Chapter 17 You Missed
He pulls the knife out himself.
One hand on the hilt, a single clean pull, and the blade comes free with a sound I will spend a long time trying to unhear.
The silver has left its mark on the wound. I can see it, the edges wrong, the tissue doing something it shouldn't, not closing the way it should. He holds the blade for a moment, just looks at it, and then drops it on the carpet.
My hands are empty. I wait for him to kill me.
He looks down at his chest. The blood is dark, spreading slow. When he speaks, his voice is conversational.
"You missed," he says. "Heart's a little further right."
Then he looks at me.
I watch him cross the distance between us. I watch his hand come up and cup my face, tilting it toward him, his thumb moving across the wetness on my cheek. Leo's hand. Leo's thumb. Leo's voice when he says: "Rosie. Don't cry."
Something in me breaks open.
I shove him. Both hands, everything I have. I'm off the bed and I'm screaming and I can't find the shape of the words at first, just the sound of them, until they organize into something:
"Don't." My voice doesn't sound like mine. "Don't talk to me like that. Don't use his face, don't use his voice—don't call me that—"
"Rosie—"
"You killed him." My hands find his chest and push again. "It was you. You took over and he died and you walked around in his body and I didn't—I couldn't—" The words collapse. "You killed my husband."
He looks down at me. There's something cold in his eyes now, something that was never in Leo's.
"Why would you think I killed him?"
His voice is still calm.
"The people who sent him to the front with a gun, that wasn't me. That was your kind. The ones who set off the charges before he made it out, that wasn't me either. Still yours."
He steps forward and I press back into the headboard, nowhere left to go.
"I never wanted to kill him. Parasites don't destroy their hosts. When the explosion happened, I saved what was left of this body. That's the only reason I could come back to you."
I'm shaking my head, can't stop, the room is spinning.
"No. You're not him. You're not—"
"Rosie." He pulls me in, locks me against his chest, and I feel his heart beating under the wound I made. His voice drops to a whisper, right against my ear. "I have his face. His body. Every memory he ever had. I am Leo."
His hand slides up to the back of my neck.
"And I love you. More than he did."
I try to pull away but his fingers find the spot just below my skull, press in, and the world tilts sideways and goes dark.
***
Birds.
I surface to birdsong and the weight of clean cotton sheets and a smell that has nothing wrong with it: no mildew, no must, no smoke. Something floral on the air. Something warm.
I lie still for a long time.
The ceiling above me is cream-colored and unmarked. Curtains move in a window I don't recognize, white and gauzy, and through the gap I can see light the color of mid-morning, the generous unhurried light of a day with no particular emergency in it.
I get up. My feet find a wood floor and I walk out of the room.
The house is small and bright. There are framed photographs on the walls. I don't look at them closely, not yet. There is a kitchen with a window above the sink and through the window there is a garden, and in the garden there is Leo.
He's in a gray shirt with his sleeves pushed up, and he has Luca against his chest, and he's doing that thing with his arms, tossing him up an inch, catching him, that makes Luca's whole body shake with laughter.
Luca is bigger than I remember. His hair has grown out. He looks like a child who has been eating well and sleeping in a safe place.
Leo sees me through the glass and smiles.
He comes inside. He crouches down and picks up something from beside the door, a pair of slippers, plush, the kind I used to keep by the bed, and sets them at my feet.
"You're up," he says.
I look at him. At the house. At Luca chewing on his own fist in Leo's arms.
"Where are we?"
Leo straightens. His expression is patient, faintly fond. "You don't remember again? That's okay." He shifts Luca to his hip.
"We bought this place after Luca was born. You had a rough few months. The doctor thinks the medication's been affecting your memory. We're going back in next week to see about adjusting it."
I stand there.
"The suburb," he says gently. "You picked the street. You said you wanted a garden."
I reach out and grip the front of his shirt.
I pull it open.
His chest is unbroken. Smooth skin over muscle, no mark, no puckering scar, nothing. He looks down at my hands and then up at my face, expression settling into something soft and questioning.
"What is it?"
I let go of his shirt.
I walk past him. Through the kitchen, through the front room, out the door and down the front steps and onto the street.
The street is calm. Residential. A man two houses down is pushing a lawnmower in slow parallel lines, and he raises a hand when he sees me.
A girl with headphones and a golden retriever is coming up the path on the other side, the dog ambling in the way of dogs who have walked this route many times before and find it satisfactory.
The girl looks up when I approach. I reach out and take the phone from her hand.
She says something but I'm not listening. My fingers are shaking. I type.
Outbreak. Virus. Infection. Werewolf attack. End of world.
The screen returns a film franchise. A comedy video. A Wikipedia disambiguation page. Sponsored results for a survival video game.
I scroll. I search again with different words. I search for the city. For the evacuation zones. For the names of the officials who stood at podiums in hazmat suits and told us it was a natural mutation.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing.
The girl takes her phone back. She says something else, I catch the word crazy somewhere in it, and pulls her dog closer and walks away.
I'm standing in the middle of the path and the lawnmower is still going and the morning is still the same specific shade of ordinary and nothing I've searched for exists.
Arms come around me from behind.
"I'm so sorry." Leo's voice, Leo's arms, Leo's chin resting on the top of my head. Speaking past me toward the retreating girl. "She hasn't been well. I'm sorry."
The girl doesn't look back.
He turns me around. He doesn't look like a man managing a situation. He looks like a man who has been worried about his wife and is relieved that she is upright and within reach.
I look at him for a long time.
Then I put my face against his chest. My arms go around him. I can feel his heartbeat, steady and present, and I hold onto it because it's the only thing I can think to hold onto, and after a moment his arms come around me too.
"I had a nightmare," I say.
His hand moves through my hair. "I know. It's over."
I close my eyes.
The lawnmower turns at the end of its row. The dog has gone around the corner. Somewhere down the street a child is calling to someone in a language I don't speak, and the sound of it is so ordinary it makes my chest hurt.
I tell myself: there are no monsters. I tell myself: the city is fine. I tell myself the word over until it stops sounding like a lie.
His hand keeps moving through my hair.
I stay.