iv. the heiress
There is a boy in her garden and he's cutting up her flowers.
Miranda sees him from her window. She does not care about the plants-she had wanted to prove she could make something grow, and once she had she'd washed her hands and left it to the gardeners-but she cares that he is not doing his job correctly. He is too friendly, too familiar, slope-shouldered and dark with sun. Peasant stock. She can find nothing admirable in his plainness, the way he smiles at her and says his name is Niket.
She keeps talking to him anyway.
Father forbids her to have friends, so they meet in the garden shed, the wine cellar, the boiler room. He is talkative in the worst ways-endless lengths of small dreams and smaller futures. His eyes glaze when she speaks of philosophy, hard sciences, the progress of man. She resents that she has to shrink to fill his world, and endures it all the same.
(She could leave, but her hands ache to remember what it feels like to be a part of something genuine; ache too badly for her to go. She can make herself compact, can crush herself to fit those futures if it meant she was no longer owned by her blood.)
Miranda hates the way Niket always smells of rich living earth; the way her skin hums with memory. She hates the way they fit together. His lips are chapped and his fingers are rough and she hates his hesitation, the gentleness he owns to his chattel-roots, damp mouths and sheets of sweat and the way the day's dirt transfers into the crevices of her skin. He murmurs his small dreams into the hollow of her neck, prayers of simple love and devotion and all the things she knows nothing about. He leaves her as imperfect as he is.
"Pretty soon now, Mira," he says into her crown of black curls, and she smiles, small and honest and rare. "Just us. We can go anywhere."
But when the day comes, she goes to the meeting spot with packed bags and money hoarded for this moment, waits and waits and waits-and he never shows. Her father rolls up in an Audi, all sleek and menace, hands white-knuckled on the steering wheel, and she knows that it is done.
She does not see Niket again. Like her flowers, he is gone.
"I'm not a monster, Miranda. I gave him a choice," her father explains, chilly as scalpel steel. He gives her a look that freezes, one that says she should have known better, and she takes it with head bowed and eyes averted because it's true. "Can you guess which one he took?"
"Money triumphs over love," he adds. "Don't ever forget that."
She won't.
In the spring, the new gardener tills her flowers to make room for ornamental evergreens, and she resolves never to get her hands dirty again.