My Husband Left Me in the Fire, So I Took His Fortune

I didn't reach for the page. I closed my eyes instead, and the snow outside turned into another winter.

---

"Come back here, you stupid kite!"

I was eight. The wind in the Hamptons had teeth that December, and it snapped my butterfly kite clean out of my hands. It sailed over the stone wall and tangled in the Sterling family's maple tree.

"Violet, leave it!" our housekeeper called from the porch. "Those people don't like visitors!"

I didn't leave it. The wall was too tall to climb, so I crawled along the hedge until I found a gap. It was just big enough for a skinny girl in a puffy coat.

I squeezed through and stopped.

A boy knelt on the frozen lawn. His feet were bare and red, and his back was straight as a spear. My kite lay a few inches from his knees.

"Is that yours?" he asked. He didn't turn his head.

"Yeah." I grabbed it. "Why are you kneeling in the snow?"

"Go home."

"Your toes are purple."

"I said go home."

I went. I got as far as the hedge before I looked back. He hadn't moved. Not even to shiver.

That night I asked the gardener's wife about him.

"That's Alex," she whispered, like his name was a swear word. "Mr. Sterling's boy from another woman. He talked back to the new Mrs. Sterling. No supper, no house, until he says sorry."

"What if he never says sorry?"

She sighed. "Then he'll be out there a long time, sweetheart."

---

The next evening I crouched in the hedge gap with a slice of marble cake I'd stolen from the kitchen.

He was still there.

I didn't hold it out. I took a big bite right in front of him. Then another. My cheeks puffed up like a chipmunk's.

His eyes slid toward me. "Are you serious?"

"Mm-hmm." I chewed loudly. "It's really good."

"You're cruel."

"Mm-hmm."

He lunged. He snatched the cake right out of my fingers and shoved the whole thing into his mouth, glaring at me the entire time.

I grinned at him with the gap where my front tooth used to be.

He stopped chewing. For one second, the corner of his mouth twitched.

"You're weird," he said with his mouth full.

"I'm Violet."

"Still weird."

---

After that, I went through the hedge every day.

I brought him warm cookies in my coat pockets. Hot cocoa in a thermos that burned my hands. Gossip I'd heard from the gardeners.

"Mrs. Sterling's sister got a nose job," I told him once. "A bad one."

He actually laughed. It sounded rusty, like he didn't use it much.

I learned how things worked over there. Small punishments every three days. Big ones every five. Locked closets. Missed meals. A belt, once, that he wouldn't talk about.

"Why don't you tell somebody?" I asked.

"Who?" He picked at a scab on his knuckle. "Nobody in that house wants me, Violet."

"I want you."

He looked at me for a long time. Then he flicked my forehead.

"Weird," he said again. But softer.

---

The summer I turned eleven, I climbed the wall for the first time.

"Alex!" I hissed, hanging over the top. "Fireflies! Down by the pond, come on—"

The words died.

Two men in black writhed on the grass below. One was clutching his stomach. One was screaming.

Alex stood between them with a knife in his hand.

He looked up. Something warm and wet hit my cheek.

My fingers slipped off the stone, and I fell.

I never hit the ground. He caught me against his chest, his shirt soaked dark and sticky.

"Careful," he said, frowning down at me like I'd done something stupid.

"You—they—"

"They came for me. Not you." He carried me to the hedge and pushed me through the gap, gentle but firm. "Go home. Wash your face. Don't tell anyone."

"Alex, are you okay?"

"Go, Violet."

I didn't sleep that night.

The next morning, a little plate sat in the hedge gap. Chestnut cakes, still warm, lined up in a neat row.

No note. He didn't need one.

---

Then my father fell.

Richard Hayes, the man who carried me on his shoulders at every Fourth of July party, was arrested for financial fraud. The newspapers called him a thief. I heard the whispers later. Alex's uncle had set the trap and shorted everything my family owned.

Dad died in prison before his trial ended. Mom followed him three months later. Her heart just quit.

After that, I took her name. Monroe. I didn't want to be a Hayes anymore.

At the funeral, Alex was seventeen. He pushed through the crowd in a black suit too big in the shoulders and pulled me straight into his chest.

"Violet." His voice scraped like sandpaper. "Every single person who killed your father, I'll make them pay."

"Alex, you can't fight your own family—"

"Watch me." His hand cupped the back of my head. "You just stay with me. That's all you have to do."

He kept his word.

One by one, they went down. Prison. Bankruptcy. A one-way ticket out of New York. He hunted them like a calm, patient animal, and he never once looked sorry.

Not even when the last one was his uncle.

---

I opened my eyes.

The IV needle sat taped to the back of my hand. A little plastic tube, a little bruise around it. I laughed under my breath.

Then the other night came back. The one that mattered most.

Alex was nineteen. A man stepped out of a parking garage with a blade, and I moved before I could think. It slid along my shoulder, an inch from my heart.

Alex didn't sleep for three days.

On the last night, the moon came through the window, and his eyes were red. He kissed the tips of my fingers, one at a time.

"Don't leave me," he whispered. "Please. You're all I have."

That was the most he ever loved me. I knew it even then.

And I'd made the doctor lie to him.

*Tell him it's cleared,* I'd begged. *Tell him I'm fine.*

Now the poison lived in my bones. There was no point in saying anything.

He'd gotten justice for my father. I'd bled for him. We were even.

The snow kept falling past the glass.

The boy who left chestnut cakes in the hedge gap was gone. He'd died somewhere I couldn't see, a long time ago.

My eyes drifted to the nightstand. To Dr. Lindsey's letterhead. To the creases where someone had opened it and folded it again, neatly. Too neatly.

The nurses didn't fold things like that.

Only one person I knew did.