Cecilia stood at the top of the steps with Clara on one side and Evelyn on the other, like judges at a trial.
"I will not have this in my house," she said. Her voice was calm, and that was the worst part. "A girl who sneaks around with men behind her family's back. A girl who shames her sister."
"I haven't done anything," Lily said. She was still on her knees in the wet grass, holding her mother's cracked photograph against her chest. "I asked him to leave. I swear it. I asked him to go."
"Do not lie to me."
"I'm not."
"Clara told me everything."
"Clara is lying!"
The words came out louder than she meant. In the silence that followed, something in Cecilia's face went cold and flat.
She came down the steps, slowly, one at a time. Lily tried to stand. She was halfway up when the slap hit.
It was harder than any before. It came from her stepmother's whole arm, and Lily's head snapped sideways. She tasted blood. She heard Evelyn gasp, and then giggle, and then go quiet.
"You ungrateful little rat," Cecilia said softly. "I took you in. I fed you. I put up with you for years. And this is how you repay me."
"Please." Lily's voice broke. She dropped to her knees again, on the wet gravel, and put her hands together. She had never begged before.
She had sworn, at seventeen in a tool shed, that she never would. But she was exhausted, and her cheek was on fire, and the only home she had ever known was disappearing before her eyes.
"Please, Mrs. Thompson. I have nowhere to go. I'll do whatever you want. I'll clean, I'll cook, I'll stay out of sight. Please don't make me leave."
"Get up."
"Please."
"Get up."
Lily did not get up. She knelt there with her palms pressed together and tears running down her swollen face, in front of the three women who had made her childhood a prison.
Evelyn looked away. Clara smirked. Cecilia only looked down at her as if from a great height.
"You should have thought of that before," she said. "Pack what you can carry."
Lily stared at her.
"Pack. And go."
She stumbled to her feet. In a daze, she gathered what she could from the muddy lawn: a few clothes, her wallet with some coins, her bag of books, her mother's locket, still around her neck. She left the rest. She did not trust herself to bend again.
She walked back up the drive toward the house, because some foolish part of her still believed that somebody would stop this.
"Martha?" she called toward the dark kitchen window. "Martha, please."
The curtain moved. A figure stood behind it, hand pressed over her mouth, tears pouring down her face. Martha could not open that door. Cecilia had fired the last maid for far less.
Lily understood. She put her hand against the glass for a moment.
Then she turned and walked to the front door, the great, heavy door that her father had once imported from Italy and been so proud of.
He had run his hand over its carved panels as if it were something holy.
"Papa," she whispered. "Please."
She did not know why she said it. There was no one there.
The door was already closing.
She watched the gap narrow, the light from the hall getting thinner and thinner, until the final sliver vanished and the bolt slid home with a sound she would hear in her sleep for years.
It was her father's door. And it had been shut in her face.
She stood on the porch for a long time, with a bag over her shoulder and no idea where to go.
Then the sky opened up, and it began to pour