Chapter 12: Seven Years

I took the bracelet and walked out of the infirmary without a word.

Mathias followed me down the hall and up the back stairs of my father's house.

I went into my old bedroom and shut the door.

He opened it anyway.

"Valerie."

"Don't."

"Let me say it."

"You knew," I said, and turned around. "The first night. When I told you my name on the road, you knew who I was."

He stood just inside the door with his hands at his sides.

"I suspected," he said.

"You suspected for four days."

"Yes."

"You let me sit at your table and make terms like a stranger. You let me say I was only a Redfern who needed a roof."

"I let you choose."

"That isn't choosing," I said, and my voice rose. "You had the whole story and I had half. How is that a choice?"

His jaw tightened.

"Seven years ago," he said, "I came out of that trap with a piece of red wool in my teeth."

"It had a Redfern scent on it. I was twenty-four and I'd lost half my ear."

"I wanted to find the girl who'd cut me loose."

"You could have come to the front door."

"I did."

I stared at him.

"I sent a message to your father the next spring," he said. "Then to your brother, when your father was dead."

"Four times since, I sent men to the Redfern gate with the same question."

"Who is the girl who owns this scarf?"

"Nobody told me."

"No," he said. "Jasper sent each of them back with a different answer."

"A threat. A lie. A different lie. And the last with a dead man's collar, to say what would happen if I came again."

My legs went weak, and I sat down on the edge of my bed.

It was the bed I had slept in as a child, with the same quilt.

"I looked for you for seven years, Valerie," he said. "I'd never seen your face."

"Then you stepped over my border stone in your cousin's coat and told me the date."

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