Turn 9 of 13

Remove the gloves but keep the blouse

You work the buttons at your wrists with your teeth, first the left, then the right, feeling the kid leather release you reluctantly. The gloves come away leaving faint lines of warmth where they pressed against your pulse, and you set them on the kitchen table with a care that surprises you, arranging them side by side as Vivienne might have done. Your bare hands look suddenly unfinished, pale and undefined, lacking the certainty the leather had begun to teach them.

The rose blouse remains, half-fastened and belted, and you find its silk has warmed to your skin overnight in a way that makes removal feel like more of a loss than the gloves. You leave it on. The narrow cuffs still reach past your wrists, expecting coverage, and you feel the absence of the gloves as a kind of exposure, your hands too visible, too much your own.

Ronan's car pulls up as you are rinsing the teacup. You hear the engine cut out, the door slam, footsteps on the path that seem to hesitate at the threshold. When you open the door, he stops on the step and looks at you with an expression you cannot read—recognition, perhaps, or its opposite.

"You're wearing it," he says. Not a question.

"I'm wearing it." You stand aside to let him pass, and he enters with the reluctance of someone entering a church where they no longer believe. His eyes find the gloves on the table immediately, the kid leather still holding the curve of your hands, and something in his face closes.

"Your mother watched Vivienne change," he says, not looking at you. "She never spoke of it after. She made me promise to stop you if you found the wardrobe." He turns finally, and you see how old he has become, how the memory he carries has worn him.

"I can't stop you, Nora. I never could. But I can tell you what she became, if you want to know why your grandmother wept."