Where Lilies Die

ADELINA

We made each other a promise in a glasshouse in October and it was two lines long.

No lying. And no not-saying.

I have kept mine. I have kept it through a funeral and a hospital corridor and a kitchen with fifty men in it, and there is one thing I am holding back, and I have written down exactly why.

He is holding back one as well.

I am twenty-three years old. I run a house with a wall round it and forty men in and out of it, I feed all of them twice a day, and every single one of them calls me signora and means it.

They tell you a woman in this world gets smaller.

Nobody tells you what happens when she does not.

I was sold to this family on a Thursday in October.

By March I was the one they came to.

SALVATORE

There is a thing I have been for eighteen years and I have been extremely good at it.

I am the one who does the arithmetic. I am the one who decides who carries what, and how much, and when they are told, and nobody in this city has ever been hurt by me getting that wrong.

Then I sat down at my own kitchen table on a Friday night in February and made a small, sensible decision about what my wife could stand to hear.

It worked. Nothing happened. She slept.

And the next one was easier.

Everybody wants to talk about April. Everybody wants the glasshouse and the four houses and the one sentence I said with her hands on my coat.

It does not start there.

It starts at a table with a plate on it, with a man who promised her he would not do this, deciding that he knew better than she did what she could carry.

She was right about all three of the things she said to me that morning.

And I am still going to have to stand at the bottom of that hill and let her walk up it.

This is the second book in The Devil's Garden Series. Reading order:

Where Roses Bleed.

Where Lilies Die.

Where Orchids Burn.

328 pages. Kindle edition.