carpet, holes in some walls, scabrous kitchen cabinets, an ancient roof, and faulty electrical. But it was structurally sound, and Rule had negotiated a really low price.
It was also big. Really big. Two stories plus a partly finished attic and a full basement. Lily didn’t trust the basement—what Californian wants to be underground when the earth starts to rock and roll?—but it was being reinforced. Originally, the ground floor had held a large living room, small dining room, and huge kitchen; a study with hideous wallpaper, a fireplace, and beautiful built-in bookshelves; and a bedroom intended as the master. The second floor was all bedrooms—six of them—plus the house’s only bathroom.
What kind of nutcase built a house with seven bedrooms and
That was being changed, as was so much else. Not on the second floor, not yet, because they were living there while the first floor was gutted and rebuilt.
The new roof, windows, and steel beams were in place. One of the walls that had come down was load bearing, which had made Lily nervous, but the architect assured her that steel beams would do the trick. The kitchen was maybe half-done, and they’d just finished framing in the new walls. Lots of electrical and plumbing still to do before they could put up drywall, but the study would end up as the dining room. The original dining room, which adjoined the master bedroom, was slated to become a luxurious master bath plus a walk-in closet.
The floor was finished, at least—and hadn’t that been a hassle, deciding what to use! Lily had leaned toward bamboo. Rule had been torn between the beauty of a dark-stained hardwood and the practicality of carpet, which offered better traction to a wolf’s paws. In the end, they’d gone with stained and polished concrete. It looked great, was highly customizable, and wouldn’t get scratched up by anyone’s claws.
Lily’s brain got constipated when she thought about what all this was costing, so she tried not to. She might have signed the mortgage papers along with Rule, but he was covering the renovations, so she didn’t have to contemplate it. If he said he could afford it, he ought to know. She ought to trust him. She did, but it was a godawful amount of money, especially when added to the cost of their wedding . . . which was supposed to happen in two weeks and five days.
“What is it?” Rule asked.
“I . . . the wedding. Should we postpone it?”
Rule went still. “Do you want to?”
“I don’t know. It seems like we should, but . . . Mother won’t be able to . . . and I don’t know who’s doing what. I don’t even have the final guest list.”
“I have all that information. I can do what needs doing, but if it hurts too much to hold the ceremony with your mother’s situation so uncertain, we will postpone it. Is that what you want?”
“I think I should want it, but I don’t. Only there’s the trip, too. Our honeymoon trip. How late can we wait to cancel our reservations? And the plane tickets. Did we get the refundable—”
“It doesn’t matter. We can decide about that later.”
“Okay.” She drew a shaky breath. “Do you think Mother will want to be flower girl instead of mother of the bride?”
“Ah,
She rested her hands on his chest, keeping an inch of space between them. “Don’t do this. If you do this, I’m going to—”
“Relax?” He stroked her hair. “Behave in an un-cop-like manner? Fall asleep?”
Fall apart, more like. Exhaustion was melting outward from her bones to her muscles to her brain, taking down what few defenses she still had. “I don’t want to stop doing the job. Without the job I’m just a daughter. Nothing good is happening with me-the-daughter. My father’s very angry.”
“Yes, he called me.”
“Did he yell?”
“Not precisely. Did he yell at you?”
“He said he would forgive me eventually, but for now he didn’t want to see or speak to me. Then he hung up.”
Rule kept petting her. He didn’t say anything.
“I’ve never . . . in all my life he’s never . . . I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t know what to do.”
“He’s a good man. He’s hurting and scared and angry. He thinks you made the wrong decision, but he’s a good man. He loves you.”
She couldn’t have hurt him so much if he didn’t. “There’s no one to hold him the way you’re holding me. He’s got Susan, I guess, and Beth when she gets here, but he’ll want to be strong for them instead of letting them be strong for him. And he’s too angry at Grandmother to let her help. He said she’d gone too far this time. What did he tell you?”
“It was a difficult conversation. I had to tell him that Julia wishes to stay with you and me when she leaves Sam’s lair.”
“When she . . . God. I hadn’t thought about that. I hadn’t thought of it at all. I just assumed she’d go home, but she doesn’t know it’s her home, does she? But that’s what she should do. As hard as it will be on my father to have her there when she doesn’t remember him, it would be worse if she wasn’t there.”
“Hmm.”
“What does that mean?”
“Julia says she won’t live with Edward and we can’t make her. She understands that we consider him her husband. That frightens and angers her.”
“But he’s not going to do anything that . . . mentally she’s a kid! He knows that. He would never take advantage of a twelve-year-old girl.”
He rubbed his cheek along her hair. “What did you want when you were twelve, Lily?”
“To be a cop.”
She felt his smile in the way his cheek moved. “Let me put it this way. Suppose when you were twelve, strangers forced you to marry a man more than forty years older than you. Would you have felt okay about being married to him, living with him, as long as he didn’t touch you?”
“Yech. No. I would have . . . if for some bizarre reason no one could help me, not even Grandmother, I’d . . .” Probably have found a way to make herself a very young widow. But at twelve, she’d had issues her mother didn’t. Julia was unlikely to turn homicidal if forced to live with Lily’s father, but running away was a real possibility. Lily sighed. “We’ve got extra bedrooms. No kitchen and only one bathroom, but plenty of bedrooms.”
“Which is fortunate, because Madame Yu and Li Qin will also be staying with us.”
ELEVEN
SHE was chopping carrots when the mouse ran across the counter.
She was dreaming. She knew that, but it didn’t make what she did less important. There were so many carrots, a huge mound of them, and she had to get them all chopped. She’d come here to complete a task, but this wasn’t a safe place. She wanted to get the carrots chopped quickly so she could leave.
But then a dirty little field mouse, all quick dun-colored nastiness, ran right over that mound of carrots. She exclaimed and swatted at it. Then another one ran right in front of her, and another was on the floor at her feet, and another . . . where were they all coming from? So many mice . . . She started counting.
She’d gotten to twenty-one when she heard him calling.
It was the call of the wind, alone on the heights. The cry of a mother grieving her lost child. His voice was the sound of tears turned to ice and unable to fall, sorrow frozen in crystal drops. It was beautiful beyond words and terrible beyond hope.
Her hands shook. Her vision blurred. A mouse ran over her foot.
She cried out in anger and swiped at the mouse with her knife. The mouse raced away untouched. She stabbed her own foot. Blood welled up along with pain.
She dropped the knife and yanked her foot off the floor, frightened. It would be bad to get blood on the
