Odd & True by Cat Winters

Author:Cat Winters
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2017-03-16T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

Odette

January 14, 1905—Oregon

“Tell me the story again,” asked Tru in the nighttime blackness of the bedroom we shared in Aunt Vik and Uncle William’s farmhouse.

I closed my eyes and breathed without a sound. The weight of shadows from our past pushed down on my lungs with a wheeze and a crackle.

“Od?” Tru lifted her head. “Will you tell it to me again?”

“Oh, Tru.” I sighed. “You’ve heard the story for eleven years now. You must know it by heart.”

“It wouldn’t feel quite like my birthday without it.” She rolled onto her side and bumped her good knee—her warm knee—against my right leg. Her other leg remained flaccid when she wasn’t wearing the brace and ice-cold to the touch, even after all these years. “Please,” she added, but she didn’t whine. Tru was polite—far more so than I.

I pressed my front teeth into my bottom lip and vowed to never tell her the truth about our father’s absence on the day of her birth, or of the fact that he had kept our mother hidden away in a remote part of the world for more than seven long years while married to another woman. Tru didn’t need to know that our mother continued to work in the city to pay off debts and that Aunt Vik referred to Mama as “immoral” and “sinful” whenever she spoke about her to Uncle William, when she didn’t know I was listening. I didn’t know how Mama earned money. Aunt Vik kept us so sheltered, I wouldn’t have understood it if she ever named our mother’s profession. I preferred to still imagine her in her long purple coat with flared sleeves, stealing out into the nights with the MarViLUs case.

“Od?” asked Tru again. “Are you awake?”

I opened my eyes and saw the stillness of my sister in the dark as she waited with bated breath.

“Once upon a time,” I said, my voice strained, “on a cold January morning, a girl named Trudchen Maria Grey was born in a castle built to resemble a stone Scottish fortress called Dunnottar . . .”

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