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Even as I knelt to pick up the shards, I heard the
sound of fast-moving feet. Amelie and Anastasia burst into the sun room, one right after the other. But it was Anastasia who spoke first.

“You dreadful girl,” she cried, as she moved quickly to her mother. “What have you done?”

“Nothing,” I gasped out. “That is, I didn’t mean . . .”

To call you here in the first place,
I thought. Not at such a terrible cost.

I had made a wish and it had been answered. Didn’t that make their misery all my fault? I felt a sudden sharp pain as one of the broken pieces of the saucer cut into my hand.

“How dare you?” Anastasia demanded. “How dare you lie? Look at her. You’ve made her cry, and she never does that. Not even on the day the king made her marry the queen’s man. My mother is not a coward. She is brave and strong. You must have done something truly terrible to make her do this, and I want to know what it is right now.”

“Oh, stop it, Anastasia,” Amelie said. “Can’t you see she’s cut herself?”

“I don’t care if she bleeds to death,” Anastasia all but shouted.

“No one is going to bleed to death,” Chantal de Saint-Andre said in a calm and terrible voice. With the backs of her hands, she wiped the tears from her pale cheeks with quick, angry gestures, as if as furious with herself as Anastasia was with me. “Please stop shouting, Anastasia. My head hurts enough as it is.”

Anastasia took a stumbling step back, as if her mother’s words had made her lose her balance.

“You are defending her,” she whispered. “That horrible girl made you cry and now you are taking her side.”

“Cendrillon is not a horrible girl,” her mother answered, as she got up from the chair. “And there is no question of taking sides. I broke a cup and saucer, and that’s all there is to that.”

Before I realized what she intended, she knelt beside me. “Let me see your hand, Cendrillon.”

“It’s nothing,” I protested, though I knew the cut was deep, a great slash across one palm. Blood flowed over its surface to trickle through my fingers. “If you will just let me go for Old Mathilde.”

“I’ll go,” Amelie offered now. She picked up the tray.

“What are you doing?” Anastasia shrieked. “Put that down.”

“Be quiet, Anastasia,” Amelie said briskly. She walked quickly from the room, her shoes making sharp sounds against the hardwood floor.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, as I gazed at my hand, cradled between my stepmother’s. “I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. I’m so sorry.”

“I think that’s enough apologies for one afternoon,” Chantal said, her tone the brisk match of Amelie’s. “It is only a cup and saucer.”

Oh, no. It is much, much more than that,
I thought. And if she knew how much, one thing seemed certain:
This woman I had wished for could never learn to love me.

“There is still the plate” I said.

Chantal sat back, still cradling my hand in hers. “I believe you are growing light-headed,” she said. “What are you talking about?”

“The plate,” I said once more. “With the seed cake on it. It has sunflowers, too. Not everything is broken.”

“I see,” my stepmother said, and for the second time that day, she looked into my eyes. This time, I was the one who saw my own reflection: an image of a girl just on the cusp of womanhood.

A girl with tears and secrets in her eyes.

There were no more chores for me the rest of that day, nor for several more besides. The cut was both long and deep; my hand was stiff and sore. At Old Mathilde’s insistence, I slept on a cot in a corner of the kitchen, much as I had done when I was a child. She could keep a better eye on me that way, she said, without having to climb up and down all the stairs to my room at the very top of the house. Too many stairs were hard on old bones, or so she claimed.

The days slid into August, and the weather stayed hot and fine. Still the ice inside my stepmother did not quite thaw. Anastasia stopped speaking to me altogether, not even to give me orders. The day she discovered that Amelie had traded a fancy dress to one of the village girls so that she might have a simple one to tramp around outside in, she all but stopped speaking to Amelie, as well. In her new dress, which she felt free to get as dirty as she liked, a sturdy pair of boots, and her sun hat, Amelie took to prowling the grounds. She was always popping up in unexpected places, poking into long-forgotten corners both inside and out. There were times, and many of them, too, when it seemed to me that she was searching for something.

Slowly, the wound on my hand healed. But I
could not quite forget the wound I had seen in my stepmother’s eyes. A wound I greatly feared I had helped to inflict myself.

“I just keep thinking it’s all my fault,” I said one day to Old Mathilde. It was midmorning, the heat of the day not yet upon us. Old Mathilde was standing at the stove stirring a great kettle of blackberry jam. My hand back to normal now, I was shucking ears of corn.

“If I hadn’t wished for them, they wouldn’t have come. And if they hadn’t come, they wouldn’t all be so unhappy.”

“Tut, now,” Old Mathilde said, as she added sugar to the pot. “Nothing is ever quite as simple as that and you should know it. You sound like your father when you speak so.”

I yanked at a corn husk. It gave way with a shrieking sound. “There’s no need to insult me,” I said. “I’m just trying to figure out what to do to make things right.”

Old Mathilde’s spoon circled in the pot like a hawk after a mouse. “What makes you think that responsibility lies with you alone?” she asked. “You made a wish, that much is true, but you did not wish for anyone to be made unhappy. You made a wish for love. In my experience, such wishes have a way of coming true in the end, which is not the same as saying the journey isn’t difficult and long.”

I sat for a moment, pondering her words. The noise of Old Mathilde’s spoon, swishing against the bottom of the cast-iron pot, was the only sound.

“Have I ever told you the story of how your
parents met?” she inquired at last. If she had asked me if I realized I had suddenly grown two heads, I could not have been more surprised.

“Never,” I said. “And you know that perfectly well.”

“No one ever dreamed that they would love each other,” Old Mathilde went on, as if I hadn’t spoken at all. “Least of all Etienne and Constanze themselves. Their marriage was arranged to help secure an alliance, of course. But I think it’s fair to say that your father loved your mother from the first moment that he saw her, and that for her to love him took no longer.”

