"Your father built it," the old woman said. "For you and your brothers. Everything careful, everything maintained. The kind of life where the ugly things happen somewhere else - outside the walls, so you never have to see them." She paused. "Very loving, what he made. Very difficult to keep up. And glass is beautiful, but it's fragile."
Annabel felt something move through her that wasn't quite fear and wasn't quite recognition - it was closer to being caught off balance. The feeling settled in her chest before she could name it.
She had been here before, this feeling. Not here on Fifth Avenue, not in conversation with a stranger, but in her own room at two in the morning when the city outside her window had gone quiet enough that she could hear the stillness inside the house. A low, wordless unease. The faint awareness of something just beyond the reach of understanding. She had never given it a name. She had always rolled over and gone back to sleep.
"What do you mean, fragile?" she asked.
"Glass breaks," the old woman said. Simply. "However beautiful, however well-tended. It breaks." Her pale eyes were steady on Annabel's face. "There is a hardship coming for you. Not today. Not tomorrow. But it's coming, and when it comes, the walls won't hold."
Annabel's pulse had quickened. She told herself this was the effect these encounters were designed to produce - vague, unsettling language, an air of certainty, the careful work of making you supply your own worst fears. Every person on earth had hardships coming. That was not prophecy. That was arithmetic.
But her father had closed a folder of papers last night when she'd come into the kitchen. And the October markets had fallen badly - she'd heard it discussed at her uncle Philip's dinner two weeks ago, voices low and careful the way men's voices got when they were talking about money and didn't want the women in the room to worry. She didn't know exactly what the crash meant for Ellsworth Trust, which had been her grandfather's institution before her father's. She knew her father was solid. She had always known that.
She had just, until this afternoon, never thought to wonder how hard he worked to appear that way.
"Everyone has hardships," she said.
"Yes." The old woman didn't disagree. "Yours will ask something specific of you. Glass, when it breaks, leaves shards." She held Annabel's gaze without looking away. "Most people walk away from the pieces. They leave the broken thing behind and start over somewhere that doesn't remind them of what they lost. That's one choice. But it means abandoning the pieces. It means never rebuilding."
Annabel was quiet. A child ran past laughing at something, trailing a parent calling after her. The ordinary world, insisting on itself.
"And the other choice?" Annabel asked.
"Pick up the pieces," the old woman said. "Learn to hold broken glass without cutting yourself." She tilted her head. "Not everyone can. Some people don't have the patience for it. Some people are too afraid of being cut again. Some people simply decide the castle isn't worth the trouble." She paused. "The question is what kind of person you are."