“I … can see you’ve put a lot of work into this,” Émilie says, and something inside me collapses, deflates into this hard nub in my stomach.
I know what comes next. I’ve heard it before, in that same, careful tone. Every time my music tutor graded a test piece, her gaze would slide to my mother, standing stiff, her expressionless face radiating cold judgment. The tutor never looked at Dad, relaxed and open, smiling as if I hadn’t just massacred Chopin.
That’s the mistake everyone made. If someone drove me too hard, if someone could crush my self-confidence under their thumb, clearly it was my mother, right? The Chinese tiger mom? Oh, my mother definitely had high standards for me, definitely pushed me to achieve them, but the one who would lambaste me after this musical disaster? That would be the genial Scot lounging on the couch.
I can see you put a lot of work into this.
That’s what my music tutor always said, and she’d been right. I’d worked my fingers off practicing, but it never mattered. I suspect she always wanted to award me an A for effort. She couldn’t, though. My parents would see through that and send her packing, like they had her predecessor. Effort is not enough. The world only rewards achievement.
Now Émilie says those words, and the same pronouncement is coming
. A for effort, Casey. C for achievement.
I don’t speak. I won’t speak. I sit as still as I had on my piano bench, chin raised, eyes hooded, inwardly raging and shamed, outwardly channeling my mother.
“You say Petra confirmed this?” Émilie continues.
“She confirmed the pieces she could. I have no idea how much she knows.”
“Nothing,” Émilie murmurs. “She knows nothing. But yes, she could confirm the pieces, and that would be enough. She would put them together and know that your theory is fundamentally correct.”
“Right, which is why she ran—” I stop. “Fundamentally correct?”
Her eyes are distant, as if she’s only half listening, half lost in another place.
“You are correct about the Second Settlement,” she says, “and the young man. What was his name?”
“Hendricks.”
“Ah, yes. An alias. Henry, I believe it was. Henry Richardson? Henri Richard? I can’t recall, but it hardly matters. He’s dead. Car accident a few years after he left Rockton.” She meets my gaze. “Yes.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
A sad curve of her lips. “But you were thinking it. Car crash. How convenient. At the time, I thought nothing of it, other than a spot of grief for a man I only vaguely knew. My husband knew him better. Hendricks’s mission in the settlement, though, was my idea. It seemed so terribly clever. Take a group of people already inclined to peace and natural intoxicants, and nudge them a little down that path. A tea to keep them happy and calm and unlikely to attack Rockton.”
That wistful smile grows rueful, one corner of her mouth twitching. “It seems silly now. A tea? That’s going to fix the inherent problems of dissatisfaction and envy? How naive. But part of me was still the girl who watched Edwin put a gun to my husband’s head. I was obsessed with avoiding that. So I synthesized a brew based on local plants.”
She glances up at me. “That’s how Robert and I first met—I worked a summer term at his family’s company while studying pharmacy and biomedical science. I devised the brew, and we tested it ourselves, naturally.” Her eyes twinkle. “That was the fun part. Then Robert hired Henry to join the Second Settlement and continue perfecting the tea while convincing them to adopt it as part of their lifestyle.”
“Which he did.”
“Very successfully, yes. Now here’s where your theory slips, just a little. You believe someone from the Second Settlement broke off and turned the two teas into narcotics, and that was the birth of the hostiles.”
“I know that the original hostiles did come from the settlement.”
“True, but your version is a little more … innocent than the truth, I fear.” She sips her coffee and settles in. “Shortly after Henry returned, my husband’s family began joint research with a European firm. They came across my Second Settlement study, and they were fascinated. They saw wider uses for the tea, beneficial uses, and they sent researchers in, posing as Rockton residents. We would have rather sent Hendricks back but…”
“They wanted their own people.”
“And they got that, without argument, because Hendricks was conveniently dead.”
“Ah.”
“Yes, ah. Had he died after they asked to send in a researcher, we’d have seen a connection. But his accident occurred before they suggested it.”
“They came prepared.”
“Evidently, and as you have guessed, this European company plays the black-hat role in my story. Which you will have every reason to doubt. It’s an obvious ploy, isn’t it? Blame some shadowy foreign corporation.”