Page 115 of The Formation of Us

“No, she’s waiting for you at a friend’s house.”

Cora’s face was covered in tears. “Can we see her now?”

His throat closed and he could only nod, unable to bear the devastation in her eyes.

She looked at his cheek. “That woman s-scratched you.”

“It doesn’t hurt.” Nothing hurt but his heart. He pulled out his handkerchief and cleaned her face, and helped her blow her nose. Then he pulled his coat around her and held her against his chest to keep her warm in the cold night.

“Ready to go?” he asked cheerfully, but inside he raged, wanting to wrap his fingers around Stone’s neck and kill the bastard.

Duke stayed to the alleys and backyards, trying to avoid walking the streets as he navigated in a northeasterly direction. The neighborhood could only be called dilapidated, the people destitute and desperate, and he wanted to get out of it as soon as possible.

But Cora’s squeal brought him to a stop. “There’s grandma’s house!” she said, her face lit with wonder as she pointed at a big house on the corner. “Is Mama there?”

Shocked, Duke looked again at the enormous two-story house. It wasn’t as shoddy as the surrounding homes, several of which were being torn down and the lots cleared, but it was far from what he would want to live in.

“Can we go there?” Cora asked.

He nodded, feeling a deep need to see the root of all his troubles.

They scared off two young boys who were playing on the front stoop. Duke forced the back door, then went through the big house where Faith’s mother and aunts had sold their bodies, and where Faith had used her beautiful hands to give other men pleasure.

“This is pretty,” Cora said, ogling the gaudy parlor. “Grandma only let me and Adam come in the kitchen.”

Thank God.

Other than the loud decor, the house was unremarkable. Still, Duke couldn’t help wondering which room Faith had worked in—and where she’d lost her virginity to Jarvis.

“Our house is out back,” Cora said, tugging his hand as if she were giving him a tour.

She showed him a ramshackle greenhouse where Faith had grown her herbs, and where her mother had tended roses. Then Cora showed him the house where she, Adam, and Faith had lived.

It was a shack.

A one-room, one-bed, miserable little shack.

But Cora trotted to the bed like it was her favorite place in the world. “I slept here,” she said importantly. “And Mama and Adam did too.”

He’d suspected that. Their spare existence outraged him, but Cora seemed to think she’d had a fine house. With a cry of joy, she scrambled off the mattress and dove for something beside the bed. “My book!”

She lifted the book, and a brush fell to the floor with a clunk, but she was too absorbed with the book to notice. But Duke noticed. He knelt beside Cora, picked up the brush with the silver handle and painted porcelain back, and tucked it into his coat pocket.

How on earth had Faith survived this?

Knowing she had spent twenty-five years living in this barren little room sickened him. It must have been a prison. No wonder she had spent her time in the greenhouse. How easy it would have been for a well-traveled man like Jarvis to mislead a desperate girl into believing she was finally getting an opportunity to escape this life.

“We need to go, princess,” he said.

“Can I take my book?”

“Of course. Take whatever you’d like.”

She rooted between the wall and the mattress like a dog digging for a bone. She found another book and proudly hugged it to her chest as she headed for the door.

Duke lifted Cora and her two precious books into his arms. He peered out the window to make sure they hadn’t been followed, then stepped outside and closed the door on a place he never wanted Faith, Adam, or Cora to see again.

“Bye, Grandma.” Cora’s comment confused him, until he saw her waving at a small rosebush behind the shack. “Mama says grandma’s sleeping beneath the rosebush now.”