Chapter VII
VII
There were three years between Alice and Catty Moore.
Three years that become two and then one and then somehow, Alice is seventeen and a half, older than Catty ever was.
She spent those three years being exactly the daughter that she’s supposed to be, the kind that doesn’t fight, or scream, or run, and now she’s at the top of her class, best grades in the whole school, small as it is, and her whole life ahead.
(That’s how the counselor puts it, when he sits her down, lays the future out across his desk as if it were a path.)
She could get into Glasgow or Edinburgh, sure, but he thinks she’d make the cut at Oxbridge, too, so she applies to those, and then, on a whim that’s not really a whim so much as an apology, or maybe an offering, she applies to one more school.
Doesn’t tell her parents because she knows she won’t get in, but getting in isn’t the point, and besides, it’s not for them. Not even for her, really.
She clutches the golden pendant around her neck—
(She went back to the graveyard, when the rain had stopped and the ground had dried, scooped a tiny bit from Catty’s plot to add to the vial.)
—and looks at the photo of their mum tacked above her desk, the one with her beneath that turning maple tree in Boston, and hits Send. And when the letters come a few months later, her parents laugh, and cry, and hug her tight, and say they are so very proud.
“It’s your choice, of course,” says El.
“But Harvard?” her father adds. “It’s so far from home.”
Alice knows, wants to say that is the point, that the world is so very big, and Hoxburn isn’t.
That Catty never made it, but she will. That she loves her family, she really, really does, but there’s a photo, on the mantel, taken a year ago, Dad and El and her and Finn, the four of them huddled on the banks of White Loch, grinning like fools after an early April swim, looking like a happy family.
(And they are, they are. And yet.)
Alice will never be able to shake the feeling that it’s three plus one.
That they have everything they need right here, and she does not.
That her whole life is out there—
Waiting to be lived.
Alice waits, and waits, and waits.
She doesn’t know how long she sits there, in the empty penthouse, eyes closed and head tipped back against the sofa, her wet hair ruining the suede.
Only knows that at some point she hears the elevator grind to life, its bulk rising through the floors.
She hears the doors chime and then slide open, the soft click of heeled boots crossing the flat, passing through the bedroom, into the bathroom, before returning and coming to a stop beside the sofa, the soft thud of a bag being dropped on the concrete, and then, a weight sinking onto the seat beside her.
Alice opens her eyes, but she doesn’t look at Lottie.
Instead, she looks up, the way Sabine did—at the ceiling high above, noticing for the first time that the beams up there aren’t steel, but wood, knots like eyes staring back.
“You told me if I killed her, I’d come back to life,” says Alice.
“I know,” says Lottie softly.
“It didn’t work.”
“I know,” she echoes.
Alice looks at Lottie, then, resentment flaring through her, but Lottie just stares back, with those backlit brown eyes, and a look that says it’s her fault for believing, a look that says she should have known better.
And maybe Alice did. Maybe she always knew, deep down, it was a lie. That some roads will always be one-way.
But Lottie lied.
They sit in silence for a minute, maybe two, and then Lottie bends forward, sinking her fingers into her mess of curls, shoulders shaking, as if she’s about to cry.
“I thought I would feel something when she died. A lightness. Or a weight. Some sign that it was over. But I didn’t. I didn’t feel anything.”
Alice stares at Lottie, unable to believe that even now, she’s only grieving for herself.
“You lied to me,” says Alice, and this time Lottie sighs.
“I didn’t really. I said you’d get your life back. Now you will.”
“This isn’t my life,” she mutters.
“It’s a life,” counters Lottie. As if they’re bickering over semantics.
As if a life is a life is a life—
“You won’t be alone,” Lottie’s saying. “I’ll help you. I promise.”
“You promise,” Alice echoes dryly.
“Both of us are free now. Thanks to you.”
“Thanks to me . . .”
Alice can’t look at her, so she looks down instead, her gaze dropping to the bag Lottie set on the floor, the one she first noticed in the hotel room.
In it, she sees the battered paperback, and something else.
