“I thought that was the extra sugar.”
“That’s just dried cooking herbs.
Strong-smelling ones — best to leave it shut.” She smiled, and the smile stopped at her mouth and never reached her eyes, and in ten years I had never once seen her look at me the way she looked at me over that jar.
It was the look of someone guarding something.
I said something breezy and stepped away, and I did not sleep that night, not for one minute, because I had understood, finally, that the woman I had treated as my mother for a decade had a jar in my kitchen she would not let me touch, and a reason to keep me from touching it.
Chapter 6 — Five-Thirty in the Morning