“Love at first sight,” I said, my voice hushed, the ears of corn I should have been shucking entirely forgotten. “It really happens, then?”

“On occasion.” Old Mathilde nodded. “I’ve heard it runs in families, if you must know. Your mother’s love was much like her garden. Its roots went deep, though it wasn’t always showy. But your father’s love was like a diamond, hard and bright, so dazzling it hurt the eyes to look upon it. His love for your mother, hers for him, were the greatest astonishments, the greatest treasures, of his life.”

“And I took them away,” I said, as I felt a swift, hot pain spear straight through my heart.

“That is certainly what Etienne believes, or what he says he does,” Old Mathilde answered. “Help me with this now.”

She lifted the pot from the heat, and, together, we worked to ladle the steaming liquid into jars. Carefully, Old Mathilde spooned hot wax atop each
one to seal the jam in, then set them in a neat row on the pantry shelf. They glowed like purple jewels.

“They are beautiful,” I said. “Can we have pancakes for breakfast tomorrow morning?”

“I believe we might do that,” Old Mathilde answered as she put an arm around my shoulders.

“I’ll do the washing up,” I said, as I leaned against her. “You should go sit down. You’ve been standing up most of the morning.”

“I believe we might do that, too,” Old Mathilde said with a smile. She sat down in the chair I had vacated. I filled a pitcher of water from the kitchen pump, then poured it into the jam kettle.

“Wait a few minutes,” Mathilde instructed. “Let the water do its work while the pot cools down. Come and sit beside me for a moment. There is something more I wish to say.”

I dried my hands on my apron and sat down across the table from her. Old Mathilde reached across the table and took my hands in hers.

“Your mother loved your father, Cendrillon. To the end of her last breath, with all her heart. And she loved you just as much as she loved him. That kind of love does not simply pack its bags and depart, even when the heart that brought it into being ceases to beat. Love so joyfully and freely given can never be taken away. It is never truly gone.”

“Then where is it?” I whispered. “Why does it seem so hard to find?”

“It is all around you,” Old Mathilde said. “It lives
in every beat of your own heart. This is what your mother knew your father would never understand, for she saw him truly, and she foresaw that his grief would dazzle just as his love did. It would blind him.

“To heal, we must do more than grieve. We must also find a way to mourn.”

“I’m not so sure I understand the difference,” I said.

Old Mathilde gave my hands a squeeze. “I am not surprised, for the difference is a fine one. But when you figure it out, you will know what to do about many things, I think.

“Remember that yours is not the only heart that may be wishing for love.”

Late that night, I could not sleep. I might have convinced myself it was because my bedroom was too hot, for my room was right beneath the roof and the day had been warm. I might have convinced myself it was the light of the full moon, shining through my window, that was making me toss and turn so often.

I might have convinced myself of many things, if I had been willing to lie.

But because I was not, I threw back my rumpled sheet and got out of bed. I made my silent way down to the kitchen, slipped my shawl from its peg, and tucked my feet into my wooden garden clogs. I took the long, thin knife Susanne used for boning chickens from its slot in the wooden block and wrapped the blade in a towel. Then I let myself out the kitchen door, heading in the direction of the pumpkin patch. I had no need to
take a lantern, for the face of the moon shone like a beacon in the clear night sky.

Though they were far from ripe, anyone with eyes could see that, unlike last year’s wide variety, this year, each and every vine in the pumpkin patch was busy producing pumpkins of precisely the same kind. Ones just like those I had planted on my mother’s grave, in spite of the fact that I had saved no seeds from them. They glowed a deep and mysterious green in the moonlight.

I took a deep breath, then knelt down among them. Before I would be able to sleep, there was something I must discover, a task I must perform.

Sliding the knife from the towel, I sliced neatly through the stem of the pumpkin at my feet and set it upright in front of me. Then, without stopping to think and so lose my nerve, I plunged the knife through the pumpkin’s skin and into the flesh beneath, slicing first through one side, and then the other. Setting the knife on the ground at my feet, I wiggled my fingers into the gap I had made in the top, then pried the pumpkin open. The two halves parted with a high, tearing sound. The pungent smell of pumpkin rose up sharply.

Not rotten inside,
I thought.
Not rotten at all, but firm and pure and sound.
And in that moment, I had the answer to the question that had driven me here in the middle of the night in the first place. I began to weep in great choking sobs.

Please,
I thought.
Let me find a way to make my father’s
pain, his grief, release their hold. Let me find a way to help love flourish Let me understand what it means to mourn.

I knelt in the pumpkin patch until all my tears were spent, then returned to my bed and slept a dreamless sleep till morning.

“
Cendrillon.”

There were hands on my shoulders, shaking me awake.

“Cendrillon!”

Swimming up through layers of sleep, I opened startled eyes. Amelie’s flushed face was hovering over mine.

“You have to get up. You have to come and see,” she said.

“What is it?” I asked, as I struggled to sit up. “What’s wrong?”

“Where is she? Is she coming?” hissed a voice outside my door. I sat bolt upright then.

“Is that Anastasia?”

“Get dressed and be quick about it,” Amelie said. “We’ll wait for you downstairs. Don’t be long.”

She dashed from my room. I tossed back the sheets and fumbled into my clothes. I pinned my braids up with trembling fingers, then raced downstairs.

“What is it?” I asked when I reached the great hall. Amelie and Anastasia were standing, hands clasped tightly together, just inside the front door. Without a single word, Amelie grabbed my hand and the two of them tugged me outside.

“Amelie, please, tell me what it is,” I begged. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Anastasia snapped, and I actually felt a trickle of relief at her tone. At least she was sounding like her usual self Hands still linked, we rounded the corner of the house. The early morning sun smiled down on the kitchen garden.