Our Nell
In this excerpt from the unpublished novel manuscript , Nell Graufeld confronts the childhood logic that taught her to mistake control for safety, and begins to understand why Moira’s strangeness has always both fascinated and wounded her.
She’d made herself a scholar of romance, a savant de l’amour, but refused to feel love. That was the real betrayal. She’d buried herself in medieval legend, in forgotten queens, wandering knights, and women who turned into trees, birds, and shadows. But when the question came: what do you want, Nell? She answered like a politician, a teacher, a woman who didn’t trust herself. She wanted to be safe more than she wanted to be seen.
Now she wanted to scream.
She saw herself as Moira used to draw her: wild-eyed, hearts on her sleeve, scribbled stars in the margins. That girl had wanted the whole fiery thing: passion, surrender, and the mythic storm. Where had she gone? No, that was the wrong question. When had she been buried, and by whose hand?
She stood abruptly. The chair legs scraped across the tile. Her heart pounded because she despised herself with the same cold, academic contempt she reserved for shallow readings and lazy students.
You coward, she thought. You played it safe and ended up outsmarting yourself. You ironed yourself out. You eliminated surprise, reduced risk, and kept emotion in quarantine. You mistook control for maturity and called the rest excess. And for what?
An apartment she could never quite bring herself to decorate. Professional fluency. Predictable nights. A life pared down to what she could manage.
“Stupid,” she said under her breath.
She crossed to the window and pressed her hand against the glass. Then, without thinking, she said aloud, “I was such an idiot, Moira, and you knew it. You always knew.” Nell let herself cry just long enough for some feeling to emerge. Was that a hint of self-compassion and warmth, and the faintest rustle of something else, like forgiveness?
Then she was nine again, on the stairs, hearing herself crying. That year, her parents argued almost constantly, mostly about where her father spent the night. He came home late, smelling of booze, or didn’t come home at all. Sometimes it was from the bar, but mostly it was Sängerbund Hall, and always about some vague masculine need for freedom or to “decompress.”
Years later, Nell realized he was out with other women.
One night, the shouting grew louder than usual. Nellie sat at the bottom of the stairs, clutching her stuffed bear. She didn’t understand exactly what they were talking about, but she knew enough to be scared. Jesus Otto, what the hell kind of man are you? Why can’t you spend time with me? With your children! Then Tina was there, fifteen, red-eyed and furious. She stormed into the kitchen, where it was happening, and started shouting at Otto, calling him a pig, a coward, and a fucking liar.
She wept, at first quietly, then harder, louder. She couldn’t stop. The room vibrated with voices, and she didn’t know where to go. She cried so hard she was almost screaming. That’s when Arlette snapped. Her voice cracked like glass. “God damn it, Tina, either shut this kid up or get her the fuck out of here!”
And Tina, normally so gentle and patient, grabbed her by the arm and yanked her down the hallway, half-dragging her. Nellie stumbled to keep up, her shoulder burning.
In her bedroom, Tina shut the door and turned, her face blotchy with rage. She stood over her little sister, breathing hard. “Shut up, Nell, shut up! Stop fucking crying!” she hissed. “Jesus, Nell. Grow up. At least you have a mom.”
Nell blinked. Tina’s voice trembled. She looked like she might cry, too, but didn’t. “Otto wrecked my life when my mom left. You don’t even know. You don’t fucking know what it’s like.”
The words came fast, jagged, soaked in grief and injustice. Shame felled her like a boot to the head.
No more tears fell, and Nell’s body went rigid. She stopped crying and never cried again. But something inside her clicked that day. She understood that her feelings didn’t matter. They didn’t change anything. Nobody cared.
After that, she began explaining things to herself before others could. She started sorting and labeling her emotions like museum artifacts. She preferred everything tidy, packaged, and easily explained. She avoided risk. She became what her teachers called a precocious child, a bit perfectionistic, but way ahead of the others. She traded vulnerability for a clarity that made her powerful, but it also left her isolated.
She hadn’t thought about that night in years. But now, the whole scene came back to her with unbearable clarity: the tension in her mother’s voice, the cruel elegance of her father’s indifference. How he’d bought her a necklace with her name on it later that week, like he remembered who she was.
She’d worn it like a badge. On one side, Eleanore was engraved in fancy script. On the other side, she carved Fuck You with her father’s pen knife, ruining the point.
But she also remembered that Tina wouldn’t meet her eyes for days, even after she apologized. Tina cried as much about what happened as she did on the day of the argument. Since then, Tina and Maria have been her fierce and loyal protectors, especially when Otto was around.
Otto, her God-damned father. Your father’s larger than life, everyone said, a real man’s man. In reality, her father was a scoundrel. A fucking cliché. Still, her heart beat faster whenever he entered the room, as if she were a character in some Greek play, doomed to adore the one who ruined her.
He’d ruined them all, of course, in the slow, selfish way men do when they can’t stop feeding their hunger. And she, bright, observant, meticulous Nell, had watched it all: how it broke her mother, who still dressed beautifully even as she cried. She’d seen how it scattered her brothers, whom she had never known and who were gone almost before she could remember them. She understood, most of all, how love becomes a ledger.
She’d learned to choose a man who won’t abandon you. Choose someone carefully, someone loyal, dull, and predictable, someone who won’t make you disappear. And so she’d chosen Nathan, not because he stirred her blood but because he didn’t.
She saw now how the calculation had begun. The other girls had flirted with chaos, letting themselves fall for artists, musicians, or complicated boys with beautiful bodies and sexy eyes. But fear and anger forced Nell to turn away from all that.
She’d thought: If I can’t trust desire, I’ll trust structure. I’ll choose someone whose inner life I can map. Nathan had never surprised her. That was the point. And it worked until it didn’t. Until the carefulness collapsed into absence. Until Nell’s heart grew so tight in its cage that it forced Nathan to flee. She pressed her knuckles to her mouth. The truth hurt; she’d always known it and refused to admit it, but now it had to be reckoned with.
Then, she unexpectedly thought of Uncle Anselm, Moira’s father, Otto’s opposite in so many ways. Soft-spoken, private, and strange, Uncle Anselm was an artist in a studio no one entered. He never flirted or caused a scene. Instead, he just drifted thoughtfully, as if haunted by his own odd paintings.
And she realized she hated him a little. Not for anything he did, but because he made it possible for Moira to drift. His silences let her become otherworldly.
While Nell had been memorizing the rules of survival, Moira had been floating above them, sketching lines so delicate they nearly vanished. Anselm had raised a daughter with permission to evaporate. Her own father had taught her never to let go. That, she thought bitterly, was the difference.
That was why Moira could sit in moonlight and conjure symbols from thin air, while Nell had to justify herself in footnotes. That was why Moira’s pain looked like a beautiful mystery, while hers was cut in sharp relief.
