Chapter 7 #3
I fell silent. Evening was settling beyond the window, the garden growing dark, the lamps reflected in the rain-streaked glass.
Somewhere far away, in my former home, Nikki was probably extinguishing the candle she'd lit for my soul.
Perhaps Adrian stood by the window in silence.
Perhaps he was drinking whiskey. Perhaps, for the first time in a long time, he couldn't sleep.
I wanted him to suffer. Yes. I won't pretend to be a saint.
I wanted the memory of my eyes on the deck to tear him apart.
I wanted him to hear "push her away" in every click of a light switch.
I wanted him to dream of Nikki in my life vest, wet, orange, strangling him.
But more than that, I wanted my child to live.
"All right," I said.
Irene nodded in relief. Andrew came back a minute later, grim and red-eyed.
He pretended he had only gone to check the grounds, but I could see it: he had heard too much and didn't know what to do with someone else's pain.
Men are strange. Sometimes they can pull a woman out of a river, but they have no idea what to do when she cries not with water but with words.
"They're getting the guesthouse ready," he muttered.
"It'll be warm."
"Thank you, Andrew."
"Don't mention it. Just, if you see that Mercer of yours in a dream, tell him I have a professional interest in him. I've wanted to find out for a long time whether men like him can swim without security."
"Andrew," Irene said wearily.
"I'm quiet. We're not supposed to upset pregnant women around here. I remember."
I looked at this rough, rain-soaked, awkward man and suddenly felt such gratitude that it hurt.
He hadn't promised me golden palaces. Hadn't told me I was one of a kind.
Hadn't given me bracelets. He had simply pulled me from the water and now felt more anger on my behalf than my husband had felt even at the thought of my death.
When they moved me to the guesthouse, I saw Lawson's estate from the outside for the first time in twenty-four hours.
The rain had stopped, but the night air remained damp and heavy, smelling of pine and the river.
They wrapped me in a blanket and put me in a wheelchair, even though I protested that I could walk. Irene said:
"You can keep quiet,"
and that concluded the medical discussion.
Graham rolled beside me in his own chair while Andrew pushed mine.
The path was laid with flat stones, and low lamps glowed along its edges.
Everything around me seemed unreal: me, a living corpse wrapped in a stranger's blanket, beside a retired general whom life had been unable to put back on his feet but had also failed to make bow his head.
"Why are you helping me?" I asked quietly when Andrew walked ahead to open the guesthouse door.
Graham didn't answer at once. The wheels of his chair whispered softly over the stone.
"Because once," they told me that what happened hadn't happened the way I remembered it, either.
I turned my head toward him.
"What did you do?"
"At first, I believed them."
"And then?"
He looked at me. In the lamplight, his eyes were almost black.
"Then I became worse."
"Worse?"
"For them."
I didn't know what to say. For the first time in twenty-four hours, I didn't want to fill the silence with sarcasm.
That brief "for them" held a promise—not beautiful, not tender, but solid as a locked door between me and those hunting me.
Andrew opened the guesthouse. It was warm inside and smelled of clean linen, medicine, and old wood.
A small room, a bed, a chair, an IV pole, a window overlooking the garden.
No luxury. No wall-sized mirrors. No silk dresses chosen according to someone else's taste. Only a place where I could avoid dying.
Once they had settled me into bed, Irene started a fresh IV and Andrew left, but Graham lingered in the doorway. I was almost asleep, sinking into a heavy, medicated haze, when I heard his voice.
"Lana."
"Hmm?"
"Memorial candles are for people who don't intend to return."
I opened my eyes. He looked at me calmly, but there was something in that calm that sent goose bumps over my skin.
"And me?" I asked.
"One day, you'll bring them the fire."
The door closed.
I lay in the dark, listening to my breathing, the IV, the distant rush of the Hudson beyond the garden.
Somewhere in New York, Nikki might have been going to bed in the house that had still been mine yesterday.
Somewhere beside her, Adrian might have been taking off his black jacket and staring at his reflection as if he didn't recognize the man who had said, "Push her away.
" Or perhaps he recognized him. Perhaps that was the most terrifying possibility of all.
I rested a hand on my abdomen.
"We'll come back," I whispered. "Just not where they're expecting us. We'll come back where they're afraid of us."
And for the first time since the water, I didn't dream about the yacht.
I dreamed of the memorial candle in Nikki's hands flaring with black fire.