Page 62 of A Secret In The Garden

Her impact was worse, somehow, after not feeling it for a while.

“Peat bogs are sensitive ecosystems that provide unique habitats for wildlife. You know the extraction of peat destroys the habitats and disrupts biodiversity. Do you want that on your hands? I don’t believe you; you’ve never cared about anything but yourself. Send me a picture of the bags—and you better be recycling those,” she snapped in her tone that made me shrink to about an inch tall.

“Yeah, I know, Mom. You’ve told me,” I said, hearing my soft voice as if I were listening to it outside my body.

I regretted answering the phone. I wished I weren’t so afraid of my balcony so that I could hurl it over the large stone railing and never see it again. “You don’t need to come get me; I have my car. Everything is fine, and I still have a lot of work to do. Besides, it’s not like I have an apartment to go home to now anyway.” I flinched, immediately pinching my fists together, wishing I hadn’t said my last words. My tongue was looser with the small taste of independence, something that would be hard and painful to tamp down later, I feared.

“You ought to be thanking me for that! Thank god you don’t have anyone over at your house ever, and you’re just poisoning yourself while you destroy all of your father’s and my life’s work. Palm oil, Eliza, fucking palm oil. Have you forgotten everything you learned from us? You told me your clothes were all sustainably sourced. That’s a move I would expect from your lying sister, but not from you. Sometimes, I wish I’d never had either of you, knowing how you both are. I would be so much happier if I didn’t have to spend my days following you around like you were a baby. For god’s sake, Eliza, you are a grown woman. Act like it.”

Warmth bloomed in my eyes, blurring them with tears.

Yeah, the words hit different parts of me after not having heard their harshness for a while. Somewhere over the course of my stay at Blackwood Manor, my numbness about life had faded. Enough so that I felt armorless and soft now. Her strikes hit harder, more painfully.

Something had to change. I couldn’t do this anymore. It wasn’t normal to treat people this way, especially not the ones you loved. I bristled even though warning bells sounded in my head.

“I’m not a baby. I’m a twenty-five-year-old woman. Why do you say stuff like that? That you wish you’d never had me? That really hurts, Mom.” My voice cracked with the unfamiliarity of speaking up.

“Excuse me for being a terrible mother and caring about you. God forbid I mention how much you hurt me, Eliza. I forgot I can’t have any feelings. Everything is about you,” she snapped.

“I gotta go, Mom,” I said, struggling to keep myself still as my legs trembled. I needed her off the phone before she got really into her rants about how horrible I was. I wasn’t equipped to handle it right now.

“I’m coming now to get you. You’ll move back in with Dad and me where I can watch you. The three of us could use another trip to the Congo Basin. You need to remember what it is you’re doing when you use palm oil and aluminum cans. A few days without anything will remind you how much you should thank Mother Earth,” she muttered. I heard a car door close.

My eyes shut, little stars of dizzying glitter dancing on the backs of my eyelids. She couldn’t come here. If she did, I would leave with her. “I’m not leaving, so please do not waste a trip coming up here.” My voice trembled with anger and sadness.

She let out an abrasive laugh. “Who do you think you are? If I have to, I will come up there and tear you out of that house. I birthed you. You don’t get to tell me no. That’s not how this works.”

I tucked in on myself. Growing up, that was the number-one rule for my sister and me. It had been drilled loudly into our heads from the moment we were born, above all else. It was the foundation upon which I lived and breathed. We were never, ever allowed to utter the word no to her.

I wanted to ask if she had talked to Lucy, but now was the worst imaginable time to bring up my rebellious sister, and it wasn’t like they talked very often anyway. I wasn’t missing anything by not asking.

“I have a dinner I need to go to. I’ll talk to you later,” I said with a trained voice that held nothing but polite respect.

“A dinner? With who? Blackwood? Oh, great, so you’ll be murdered next, then?” she snarked.

My tongue refused to hold. She was just like everybody else that didn’t really know him.

“Jasper didn’t murder anybody. You don’t even know what happened—” I tried to explain.

“Don’t be such an idiot. I’ve been in this town longer than you’ve been alive. That man killed his mother, and his father was probably in on it with him. I’ve seen his interviews; I get it; he’s handsome as the devil, but do you think Ted Bundy wasn’t a charmer? How do you think they get their victims to trust them? Idiot girl.”

“Bye, Mom, I need to go,” I said and hung up to the sound of her yelling.

Tears pitter-pattered on the floor as I bent over, holding my head against the edge of the mattress. I don’t know why I had tried to get free from her grip; it was impossible; the woman wouldn’t stop. She was relentless.

With shaking hands, I tossed the dress on the bed and wiped my eyes as I instinctually moved for the locket on the dresser.

As silly as it was, especially now that she was so chaotic, Hester felt more like a mother to me than my own mom. Even in the moments that I feared her, I didn’t think Hester would ever hurt me intentionally just because she wanted me to hurt. Even when she had, I knew she was trying to tell me something that I hadn’t figured out yet. Maybe I was delusional or stupid, but I’d even started to find the lingering scent of Chanel No. 5 comforting in a weird way. Hester trusted me to help with her whole life—or death—and that meant something to me. I felt supported when she would linger in the conservatory or hallways with me. My mother didn’t even trust me enough to make my own dinner choices.

I palmed the golden locket and prepared to open it, holding it away and bracing myself for whatever might fly out of it and bite me, though, to be honest, I would’ve welcomed it right then. I clicked it, and the warm gold fell open, showing my own tearstained face squinting back at me, a small mirror on the inside.

There was movement. A small inscription carved itself across the mirror in beautifully elaborate cursive.

Your worth is not held in her words.

I choked on a sob, snapped the locket shut, and slammed the oval pendant on the dresser; the chain slid over the top of my hand and onto the worn wood. It wasn’t even a clue to help her; she’d used her energy just to be there for me. I couldn’t take the kindness. Didn’t deserve it.

Hester’s thoughtful words cut through, pressing into my deepest vulnerabilities, cauterizing some of the wounds my own mother had just opened.