The metal glint of something thin and silver.
A letter opener, or a knife, or a long-handled brush.
Did you hear about poor Penny?
“Everything will be okay,” Lottie’s saying, half to herself. “The worst is over now.”
And it’s funny, she’s shaping the words, and Alice hears them, but at the same time, she hears Sabine’s low voice, rolling through like rain.
Tell me, dear Alice, why our Charlotte didn’t do the same to you.
She hears herself asking that question in the hotel room.
Why didn’t you kill me?
I looked at you, and I saw me.
She looks at you and all she feels is guilt.
The voices are tangling inside her head, until she doesn’t know which ones to listen to. But she knows one thing for sure, and that’s that Lottie lied.
Perhaps that’s why Alice doesn’t stop Lottie when she reaches for the glass of blood, the one that’s still sitting on the coffee table.
Why she simply sits and watches as Lottie brings the poison to her lips, and tips it back, and drinks, her throat bobbing as she swallows. Watches as she tastes the wrongness in the dregs and tries to spit them out.
Of course, by then, it’s far too late.
Lottie begins to gasp, and choke, her face taking on that awful gray tinge that climbed up Alice’s own arms back in the cemetery, that pallor like a fresh-made corpse, and then she’s slipping off the sofa, she’s on her hands and knees, clawing at her throat, mouth opening and closing as she gasps out “What” and “Please” and “Help.”
Alice rises to her feet.
She wants to be angry—it would be so much easier if she were angry—but the truth is, the anger’s all used up, leaving something weary, hollow in its wake.
Lottie rolls onto her back, chokes out, “Why?” as Alice pulls the weapon from the bag, and it’s a silver hairbrush after all. And at the sight of it, Charlotte’s eyes go wide with panic.
She coughs, trying to explain, but her lungs are shriveling inside her chest, the grave dirt dragging her down with it, turning the veins black beneath her skin, blood pooling in her eyes.
But Alice remembers what she said.
How grave dirt would sicken, but not kill.
How only the heart could die.
So Alice sinks to her knees on top of Lottie.
“Everything will be okay,” she says, parroting the words. “The worst is over now.”
She wedges the silver handle of the brush between her bottom ribs, and in that moment, Lottie changes. All her pretenses—of confusion, of kindness, of compassion—die away, and so does the image of the beautiful girl perched on the bed in the dark, curls stained violet.
In its place, Alice sees the one who danced with Sabine through stolen halls.
Who butchered families in their homes.
Who let girls die because she couldn’t bear to sleep alone.
Lottie starts to fight, then, thrashing like a feral cat, manages to throw Alice off, even scrambles back across the polished floor, but this isn’t a cemetery plot, a piece of poisoned land she can escape, the ruin is inside her.
Even still, she is full of life, or fight, rolls onto her stomach, nails chipping against the concrete as she crawls away, but Alice catches her, forces her onto her back again, pins her to the floor.
Alice, no longer soft, and gentle, and full of grief, as she drives the makeshift weapon in, and up, between flesh and ribs, hitting Lottie’s heart.
The light flickers on and off behind her eyes.
And then at last, goes out.
Lottie’s body stiffens once beneath her, then gives way, crumbling to rot beneath Alice’s weight, a girl-shaped pile of debris, slivers of bone and dampened ash.
Alice sags and rocks back onto her heels.
She wipes her hands on her green dress, and stares at the place where Lottie was, and maybe it’s because she hadn’t been dead as long as Sabine—or simply that she hadn’t rotted to the core just yet—but there is more of her.
The pile like a heap of wet earth, the silver brush sticking out like a petrified bloom.
“Bury my bones,” Alice whispers to herself, a horrible sound like a laugh rising in her throat. She presses her palms against her eyes until her vision goes black, then white.
Get up, get up, she thinks, counts to ten, then blinks and rises to her feet, skirts Lottie’s ashes as she heads for the elevator door, forcing herself forward sstep-by-step.
Because if she’s learned anything it’s this:
There is no going back.