Heavenstone 01 - The Heavenstone Secrets

hoping she would. It was late. But to my disappointment, she turned into my doorway. For a long moment, she simply stood there looking in at me. I had not yet turned off the night table lamp, so she knew I was still awake. Why was she just standing there?
    “Cassie?”
    “He’s getting worse,” she said, coming closer to my bed. “He was sobbing as I walked up the stairway with him. It broke my heart to see him like that. My chest feels as if it’s filled up with gravel. I can hardly breathe.”
    She pressed her hand to her breast and closed her eyes. I sat up quickly.
    “Are you all right?”
    “No,” she said. “And neither are you, as longas he isn’t all right. We’re more connected to one another now than ever. What makes one of us happy will make all of us happy, and what makes one of us sad or angry will do the same for all of us. How can you or I laugh in this house again? A smile is as comfortable on our faces as a moth is next to a candle flame. It can come close, but it can never settle on it without being destroyed. It makes it very hard to enjoy ourselves.”
    “I was hoping you would have a good time tonight, Cassie, and be able to put all of this out of your mind for a while.”
    “I tried. You liked Porter, didn’t you?”
    “Oh, yes. He’s very handsome.”
    “And very intelligent, very clever and witty. But mostly, he is very ambitious.”
    “Isn’t that good?”
    “Oh, yes, very good,” she said with a wry smile on her face. “Very, very good. Ambitious men are more … more cooperative.”
    “Cooperative?”
    “More agreeable, easier to get along with, because they’re so careful not to offend.”
    “So, you like him, too, then?” I pursued.
    “Yes, I like him.”
    “Then he’ll be asking you out again?”
    “Oh, we’ll see quite a bit of Porter Andrew Hall. You can count on that,” she said. “But I can’t go to sleep thinking about him anymore right now, Semantha,” she added, changing her expression to a more serious look instantly, “not after these last few moments with Daddy. He was beside himself. I helpedhim into bed, but he was mumbling and sobbing something awful.”
    She looked down, her head lowering like the head of someone resigned to a great defeat and disappointment, like the head of someone simply helpless.
    “Oh, no,” I said, the tears quickly flooding my eyes. “How terrible it must be for him. How terribly he misses Mother.”
    She raised her head quickly, her eyes brighter.“No, Semantha,” she said. “Mother’s name was not on his lips as he sank into what will surely be a night of dark dreams.”
    “What do you mean? Why wasn’t her name on his lips? What did he say?’
    “He said … Asa … Asa.”
    “He did?”
    “Yes. He’s not selfish. He’s not suffering just for himself, for his own personal loss. He’s suffering for the entire line of Heavenstones. He needs his Asa, Semantha. The Heavenstone blood in him is boiling with that need.”
    “What can we do, Cassie?”
    “We can give him his Asa.”
    “What?” I shook my head. “I don’t understand. How could there be any Asa Heavenstone now? Mother’s gone. Our children will have their fathers’ names.”
    She smiled.
    Then she turned and walked toward the doorway.
    “Cassie? They’ll have Heavenstone blood because of us, but they’ll have their fathers’ names, won’t they?”

    She paused in the doorway and turned back to me, that smile still there.
    “Not if there is no father,” she said.
    “But how can there be no father?” I asked.
    She didn’t answer. Instead, she kept her wry smile and left.
    And left me hanging by a thread over a pot of boiling confusion.

Overhaul
    I N THE MORNING , I expected to see a face of sadness and defeat on Daddy, the same face he’d had after dinner the night before, but instead, he looked bright and energetic. He was going to visit one of the stores, the one in Fayette. I didn’t know it until then, but he was going to stay overnight for a meeting the following morning. My second surprise came when Cassie told me that neither she nor I was going with him.
    “We have things to do here,” she told me.
    She didn’t tell me what they were until after Daddy had left. She had been keeping a big secret. On her own, she had contracted with the decorator Mother had used to redo some rooms in our house, and together they had planned out a major renovation of Daddy’s bedroom. Less than an hour after Daddy left, the