Chapter 10: The Kitchen Light

Rhys's POV

I keep a house on the lake, an hour outside the city, where nobody from the Mercer family ever comes.

At ten past three in the morning someone knocked on the kitchen door.

I took the poker from the stove and opened it.

Nesta stood on my step, soaked to the skin, with a bag at her feet.

The housekeeper stood behind her.

I had never seen the housekeeper outside the Mercer house. She looked smaller in the rain, with her hair down and her gloves in her hand.

"How did you find the place?" I asked.

"She sorted your post for eight years," Nesta said. "She knew the address."

I put the poker down.

I was going to say something sharp. I looked at her face, and what I said was, "Come in."

They came in.

I lit the stove and found blankets, and the housekeeper sat on a kitchen chair with a blanket over her shoulders and her hands in her lap.

I had seen those hands in cotton for eight years.

I had never seen them bare.

They were scarred from the wrists up, ridged and white, and I thought, with a kind of dull horror, of every plate she had carried for me.

I put a cup of tea in front of her.

She looked at the cup, and then at me, and for a moment I thought she was going to cry.

"Rhys," she said.

Her voice was low and scraped.

I stood completely still.

In eight years she had never said anything to me.

I had said good morning to her every day.

"Thank you for the light," she said. "In the kitchen. Every night. You left it on."

"I didn't know why I did."

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