“But it’s never going to be our home,” says Bella with sudden intensity. “Dad’s not going to risk moving here, so far from London. Not here.”
Jessie doesn’t answer. Yes, there’s a risk in moving, she decides, not least for Bella, but there is also a risk in staying where they are. In London Bella could easily float further and further away, like a balloon in the sky, until they lose her completely. She imagines herself and Will looking back at this day, thinking maybe things could have turned out differently if they’d been braver. And who says Jessie can’t reinvent a freelance career from the country when Romy’s a bit older? She’s always been struck by how many smart city women daren’t change anything—home, relationship, job—in case it destabilizes the lot, as if all those busy London lives are improbably balanced on the tiniest of points, like ballerinas, and the merest tilt will send everything crashing to the ground. She refuses to become like that.
“Are we going upstairs or what?” Bella puts the paperweight back on the desk a little too hard, jolting the room’s stillness. “I might yet find my corpse up there, you never know.”
“You never know,” agrees Jessie, feeling an unexpected twitch of unease.
As they emerge on the attic-like top floor, it feels instantly colder and smells mustier. Old servants’ quarters, Jessie supposes. The doors are in a boarding-house line off a dark, narrow landing.
“That’s the room,” Bella says in a hushed voice, pointing at a scuffed white door at the far end of the landing on the gable wall, almost hidden in shadow. It takes Jessie a moment to realize that the walls are actually subsiding slightly toward each other, giving the impression that the room is farther away than it is.
The doorknob turns reluctantly with a rasp. A soup of dust swirls in front of her, obscuring the room. Jessie feels particles settling in her hair, tastes an odd sweetness on her tongue. As it clears, the room solidifies, still and shadowy as a Dutch interior painting, its world as self-contained and ripe with meaning.
It is not a storeroom.
The thick black beams on the eaves funnel their eyes to a small porthole window made of purplish stained glass—an ornate pattern of grapes and vines—that bruises the light against the wall. There’s another window, too, larger, square, with tattered umber silk curtains that drape to the floor, making Jessie think of an antique, disintegrating ball gown. Most curious of all are a sleigh-style bed, still made up (a stack of pillows, a mothy pink blanket with satin-ribbon trim); an old wooden school desk with an inkwell and pen-scarred lid; and a mirrored dressing table, kidney-shaped, similar to one Jessie’s late nan owned.
Jessie’s footsteps sound far too loud in here: the room feels private, inhabited. It’s like coming across a deserted old cabin in the woods, she thinks, and finding ashes still warm in the grate.
She glances at Bella, who is hanging back, still standing in the doorway, long arms braced on either side of it, countering the force pulling her in. Her eyes are enormous, their blackness spreading, wire-tripped awake.
“Well, this is a surprise.” Jessie isn’t sure why she whispers. Like you do in a room where a child is sleeping. She encourages Bella forward. The dressing table’s mirror reflects them both as smudges, half-formed future ghosts.
Bella moves cautiously into the room, running her flat palm along the faded floral wallpaper before stopping, staring intensely at the bed, panning it for meaning.
“Do you like it?” Jessie smiles, pleased to see Bella’s staple expression of sullen indifference replaced with absorption, like she’s stepped out of herself for a moment. She even looks different in this room, her monochromatic beauty not modern at all.
Bella glances up, surprised, having clearly forgotten Jessie was there. “What?”
“I think this room might have your name on it, Bella.”
Bella blushes, seemingly caught out thinking the same thing. Sometimes, in rare, precious moments like this, Jessie glimpses the girl Bella must have been before her mother died, someone less shut off, more readable. She wishes she’d known that Bella. She will never give up trying to find her again.
“If we move here, it’s yours. We can decorate it together, exactly how you like. And . . . and you can take the room next door as a den or something. You’d have your own bathroom up here, too! Imagine that, a bath without Romy’s armada of rubber ducks.”
Bella nods absently, as if not listening to Jessie but to someone or something else that only she can hear, the wrong pitch for adult ears.
Jessie perseveres, nods at the bed. “You can have that, too. We may have to stretch to new bedding, though.”
And that’s when Bella whips around, snaps back to the present, to being Bella Tucker, a teenager who doesn’t want to be there, whom the world has royally screwed over. And Jessie knows it’s coming, the sudden, unpredictable whiplash of rage that will pull Bella away hard. “Who are you to say what is mine? What we can buy?” Bella’s voice trembles. “It’s not your house in London to sell.”
Jessie takes a deep breath. “Bella, I’m putting all my savings into this, too. But it’s not about money, it’s . . .” She catches herself. She mustn’t mention Bella’s behavior in London: moving here is not a punishment. “Your dad wants a change.”
“Don’t tell me what Dad wants.” Bella stands straighter, broader, a threatening show of strength and unmistakable genetic difference, towering over Jessie’s petite five-foot-three frame, her spray of freckles and coppery hair, the softness that has settled on her hips since Romy’s birth. “Like I don’t know him better than you.”
Jessie presses her gold pendant between her fingers, feeling her heartbeat conducted along the chain. “He can work most of the week from home. You’ll see more of him; we all will.” She tries to steady herself, take a breath. “He wants a slower pace of life, Bella.”
Bella hisses out the words, “All Dad wants is Mum back. Don’t you get it?”
Jessie recoils, steps back. The oak boards creak, as if the weight of Jessie and Bella—their relationship, the complicated tangle of family ties—is too much to bear. She tries to silence the little voice in her head, the one that fears Bella might be right, that she is less loved than Mandy, that she and Will met too soon after Mandy’s death for the love to be as real for him as it is for her.
Bella sizes her up. “You think Dad will come here and forget all about Mum, don’t you?”
“Bella . . .” she begins, not knowing how the sentence will end, a guilty heat rising beneath her skin. It is impossible to lie to Bella, even if she wanted to. She is too astute.