightened.
“That could be months.”
“Yes.”
“Years.”
“Yes.”
She looked down.
“And if never?”
I answered honestly.
“Then never.”
May you like
She closed her eyes.
For once, my aunt had to live inside uncertainty instead of assigning it to a child.
