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“For what?” he asked, looking back. “The journal? I told you, I’m into it.”

“No. For being my friend. If we are friends,” I said, suddenly afraid that I’d read too much into things.

He looked thoughtful. “We are,” he said, and the fact that he’d had to think about it made me trust it more somehow. “Early days, but yeah, we’re friends.”

“I’ve never really had a friend before. It’s nice,” I said.

He smiled. “Well, for not having much practice, you’re decent at it. I’ll see you at dinner.”

“See you,” I said. And then he was gone.

—

An hour later, Iris knocked on the door of the Willows. She wore a deep-red turtleneck and black slacks, a simple outfit that looked as elegant as a ballgown. “Helen, I thought I ought to check on you, given this morning’s distress.”

I strained to hear a hint of something nurturing in her tone but failed. She looked at me with an air of faint disappointment. “I’m okay,” I said. “I’m sorry about all of that.”

“This place can play tricks on you,” she said. “It’s hardly the first time someone has woken up with odd notions.” She walked in without asking for permission and crossed to my desk, examining the scapula and fox skull sitting there. “Hm.”

“It’s kind of a hobby,” I said with a note of apology.

“I suppose everyone needs a few of those,” she replied, not unkindly. I studied her. She was a hard woman, but perhaps that was necessity. She’d come to live at Harrow as an adult—married into this mess. You’d have to be tough to navigate living in this place for so long when you weren’t born to it. Tough and canny.

But in what way? It hadn’t yet sunk in, what Bryony and I had realized about the foxglove. Our suspicion that Leopold, and maybe even Jessamine, had been poisoned. Was Iris Vaughan the kind of tough and canny woman who could poison her husband?

And why would she? What had she gained by bringing me here?

What hadanyonegained? I was hardly the mistress that they all wanted. Even Caleb knew I was in over my head. Then there was Jessamine. I could concoct a dozen reasons, some more far-fetchedthan others, why someone would have wanted to murder Leopold. For all I knew, he’d personally betrayed every one of them and was mean to puppies on the weekends. But Jessamine?

It didn’t make sense.

Iris turned away from her examination of the scapula. “Attire tonight will be semiformal. Dinner at six o’clock. Tomorrow’s dinner is the formal celebration, but I do expect everyone to attend this evening as well.”

I looked down at my dirty jeans and sneakers. “Right. I’ll change before then, obviously.”

“It is best to meet Harrow where it stands—it is easier to change yourself than to try to move these old stones,” Iris said.

“I meant my clothes,” I replied, and her eye glinted with amusement.

“I know. Still, the point stands. Harrow has its rules and routines.”

Don’t go out on the grounds after dark. Bells for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, bells for sunset and sunrise. And then all the unspoken rules: the things you didn’t say, didn’t notice, didn’t warn your granddaughter about, even though she was in danger.

“I don’t think I’m fitting into them well. Those rules and routines, I mean,” I said. I wasn’t being obstinate—just honest. “When I went to school, all the structure... I didn’t do well with it.”

“That is a bit of an understatement, don’t you think?” Iris asked. “That girl almost died.”

I flinched. “You know about that.”

Iris regarded me, her expression hooded and hard to read. “Your mother called home when it happened. She was frantic.‘Something is wrong with Helen,’ she told us. Leopold drove down in the middle of the night.” She sounded detached, but under that was something else. Anger, maybe.

“I didn’t know that,” I said. I didn’t remember a lot from that day, or the ones before it, or after it—I’d sunk down into myself, vanished, and only emerged weeks later, as if I’d been dreaming. I flinched. “He’s why I didn’t get in trouble, isn’t he?”

“He smoothed things out.”

“Did he give that girl her eyes back?” I asked bitterly.

Iris raised an eyebrow. “I believe they were able to preserve some sight in one of them.”