She led the way to the morning room, then sat on one of the mauve sofas and patted the spot next to her. I hesitated, because this was new—usually when we spoke in here, she sat behind her desk and I sat in one of the chairs like we were conducting business. Finally, a split second before it got awkward, I sat down.

She leaned toward me. “How are you, Margot?”

Um. Bad? “I’m great,” I said weakly.

“How do you find life at Copeland Hall? Are you happy here? Have you been lonely? Bored?”

I’d prepared for cold, snobbish anger. I had not prepared for a painstaking examination of my emotional state.

“No,” I said. “Yeah. I mean, I’m happy. Yeah.”

She sat up and looked at me, a trace of regret in her expression. “I’ve noticed something, and I hope this doesn’t make you uncomfortable.”

Oh, sure, no chance of that. I sat frozen in place.

“It’s Barrett,” she said. “You seem to be spending a lot of time together lately.”

But not the kissing, I thought. She didn’t complain about the kissing.

“I know he’s . . . charming. But I don’t want you to feel you have to entertain him.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t feel that way.”

“It’s sweet of you to ‘hang out’ with him.” She said the phrase hang out as if it was alien slang she’d just read about on the internet. “But if he’s always lurking around and bothering you, please feel free to tell him you’re occupied with other things.”

The thought of Barrett lurking, like some mad scientist’s assistant, almost made me laugh. But that was a blip, because most of me was highly aware that there was nothing, not one thing, that was actually funny about this.

Sitting there, so close to Laura, with her studying my face, I realized what it was that I was detecting under her outwardly warm and caring manner—and it was the same thing that some little part of me was always aware of but never wanted to acknowledge. It was a shadow of something.

Something scary.

I wanted to think that I was mistaken, but I couldn’t talk myself out of it. I was too attuned to Laura’s moods, her whims, her looks. I’d spent so much time trying to please her that I knew when she was happy and when she wasn’t. And what was happening now was that she was pretending. Pretending at something big. And underneath that something, she was . . .

She was . . . sharp. Like the tip of a knife.

“It’s fine,” I said, trying to make it sound like I didn’t really care. “He’s nice.”