Chapter Twenty-Five
FOR ONE EVENING, HE thaws.
I don't know what changes. I only know that he comes home at a human hour, and he asks if I've eaten, and when I say no he cooks, actually cooks, the pan and the knife and the whole domestic emergency of it, and for the length of one dinner I get my Maximo back like he was never gone.
We don't talk about the study, or the silence, or the week of frost. A smart girl would use a rare thaw like this to dig for answers about where he went and why.
I've been calling myself a smart girl my whole life, and tonight I let the whole smart part go.
We talk about nothing. It's the best nothing of my life.
Afterward he walks me to my door, the way he did the very first night, a whole head above the world, and there's a moment on the threshold where the air goes tight and strange.
My borrowed heart starts up quick and giddy, reaching for him the way it always does when he stands this close, and I press a hand to my sternum and tell it to slow down like I always do.
He looks at me. His hand moves toward his jacket pocket, like there's something in it, like he's about to—
And then he stops.
Whatever it was, he leaves it in the pocket. He closes his hand over the shape of it and lets it go.
"Good night, Jassy," he manages, and it comes out wrecked, and he walks away before I can ask what he almost did.
THERE WAS A NECKLACE in his pocket.
Maximo had bought it three days ago and had been carrying it around like a live coal ever since, a fine gold thing with a single stone, chosen for the specific girl who would roll her eyes at anything showier and secretly love it forever.
He had bought it to say the words he couldn't make his mouth form.
He had stood on her threshold with it burning a hole through the wool, close enough to reach up and lay it against her collarbone, close enough to change both their lives.
And then he'd thought of the other necklace. The crooked little star in a dead girl's drawer.
Because how did a man clasp a chain around the throat of the girl wearing his sister's heart?
How did he decorate the living proof of what he'd lost and call it love and not grave-robbing?
Every good thing he might give Jassy would sit on top of Mary.
Every kiss was a theft. Every future he wanted was built on the one his sister would never get.
So he put the necklace back in his pocket, and he walked away from the only door he wanted to stand at, and he told himself it was mercy.
It wasn't mercy. He knew that even then.
It was just the last kind thing he would do before he did the cruelest.