The Woman Who Wasn't a Burglar

The woman in the doorway was silver-braided and unhurried, reading glasses pushed up into her hair, a cardigan pulled tight against the morning cold. She didn't look surprised. She looked like someone who had rehearsed this exact moment for longer than Imogen had been alive.

"You don't know me," the woman said, "but I used to know you very well. Odalys Kestrel. I kept your house for six years, when you were small enough to ride on my hip through the kitchen."

Imogen stood frozen on the front step, the ring box clutched in both hands like something that might be taken back from her at any moment. "You sent this."

"I did." Odalys stepped aside from the doorway. "You'd better come in before your young man freezes out there in his undershirt."

Callum, halfway out of the car, gave an awkward wave.

Inside, the house was warm and cluttered in the way of someone who had lived carefully within a small space for a long time — photographs on every surface, none of them, Imogen noticed with a jolt, of anyone she recognized. Odalys gestured her to a worn armchair and sat across from her, hands folded, unhurried in a way that made Imogen want to shake her.

"There was never a burglar," Odalys said. "I need you to understand that first, before anything else. No stranger walked into your father's house that week and took your mother's things. I did."

"Why?" It came out smaller than Imogen meant it to.

"Because your father was already selling what he could of hers before she was even in the ground. Her coat. Her mother's silver. Things that could still speak for her, if anyone had bothered to listen." Odalys's voice didn't rise, but something underneath it went very hard. "I took the ring before it could go into one of those boxes too. I told myself I'd give it back when things were safe again."

She looked at Imogen for a long moment.

"It took twenty years for me to decide that was today."