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“This is a very unsatisfactory conversation,” Sophia snaps.
“What an absolutely illuminating choice of words, Sophia. You have
found yourself precisely at the point without trying at all. Allow me to ask
you two questions, and when I have done it, if you still find me an …
unsatisfactory companion, I shall guide you back your house immediately,
entirely undiscovered by the local authorities, and we shall both continue on
in our perfect lives in this perfect place as though we had never met and no
single second of this night had ever occurred. Agreed?”
“Yes,” Sophia says, as though she has fallen asleep and all her dreams
abandoned her. “Yes.”
The dark crowds so close around Cascavel’s face. Shadows drawn to
him, to be near him. But she wants to know his questions. She wants to
have his answers.
“All right, little one. All right. The first one is easy.” He tucks a stray
lock of hair away from her face round her ear, such a curiously paternal
thing. “What are you clutching so in your left hand?”
Sophia looks down. Her fingers are balled into a red fist, a grip so tight
they’ve gone numb. She opens them, the electric prickle of life returning to
the pad of her thumb.
She is desperately holding on to the little crooked ancient finger bone.
She must have taken it in the moment of her breaking, reflexively,
instinctively, the way she lied about the window. Sophia presses her soft
lips together. She begins to cry as simply and miserably as the first weeping
of the world.
“It should be inside someone and it’s not,” she sobs helplessly.
“I see,” Cascavel says with real comfort in the margins of his voice. “I
see.”
He nods his head as if he expected it, but still hoped for some other
outcome. Sophia studies his face. He looks so sad for her, the way Mrs.
Palfrey looked at the amphitheater.
“Are you ready for my second question, sweet girl?”
Sophia nods wretchedly, turning the bone over and over in her hand.
Cascavel takes her chin in both his hands and kisses her forehead with
so much love it feels like the mark of his lips must have left her brow
stained with gold. A love that beggars sensation.
“Are you happy, Sophia?”