Her name is Victoria Winters, nothing but wide green eyes, hair blacker than the Collinsport frosts, and a modest blue suitcase to her name, and Carolyn is caught in some kind of tide when she finds her gracing the staircase. An outsider, perhaps - though the softness in her stance bears no echoes of the hustle and bustle of Manhattan, or even Boston, for what it's worth.
But she's lived. An orphan, in a city with nothing but letters as to clues of her place in the world. It's something Carolyn's always known, and a contrast to the seaside estate that has a hold on her: assets of a dying breed, her very bones rooting her to the floor, the walls, the roof. Victoria is proof that the world exists beyond the maps and the movies.
Victoria has lived. And that's what matters.
"Small town life isn't all it's cracked up to be," Carolyn tells her. Chirps. She smiles, perched at the edge of Victoria's bed, but her eyes fall to the floor and she tucks a golden lock of hair behind her ear in distraction. "You know, I - I don't care what my mother wants. I don't want to settle. I can't let her keep making my decisions for me."
A pause, poignant for Carolyn, and she allows herself a glance at Victoria before bubbling over with giggles. "Oh, I don't mean to bore you. Look at us. Here you are, all sophisticated while I ramble about things that don't matter."
For a moment, Victoria says nothing - a mercy which Carolyn means to thank her for, but Victoria instead says, "You're lucky."
"What do you mean?"
"Everything you need is right here," she explains. "I traveled hundreds of miles for even an inkling of who I am, or where I'm from - when, by some other perspective, I could just be a girl longing to get out of New York." She laughs. "It's strange how we always seem to run from the things we've had all along."
That night, Carolyn is no closer to bending the bars around Collinsport, Maine as a whole, but the shades are up and a beam of light spreads across the ground and cuts across the sea.
Women on the cliff, chilled from the wind and soaked in the salt of the sea: morbid though it was, Carolyn had always found something romantic in the story of the widows. Caught up in a gilded tower of her own, she'd felt the chords struck of a love mourned, one she'd never truly had. And here (sometimes, perhaps, a stray thought and a squint of her eyes as she looks out on the horizon), it she understands the hope in waiting for it to return. A frozen fire fills her fingertips and itches its way through her arms, stomach in knots by the time it reaches her insides, boiling over into a giddy smile.
"I'm glad you're here, Vicki," are, all at once, the only words not burned like a wick inside of her.
Money flows like wine straight through the Collins veins, and throughout childhood, Carolyn was no exception. Any desire, regardless how ludicrous, was granted. Entrapments, part of Carolyn thinks now, but security. Proof she's here, proof she, too, lived. But it's life and longing and security with no chains, no shackles, that Carolyn sees in Victoria inexplicably, and she's here, isn't she? Victoria is hers.
"Please don't leave," she says.
"Well, I'm not planning on it." And the two share a grin.
And perhaps Victoria is not her white knight, content as she seems to keep her horses stabled and her sword sheathed, but the strength is there, stability in willowy limbs and kind eyes, quiet smiles through David's tricks and Roger's hurricanes of liquor. Perhaps Victoria will not sweep her off her feet and carry her into the sunset, but there's a moment at breakfast when their knees touch and Victoria blushes, looks into her coffee, and chuckles - and Carolyn considers herself certifiably swept.
Victoria starts to utter a quick, "Sorry," but Carolyn cuts her off succinctly, coyly: "Don't apologize."
Without warning, without words, Victoria reaches over and laces their fingers together. Loosely, comfortably. Carolyn believes that this is what a soothed wanderlust feels like.
They say nothing else of it, though when Carolyn places herself next to Victoria at dinner, she swears she can see a hint of pink rise into the porcelain of her cheeks. Imagined, perhaps, but to survive at Collinwood, one grows accustomed to seeing things that otherwise are not there.
(In fact, Carolyn's imagination runs rampant. Thoughts that make her shiver, tremble, shake as though her blankets are laced with ice and Victoria lies beneath them, lips parted and chest heaving. Thoughts that make her dig her nails into the sofa in Burke Devlin's hotel room, scratch and grasp onto the last piece of reality as she's done up to the nines in red, red like the way he kisses her, red as she thinks of Victoria, red as she thinks of them. Red as she stares, mascara-stained eyes boring into the mirror later that night, clutching desperately onto that one last taste, a little lighter, a little sweeter, wondering if she was on his lips all along.
Red like the lipstick she smears across her mouth, and red like the way she shouts at Victoria, a betrayal on their family - but Victoria cannot have Burke because Victoria belongs to her.
She does not say this, but Carolyn can hear it because Carolyn knows it's there.)
"Vicki," she calls. "Vicki, please, I need to talk to you. Vicki, I -" Carolyn's hand rests in a fist on the wood of Victoria's door late one night.
She hears a rustle of bedsheets, sees a light flick on under the door, and, "Carolyn?" before the door opens, and Carolyn falls against Victoria, and for all of her caresses, they cannot stop Carolyn's strangling sobs through her chest.
"Carolyn? Carolyn, what's wrong?" Victoria asks. There's a sense of satisfaction, comfort, fascination and wonder all at once at the desperation in Victoria's words. Even when she chides, "Do you know how late it is?" it's halfhearted, and Carolyn knew she would let her in. She's hers, after all.
"Vicki, don't go," is all she can murmur. The tears flow down her cheeks, and Victoria maneuvers the two to sit on the edge of her bed - like always - and Carolyn buries her face in the crook of Victoria's neck, feeling cool hands idly stroke her hair. Time stands still.
"Carolyn, what are you talking about?"
"Just don't go, can't you promise me that? Promise me you won't leave."
"If this is about Burke -"
"Vicki, please!"
She's left her window open, and it's begun to rain. There's a sprinkle on the windowsill that catches Victoria's attention, and Carolyn speculates that regret is the reason that she rises from the bed so slowly, dodging the small damp spot on the carpet to close the window.
Hope. She hopes.
When she returns, Victoria kneels in front of Carolyn, reaching out to clutch her hand. "Why don't you tell me what you're talking about?"
Carolyn lifts an arm, dries her eyes, and forces a hollow laugh from her throat. "I just - I thought with Burke and all these things changing - you know how silly I am."
Victoria does not comment on Carolyn's state, silly or not, and instead reaches forward to draw Carolyn's bangs away from her face. There's a warm, honest, "I'm not going anywhere."
She has David to teach, after all, companionship - and she'd vowed to herself that she'd never be done until she discovered the secret of her family. Responsibilities rattled off that Carolyn feels that she's heard dozens of times. This time, she has to will them to comfort her. Victoria will not leave. Not because Victoria is hers, but because Victoria said so.
She did not promise. Victoria will leave.
In the meantime, Carolyn allows herself one slip, one chance, once to simply lean over and place her lips on Victoria's skin. Her cheek, chaste enough, and Victoria's lack of embarrassment provides her more solace than her lack of assurance.
(It's only later, months upon months later, when Carolyn stands upon Widows' Hill, that she can't shake the feeling that her life is moving in reverse. The acidic nagging in her stomach had proved correct, and Victoria had left. Victoria is gone, and Carolyn recognizes it as a step forward, a family made for herself. Perhaps she was too dusty, Carolyn thinks, too warn, too thin, to pale from her time in the tower. Too something, too obvious, too eager, too much waiting, too much yelling too much red.
There is no family to be found in Carolyn Stoddard, only patterns in her veins and shackles still at her ankles. Only towers and damsels and stories of white knights and widows on a hill, waiting, longing, wilting, complacent in their emptiness.
Perhaps she understands why they never moved forward themselves.)