LOGINChapter 256MATTHEWThe house was dark when I pulled into the drive.Not late-dark, not the ordinary dark of a house where everyone's gone up to bed. Wrong-dark. No kitchen light. No hallway light. Cal kept lights on. He'd told me once, early on, that a lit house was a house where you could see who was in it, and he never let it go fully dark before Theo was down for the night.I sat in the car for one second too long, telling myself I was being careful rather than scared.Then I went in."Cal?"Nothing."Theo?"The silence had a texture to it. The specific silence of a house that nobody is currently in, which is different from the silence of a house where people are simply quiet.I went through it fast. Kitchen — empty, the apple core on the table, Cal's mug by the sink, untouched coffee gone cold. Living room — empty, the dinosaurs out on the floor in mid-formation, abandoned rather than finished. Upstairs — Theo's room empty, the bed made from this morning, the night-light off beca
Chapter 255THEOVoss worked quickly. I watched her do it with the watching that was not the same as looking, the kind where your eyes were on something but the significant part of your attention was elsewhere. I was thinking about Dad. About whether the message had reached him. About the sequence of events that would have to happen for anyone to know where we were.The thing she did did not hurt very much. Less than the blood draws at the hospital, which I had extensive experience with and which I had a complicated relationship with but had developed a practical acceptance of. This was faster than those and the equipment was smaller and she sealed it quickly when she was done."Good," she said.She closed the kit.She stood and went to the door without saying anything else, which was something I had come to understand about Voss, that she did not add words to situations when the words would not do any work. She had said what was necessary and had done
Chapter 254THEOThe woman was already in the room when they brought me back.She was standing near the wall, not near Cal, which I noticed immediately and noted. She had dark hair pulled back and blue scrubs and the specific way of standing that I had memorized over months of watching it.Bianca's way of standing.I looked at her for one moment.One moment was enough. I had seen the room. I had seen the table at the far end. I knew exactly what this was and I knew exactly what it was for, and the one moment told me everything I needed to know about whether looking longer would change any of those things.It would not.I walked past her to Cal.He was on the floor where they had put him, on his back, his arms at his sides. Someone had placed him carefully enough that his head was not at a wrong angle. His breathing was the slow even rhythm it had been in the van. Still deep under. Still the dartssleep rather than something worse.I s
Chapter 253THEOShe looked at me for a moment with the expression that was not quite anything. Not contempt, not approval. The expression of someone noting something down."My name is Voss," she said.There it was.I had not known the name before but I knew it now, from the drawings, from the green folder, from the quality of the dreams and the room in them and the specific things she had said to Bianca that Bianca had needed me to know about. The numbers in the corner of the drawings. The help through the water-sound.I kept my face still."I'd like to show you something," she said. "It won't take long.""I'm not leaving him," I said."He'll be here when you come back," she said. "I'm not going to do anything to him while you're gone. He's not useful to me right now and doing anything to him serves no purpose."I looked at Cal.He was breathing. I could see it. The specific movement of his chest, slow and even, the rhythm of s
Chapter 252THEOThe thing they put me in was dark and smelled like metal and old carpet.A van, I decided. The floor under me had the specific vibration of a vehicle engine, and the turns were the slow wide turns of something large rather than the quick turns of a car. The carpet was rough against my palms when I put my hands flat on it to steady myself during a turn.I counted.Dr. Fisher had told me about counting a long time ago, before I understood what it was for. She had said that when feelings got very large, bigger than the available space for them, numbers could be a container. Not because numbers fixed anything. Because numbers required just enough of your attention to keep the feelings from taking all of it.I was at four hundred and twelve.I had started from one when they put me in the van and I had been counting steadily since then, not fast, not slow, the pace of someone using counting as a tool rather than a race. Four hundred and
Chapter 251THEOThe bird's chest slowed.Not stopped. Slowed. From the too-fast rhythm of something trying very hard to stay alive, down to something that was still quick but no longer desperate. Its eye, which had been very still and very fixed, shifted. It looked at me from a slightly different angle, which meant its head had moved, which meant it was choosing to move rather than just existing in whatever state it had been in.The held wing lowered.Just slightly. The way something lowered when the thing it was protecting had stopped hurting enough to require active protection.I looked at this happening and I did not have words for it. I was five years old and I was sitting on the cold grass with a bird in my hands and something was happening that I did not have a framework for. The book Sophie had lent me about birds had not covered this. Nothing I had read about anything had covered this.My cuts closed.I watched this happen with the same quality of not having words. The small
Chapter 46BIANCA When we pulled into the driveway coming back from grocery shopping,, Rivera was waiting on the porch, waiting for us with a smile on his face which immediately shifted to that of concern when he saw my face."What happened?" he asked, moving down the steps to help with the grocer
Chapter 42MATTHEW Over the next few days, I found myself watching Mia with different eyes. Noticing things I'd dismissed or ignored before.How quickly she'd moved into my home after Bianca's death. How she'd taken over the master bedroom without asking, had moved her clothes into the closet wher
Chapter 43.BIANCAIt had been a week since Rivera brought me to his home, and for the first time since waking up in that hospital bed, I felt almost human again.The dizziness had faded to occasional lightheadedness. The nausea had subsided enough that I could eat without feeling like I might imme
Chapter 47MIAI stood in the kitchen of the house I'd dreamed about for over a year, surrounded by expensive appliances and I felt nothing but hollow frustration because I had it and still I wasn't satisfied.This was supposed to be my victory. My triumph. This took thirteen months or careful and







