Free Silhouette of a Sparrow by Molly Beth Griffin Page B

being seen by other hotel guests and confused my own mind with constant lying, Hannah would be sure to find out what I was doing and whom I was doing it with. So I would need to be more careful. I would need to wait awhile before seeing Isabella again.
    The thought set off a pang inside me—Isabella was joy and excitement and adventure and everything else seemed dull in comparison—but there was no way around it.
    After I delivered the thread I excused myself to my room. I wrote a note telling Isabella that I was sorry but I needed a little time to let Hannah’s suspicion subside before we went out together again. I rang for Avery, our willing messenger, and asked him to deliver it.
    He noticed my long face when he took the note from me at the door of the suite.
    “Does the girl know?” he asked, his voice hesitant to address me so informally.
    But formality at this point seemed ridiculous. He was a friend now, at least when the Harringtons weren’t watching.
    “Not yet. I want to keep it that way.”
    “Right, right. Well, let me know when you think it’s safe. I’ll fetch her for you.”
    I smiled.
    “She’s a gem, isn’t she,” he said. “Our Bella?”
    “The best.”

    He turned to go.
    “Avery?” I said. He turned in the hallway. “Thank you.”
    “No problem, Miss.”
    I swallowed hard and then corrected him. “Garnet.”
    He paused, then looked right and left. The hall was empty. His eyes came up to meet mine and he nodded once. Then he said, in a low voice, “Right, Garnet.”
    I closed the door slowly and then leaned back on it. After a moment of pouting I went back to my room and set myself up at the writing desk, vowing to stay occupied for a few days or maybe even a week. I’d catch up on my reading, I decided, and my correspondence. There was so much trouble going on at home and I’d hardly thought to worry myself with any of it since meeting Isabella. Now it rushed back to me and I felt compelled to send reassuring and distracting letters to my parents, to Aunt Rachel, to Alice, to Teddy. I started with my parents, composing for them a happy letter about the lake and the weather and my harmless little job and the progress of my needlepoint. It seemed like fiction. Like writing about another life. Another girl.
    I’d just have to pretend to be that other girl for a while, until Hannah stopped looking at me with questions in her eyes every time I set foot outside the hotel. And even though that other girl was the girl I’d been for years, being her now was like acting a part in a play.
    Actually, I thought, it was always like acting a part in a play. I just didn’t realize it .

Red-Tailed Hawk
    ( Buteo jamaicensis)
    During that long week of self-imposed estrangement from Isabella, the hat shop was my refuge. Oddly, the fussy little store with its mother-hen proprietor and its constant stream of feminine customers liberated me from what I’d always thought of as the woman’s world. There, I was free from the confinement of “home,” free from idle hours and dull company and mundane work. My hands were kept busy unpacking boxes and arranging displays and handling money; my mind was always occupied helping customers and making change and tallying receipts; my quiet nature was stretched by the constant interactions with strangers and as I learned to navigate the unique relationship between employee and boss.
    The job served as a distraction from so many things—the troubles I heard about in letters from home (and the progress that I didn’t dare believe in), the difficulties of
living with the Harringtons, the knowledge that my time with Isabella was limited and already slipping away, and the decisions (especially the answer to an important question) I would have to make once I arrived home at the end of the summer, a mere six weeks away. But the job was much more than a distraction, too. The work filled me up with a sense of competence, gave me a taste of precious independence. I