Chapter 1
Gizelle paused in the doorway, peering around the doorjamb.
Scarlet was angry.
Scarlet was often angry when she got the thick envelopes from the lawyer who didn’t live on the island, the one who wanted to sell the resort so Scarlet couldn’t have it anymore.
Everyone else avoided Scarlet as much as they could when those envelopes came in the mail, going about their day-to-day jobs at the resort with their eyes averted.
But Gizelle actually liked it when Scarlet was angry. The prickly feeling made her feel safe, like Scarlet’s energy was a shield that kept other bad things away.
The red-haired woman looked up when Gizelle padded into her office, and she pushed the paperwork away to force a smile.
“Gizelle,” Scarlet said, carefully gentle.
Everyone was carefully gentle with Gizelle.
Gizelle trailed around the room, touching the potted plants and the spines of the old books.
“My head was quiet this morning,” she said, coming to stand beside Scarlet and look down at the paperwork spread out in front of her. “Can we read that?”
“This isn’t very interesting,” Scarlet lied with a dry, humorless chuckle. She put it into a pile, tapping it briskly into order. “Let’s read another chapter of The Secret Garden and practice some of your letters.”
Gizelle fidgeted as Scarlet put the papers back in their dread-steeped envelope and stood up. “Ally says she learned to read as a little kid,” she said dejectedly.
“Most people do,” Scarlet said. She gave Gizelle a searching look. “You don’t have to feel bad, though. I didn’t learn to read until I was grown up, either.”
Gizelle felt brighter. “You didn’t?”
Scarlet shook her vivid head.
“Who taught you?” Gizelle asked.
“A dear friend,” Scarlet said softly. “A dear friend who knew that reading would give me what I needed to understand people.”
“I’d like to understand people,” Gizelle said wistfully.
They walked together out to the open lawn behind Scarlet’s office and settled into the grass to read. Other people seemed to prefer chairs, but Scarlet liked to sit on the ground like Gizelle did. Gizelle tucked her skirt neatly under her knees, imitating Scarlet’s pose.
“Did you grow up in a zoo, too?”
Gizelle didn’t remember the menagerie that she’d been rescued from, but she had heard enough stories to piece together where people thought she came from. A bad man had collected shifters in a prison where he did awful things to them.
No one would tell her what the awful things were.
Scarlet, opening the book in her lap, gave Gizelle an amused look under her eyelashes. Scarlet never talked about her life, not to anyone.
Scarlet’s reading voice was low and calm, and there were pictures that Gizelle could look at over her shoulder periodically. When the chapter ended, too soon, the world came back. Then it was time for writing practice.
“Can’t I learn to read without learning to write?” Gizelle asked, frowning over the disappointing mess she made copying Scarlet’s tidy handwriting.
“It has to do with how you learn,” Scarlet assured her. “How everyone learns. When you make your hands do it, it gets into your brain better.”
“Why doesn’t it look like it does in a book?” Gizelle chewed on her lip, trying to make herself finish out the page, but the letters slithered away from how she wanted them to look, and she couldn’t concentrate over the sounds crowding her head.
“Scarlet?” She pushed away the noise.
“Yes, dear?” Scarlet was thinking about the lawyer’s letter again. Gizelle could tell because of the prickles all around her.
“Do you think I could ever have a mate?”
That earned her all of Scarlet’s attention, prickles changing to little rays of surprise. “A mate?”
Gizelle picked at the edge of her paper. “Jenny and Tex and Bastian and Lydia all have mates. And Neal.” She missed Neal. Her gazelle missed Neal.
“Do you want a mate?” Scarlet asked pointedly.
“Don’t you want a mate?” Gizelle countered.
Scarlet was silent with surprise, as if no one had ever asked her that before.
“They seem really happy,” Gizelle said wistfully. “Like something they didn’t know was missing was found. I’ve got a lot of missing parts, would a mate fix them?”
“I don’t know if a mate could bring your memories back,” Scarlet said frankly, but slowly, like she was thinking carefully about her answer. “And I don’t know if you’d want them to. And there are... other parts to having a mate.”