Her steps slowed. She found the house hidden deep in the trees and smiled at the sight of it. No wonder her uncle Søren loved it here so much. No wonder he never let them send him anywhere else. Such a pretty house, this little two-story Gothic cottage that looked like something off the cover of a mystery novel.
Laila knocked once and received no answer. Another knock. Still nothing. Strange … she would have thought at least one of them would be waiting for her at the rectory. Last week she’d received an email from her tante Elle offering to fly her to the States for a week. “Shh …” read the note. “Let’s give your uncle a big surprise.”
So where was her aunt? And where was her uncle? With a nervous hand, Laila turned the doorknob and found the door unlocked. The flight had been delayed an hour in London. Maybe her aunt and uncle were home. Perhaps they were … occupied. She wouldn’t put it past them to steal a spare hour. Laila found herself smiling as she stepped into the kitchen.
She’d worn that smile before when she’d caught them in an embrace during a visit last year. An embrace and a whisper, a whisper and a kiss … Laila had seen the glint in a pair of green eyes, a glint that hinted the embrace was merely a prelude to a nighttime symphony.
“Wipe that smile off your face, young lady,” her uncle had ordered her as he’d pulled back and crossed his arms across his broad chest.
“Why?” she’d asked. “Am I not supposed to know about—” and she dropped her voice to a whisper “—sex?”
“No, you are not.” He’d given her a look so stern it nearly scared her. Or would have scared her had someone else not reached up and flicked him on the ear.
“She’s seventeen. She’s allowed to know about the birds and the bees and that you and I very often engage in the birds and the bees. More bees than birds. Like last night, for example. And this morning. And—”
And whatever came after the “and” got muffled under her uncle’s hand.
“Laila,” he said with deliberate, menacing calm to Laila and the woman he gently, playfully suffocated under his hand, “is not to know about sex or talk about sex or have sex. Ever. I’ll never have children. She is therefore my honorary daughter. With her love of animals, Laila was no doubt destined for the Franciscans. I have the perfect convent picked out for her. Her room is already reserved. Now I have spoken. Nod if you understand.”
And Laila and the woman in his arms nodded even as she giggled all the way back to her bedroom.
Of course she knew about sex. She knew he had it all the time with her “aunt,” as she and Gitte, her sister, thought of her. Not that it bothered her. She wasn’t Catholic, after all. Why should she care if he had a lover?
And such a lover he had … No one seeing her could blame him for what he’d done. Then again, no one seeing him could ever blame her, either. As a younger girl, she’d envied her aunt in a way. Her feelings about her uncle made her ashamed of herself sometimes until she got a little older and realized she didn’t want him so much as she wanted what they had, her onkel Søren and tante Elle. What they had … it seemed like magic to her. She even thought of it as not a thing so much or a feeling, but as a place. The Enchanted Kingdom of Adulthood, she’d dubbed it. Adults alone lived in that world and as a girl she’d longed to gain entrance into it and learn all its secrets.
Whenever around her aunt and uncle she felt like she stood outside the gate and could see through the bars. She only needed the key. Love. That was the key. Adult love. Private love. Passionate love between two people who told secrets with their bodies. She’d learned about love watching her aunt and uncle doing nothing but talking to each other. There had only been those few visits, once a year, sometimes twice, but they were enough to teach her that love wasn’t something one found only in books. The kind of love that knights fought for and kings died for and ships were launched for and poets recorded for posterity—it was real. She’d seen it. She wanted what they had, wanted that secret that they told each other without even saying a word. She’d seen it pass between them with every glance. Maybe she would have that someday, she wished every time she’d seen it. Maybe she’d find it here in America.
Silence filled the rectory. She heard nothing, no one. What if he was with her now in his bedroom? Maybe that’s why the quiet all about her resonated with restless energy. In a house so small surely she could hear the sounds of passion even upstairs and behind closed doors. Or was it possible to make love entirely in silence? She doubted her aunt could. As a girl of ten, Laila had discovered that if she sat on the floor with her ear to the wall, she could hear them at night. That young she never quite understood what she heard—breathy gasps, warm, illicit murmurs, a moan followed by silence. Sounds of pleasure caused by … what? Then she hadn’t known. She’d heard other sounds, too—whimpers, cries, quiet noises that sounded far more like pain than pleasure. It gave her the strangest feeling in her stomach to sit by the wall at night and force herself to stay awake and listen to them in their bedroom. Sometimes she felt something like jealousy. Sometimes her whole body shuddered with a need for something she couldn’t name.
Shuddering … that’s what it was. The house seemed to shudder as soon as Laila stepped foot into the kitchen. Laila’s happiness here started to falter. Something didn’t feel right. Never before had she breached her uncle’s home, but she knew the house, like him, would be meticulous, nearly immaculate. And it was. Nothing out of place. Nothing disturbed. Nothing wrong. But still … everything seemed wrong. She passed through the kitchen and into the living room. Beautiful, of course. A thousand books. One perfect grand piano. A fireplace naked without a fire. She found a staircase and took it to the second floor. She found the bathroom, the office…. When she stepped into the bedroom, she almost blushed.
Laila couldn’t look at the made bed without imagining the sheets askew. Four years ago, her aunt and uncle had come to her grandmother’s funeral, and as usual after everyone had gone to bed, Laila pressed her ear to the wall and listened. She’d expected to hear the usual sounds of passion, of pain. Or maybe only talking. But that night she heard them doing something she’d never heard them do before in the Enchanted Kingdom of Adulthood—fighting.
“I don’t want to discuss this with you, Eleanor.”
“The funeral’s tomorrow. We need to talk about it.”
“You brought it with you?”
“Of course I did. I thought you might want … she might have wanted …”
“No, she wouldn’t. She gave it to you. She wanted you to have it. Unless it means nothing to you anymore.” Laila heard the bitterness in her uncle’s voice.
“It means as much to me as it always did. I only thought that since I left you, you might want to bury it with her.”
“You might have left me, but I never left you. Keep it if you want it at all.”
“At all?” Her aunt sounded aghast. “It’s my most precious possession.”
Laila’s stomach had clenched so hard at her tante Eleanor’s words and the fervency in her voice. As was her habit, she reached up to her neck and wrapped her hand around the locket that rested in the hollow of her throat for comfort.
“As you are mine.”
Then Laila had almost stopped listening. The sorrow in her uncle’s voice cut into her, his words sharp as a knife.
“Don’t … don’t make this harder than it is.”
“It couldn’t be any harder than it is, Little One.”
Silence came after that but only for a moment before she heard her uncle’s voice again, tender and careful.
“Forgive me. I’m so grateful you’re