CAMILA
I signed it at ten past ten at night, in a stranger's kitchen, with two old men watching and a dish towel on the chair beside me in case my hands went.
Nobody made me.
I walked down that drive on my own two legs so that nobody could ever say I was taken.
One year. That is the price, and I set it myself, and it is the only thing in my entire life that nobody arranged for me.
One year out of that house. Out of that kitchen. Off that hill.
Fifty-two Sundays at a table eleven miles away with a plate on it and nobody in the chair.
And I cannot tell my husband one word of why.
DANTE
My wife is four hundred feet away and I am not allowed to know what she paid for me.
I have the best arithmetic in three boroughs. I have spent eleven years being the man in the room who can hold nine things at once and say the sentence that ends it, and I have taken this apart two hundred times, and it does not come apart.
She built a door and left no handle on my side.
So I am going to do the one thing I have never done in my life, which is ask.
There is an old woman on that hill who signed her name in a blank in 1994 and has never told a living soul what it cost her.
There is a garden with six roses in it and one of them is planted on its own.
And there is a year to get through, and everybody in this family is going to pay for it, and not one of us is allowed to say so out loud.
This is the third book in The Thorns We Wear Series. Reading order:
A Throne of Thorns.
A Crown of Thorns.
An Empire of Thorns.
