He was in the picture. I hadn’t noticed him the first time I’d seen it because I hadn’t known to look for him, but now that I knew his face, I recognized him easily. He stood near the back of the group, smiling at the camera. Next to him was a woman I recognized as Mason’s mom, then Mason’s father, Edward, and then my mom. I squinted, leaning closer to the picture as my gaze flicked back and forth between the two women.
They both looked so… happy. So full of life, so unconcerned. None of the ugliness of their futures seemed to hang over them. In that captured moment, those futures didn’t exist yet.
How did it all go so bad?
My gaze flicked down to the child held in my mother’s arms. She had chubby cheeks and wore a bright yellow dress, and the sight of it made my heart squeeze.
A little girl dressed in sunshine.
Mason had known me then. They all had. And that was how he’d described the memory of me once.
Keeping my crutches pinned beneath my arms, I reached up awkwardly to brush my fingertips over the image, as if touching it could somehow connect me to the people inside, could transport me back to the moment the picture was taken.
“You shouldn’t be up here.”
Jacqueline’s firm voice startled me, and the crutch on my left side slipped out from under me, clattering to the pristine wood floor with a loud noise.
“Shit,” I muttered, adjusting my grip on my other crutch to try to bend and pick it up.
But before I could reach it, my grandmother strode forward, lifting the metal apparatus and helping me secure it under my arm again. As I’d come to expect, she didn’t look directly at me as she worked, and her expression was cool and businesslike.
“You should be resting. And you shouldn’t be taking stairs.”
“Sorry,” I muttered, resisting the urge to ask her why she cared at all. Instead, I jerked my chin toward the photograph on the wall. “Who’s that guy? In the middle?”
Reluctantly, Jacqueline’s gaze moved to the image, her face unreadable. “Oh. That’s Adam Pierce. He became friends with your mother and her group of friends in college. He wasn’t a classmate of theirs at Oak Park. He came from… lower stock.”
My eyebrows flew up at her words. God, does she have any fucking idea how stuck up she sounds?
“You mean he was poor?”
“No.” She shook her head, pursing her lips. “He had money. But he was from newer money. Just a different caliber of person, that’s all.”
I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from snapping at her. The hallway suddenly seemed too crowded with both of us in it, and her gentle, floral perfume seemed to stifle me. I cleared my throat, carefully avoiding looking at her. “What happened to him?”
“Adam?” She let out a breath, waving a dismissive hand. “I don’t know. He was never truly part of the group, I don’t think. He wasn’t from around here, and he left just as quickly as he appeared.”
Jesus. She could even make “wasn’t from around here” sound like an insult. As if being born anywhere but Roseland automatically made someone a lesser person.
I glanced back at the picture again, taking in the entire group of my mother and her school friends. I wondered for a moment what they had been called. Had the student body at Oak Park known them as royals too?
Despite the assistance of the crutches, my good leg was shaking and my body was starting to ache. I had several bruises on my left leg, although no bones had been broken.
“You need to lie down.” Jacqueline’s voice was sharp, and when I glanced over at her, she was finally looking directly at me. Her lips were pressed into a line, but something like worry darkened her eyes. “You shouldn’t have walked up three flights by yourself. To—do what? Look at a photograph? If you want something, send Avery or one of the others to get it for you.”
“I wasn’t gonna make Avery take a framed picture off the wall and bring it downstairs just so I could see it,” I muttered, backing away from the picture in question and turning to head back down the steps.
“Why not? That’s what she’s here for.”
Jacqueline followed closely behind me, and when I started trying to navigate the steps down with my crutches, she gave a tsk.
It was more awkward going down than coming up; I had to hunch over to place the rubber ends of the crutches on the step below, and the action made me feel like I was about to pitch forward and tumble down the staircase. After only a few steps, I stopped, breathing hard.
“Oh, for—”
My grandmother’s heels clicked as she came up beside me and tugged the crutches out of my hand, wrapping her arm around my waist to support me. She laid them gently on the stairs, then secured my arm around her shoulders.
“My crutches—” I cast a glance back over my shoulder as we took a step down.