“Come here. Let me show you something.” Zach shifted his arm around her shoulders, guiding her down the gallery toward the staircase.
“Your room?” she asked.
“No. But I like the way you’re thinking.” He steered her down to the first floor then back through the hallways to Sadie’s parlor.
“What are we doing?”
“I want to show you that she was happy.”
He sat Kaitlin on the settee and retrieved an old photo album from Sadie’s bookcase. Sitting next to her, he flipped through the pages until he came to one of the Harpers’ famous garden parties. The pictures were black and white, slightly faded, but they showed the gardens in their glory, and the sharp-dressed upper crust of New York nibbling finger sandwiches and chatting away the afternoon.
“That’s her.” Zach pointed to his grandmother in a flowing dress and a silk flower-brimmed hat. Her smile was bright, and Zach’s grandfather Milton had a hand tucked against the small of her back.
“She does look happy,” Kaitlin was forced to admit.
“And that’s a hedge, not prison bars,” said Zach.
Kaitlin elbowed him in the ribs. “The bars are metaphorical.”
“The hedge is real. So were the trips to Europe.”
Kaitlin flipped the page, coming to more party photos, people laughing, drinking punch, playing croquet and wandering through the rose garden. There was a band in the gazebo, and a few couples were dancing on the patio. Some of the pictures showed children playing.
“That’s my father,” said Zack, smiling to himself as he pointed out the five-year-old boy in shorts, a white shirt and suspenders standing next to the duck pond. He had a rock in his hand, and one of his shoes was missing. He looked as if he was seconds away from wading after the ducks.
Kaitlin chuckled softly. “Were you anything like that as a child?”
Zach rose to retrieve another album.
“Here.” He let her open it and page her way through the pictures of him as a young child.
“You were adorable,” she cooed, moving from his toddler pictures to preschool to Zach at five years old, digging up flower bulbs, dirt smeared across his face and clothes.
“Yeah, let’s go with adorable.”
“Did you get into trouble for that?”
“I would guess I did. Probably from Grandma Sadie. Those gardens were her pride and joy.”
“I never had a garden,” said Kaitlin, and Zach immediately felt guilty for showing her the album. He’d done it again, parading out his past and his relatives without giving a thought to the contrast with her life.
“I bet you stayed cleaner than I did,” he said, making a weak attempt at a joke.
“Once I realized—” She paused, gripping the edge of the album. “Hoo. I’m not going to do that.” She turned another page.
“Do what?”
“Nothing.” Her attention was focused on a series of shots of the beach and a picnic.
“Katie?”
“Nothing.”
He gently removed the album from her hands. “I upset you.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Liar.”
She straightened her shoulders. “It was hard, okay.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t.”
“You’re right. I don’t.” He folded the book closed and set it on the table beside him. “I’m sorry I showed you the photos. It was thoughtless.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“What were you going to say?”
She pasted him with a look of impatience.
“I’ve got all night to wait,” he warned her, sitting back and making a show of getting comfortable.
She clenched her jaw, looking mulish, and he prepared himself for a contest of wills.
But then her toughness disappeared, and she swallowed. Then she closed her eyes for a second. “I was going to say…”
Part of him wanted to retract the question. But another part of him wanted to know, needed to know what she’d gone through as a child.
“I was going to say,” she repeated, sounding small and fragile, “once I realized people could give me away.” Her voice cracked. “I tried to be very, very good.”
Zach honestly thought his heart was going to break.
He wrapped an arm around her and drew her close. She felt so tiny in his arms, so vulnerable. He hated that she’d been alone as a child.
“I’m sorry, Katie,” he whispered against her hair.
She shook her head back and forth. “It’s not your fault.”
He drew a deep breath. “You’ve been alone for a very long time.”
“I’m used to it.”
But she wasn’t. She couldn’t be. Nobody should have to get used to not having a family. Zach had lost his parents when he was twenty, and that had been devastating enough. He’d still had his grandmother, and he’d always had the Gilbys. And he’d had Aunt Ginny, who usually liked him very much.