Ghost Flower Read Online Free Page B

whispered to Nina as she lay asleep in my arms in the emergency room waiting for someone to see us.
    And when they did—
    I shook myself out of the memory and realized I was gripping the silver picture frame so hard the edges bit into my palms.
    I set it down carefully, in the exact spot I’d taken it from on the top of the piano, the way I would have if I’d been cleaning this house and not been a guest in it. Over my shoulder I checked on Bain and Bridgette and saw they were now leaning side by side against the railing. I raised the lacquered cover of the piano keyboard on its hinges, and my fingers tapped lightly across the cool smoothness of the keys.
    “Do you play?” Bridgette’s voice startled me. The cover fell with a sharp crack as I stepped away from the instrument.
    I hadn’t heard her—heard them—come in, but now she was standing right next to me. “A little. One of my foster parents…” I said.
    “
One
of your foster parents?” Bridgette asked, her interest obviously quickening.
    “It doesn’t matter,” I said, poorly concealing that her interest unnerved me. “I don’t play much. It’s just this piano is so—pretty.”
    “Yes,” Bridgette agreed. “It used to be in our grandmother’s house, but she decided she didn’t want to see it anymore. So we moved it up here.” She was watching me with an intensity and curiosity that made me feel like I was an insect pinned on a microscope slide.
    I tried to strike a casual pose, moving to put my hands into my back pockets but remembering too late that one of them had been ripped off by Roman that afternoon.
    Only that afternoon. It felt like a lifetime ago.
    Instead I twined them behind me. “Do either of you play?” I asked to shift her attention.
    “Bridgette is an accomplished pianist,” Bain said.
    Her eyes didn’t leave me. “You don’t play at all? What about tennis?”
    I frowned. “Tennis? Nope.”
    “Horses? Do you ride?”
    I couldn’t help but laugh. “Sure. There are a lot of foster homes with stables.” I tilted my head toward the balcony. “What did you decide out there?”
    Bain and Bridgette exchanged a look, as though they were having a conversation without words. She said, “Let’s discuss it over dinner. I’m starving.”

CHAPTER 6
    M y most recent definition of dinner had been eating things that came out of cans off of paper plates with a plastic spoon.
    Bain and Bridgette’s version of dinner was a little different. As we sat down, Bain informed me that Bridgette had gone to Paris to attend culinary school the summer after her senior year of high school. She downplayed it—“It was mostly just basic sauces and knife skills”—but she was a really good cook.
    Macaroni au gratin avec lardon
, I learned, was a fancy way of saying macaroni and cheese with bacon in it, but this wasn’t like any mac and cheese I’d ever had. Bridgette baked it in the oven, so it had a golden bread-crumb crust, and the saucy part managed to be delicate and smoky and cheesy all at once. I ate two plates of it, and Bain kept up. Despite saying she was hungry, Bridgette mostly pushed the pasta around with her fork while shooting furtive glances at me.
    Finally I couldn’t take it. I stopped mid-bite and let my fork fall into my plate. It made a sharp noise, and Bridgette jumped slightly. “Why do you keep staring at me like that?” I demanded.
    To her credit she didn’t deny it. She said, “I’m wondering how you digest your food hunched over, gulping it like that.”
    I was eating like the people I knew ate, face close to my plate, left arm curved around it to protect it, fingers of my right hand wrapped around the handle of my fork. “What’s wrong with how I eat?”
    “It’s not that something is wrong. It’s just—” She laid her fork down carefully, pushed her plate forward and crossed her arms in front of her. “I was just thinking about how much work this is going to take. Every detail is going to