"Money isn't the root of all evil," my father says. It's a Sunday, day of long dinners and grand pronouncements. I can see the gray city spread out below us, buildings locked with buildings and the slow creep of afternoon vehicular progress, great gulping belches of smoke spewed forth into the air. On Sundays all the lights in the city are lit. Because of my father, we can live high above the commonest places in the city, comfortable and discreet.

"One day you'll be grateful," my father says: but it's not this day.

He looks at me askance, and probably has forever, since the day I was born. Sometimes I'm afraid it's because he sees my dreams in unsubtle broadcast, mapped out on the tall blank walls of the Gold Room, which he keeps empty. My father's rituals aren't exactly solemn but they are ubiquitous, stamped fervently all through his house. Our house. The house he bought with all that money.

There are exactly one hundred rooms in this house—I counted. It took me one hundred days, one room per day, making sure of them all in red pen on yellow notepad. One hundred is a round but intimidating number, my father's kind of figure.

On Sundays my father pulls his fingers through my hair with obstinate remorse, like rubbing salt in an old wound. I don't look anything like my father and this troubles him.

At least I don't look anything like my mother, either. Both of them have dark hair, not gold wire like straw in a tangle that grows and grows because no one can cut it. My father has hazel eyes and my mother has blue. They have regular, if different, features, noses and ears and cheekbones and teeth and mouths. My father is a man, my mother a woman. Even though she was from the lowest outskirts of the city and my father hates the smell of poverty, he married my mother. Thirteen years ago. That's what I know.

"Because," my mother explains, "I could turn a room full of garbage into gold."

It seems a good reason.

I'm the last to know the true story, how my mother's father promised she could spin straw to gold, or anything else at that, if it could be fed into the old spinning wheel he'd found in some far-off junkyard.

"Can you do it now?" I ask my mother.

She purses her lips tight together. "Not today," she says.

"Or today?" I ask her.

"No," my mother says. "Not now."

It must be because the spinning wheel is gone. I've been to every single one of the one hundred rooms and I've never seen it. I've never seen my grandfather or the elusive gold my mother wove to win my father's heart.

If I ever marry a woman I'll give her a spinning wheel she won't have to use. If ever marry a man I'll pay him in golden stars. I'm pretty sure that's how it works.

I can hear music coming from somewhere far off in the city, but I've never been down there, all the way down there. Faeries, my mother says. White dragons. Cats made of metal and fur in the deepest heart of the city, where the pipes guzzle to a constant electric hum and the pavement is always warm, worn by the soles of many feet.

"But from here," my mother always tells me, "we can see the stars."

My father built a room just for that purpose with the money my mother spun for him. Its ceiling is nothing but glass, and on Sunday nights we eat together under the inky night sky.

"Your hair reminds me of the stars," my mother says, braiding it one night in front of the mirror.

"Tell me our story," I say.

"Please," my mother scolds.

"Tell me the story—please," I say.

"Once upon a time, I won your father's heart away," my mother begins, the same as always, routine as a circle, complete as a spinning wheel, slow and easy as feeding thread. "When this house had only two rooms, when I was little older than you are now. I didn't know I could do it, but promises must be kept."

"And you loved him," I say.

"Oh—yes. I loved him," she says.

"And he loved you," I say.

My mother slips one of her rings into my hair. "He loved what I could do," she says. "Isn't that the same?"

I lean back into my mother's arms, stare up at the sky. My father is somewhere else in the big house, running his fingers over mirror-frames, candlesticks, crowns and lamps and jewelry, piles and piles of gold wire I've never even seen. I tug at my collar and fall asleep with my head in my mother's lap; as I dream I feel her fingers threading through my ice-cold hair.

I dream of the spinning wheel I never saw, the stars I only know as distant golden coins through the roof, impossibly far and high. I look away from them and realize that the bony knees my cheek's pressed against aren't my mother's.

Mr. Rumple has come back to me.

"Money isn't the root of all evil," he agrees. "The love of money is."

I'm tired and sulking. "What?" I ask. "Why?"

"A child born of money is no child at all," Mr. Rumple explains. "I'm so sorry, so sorry to say."