Chapter Twenty-Six #3
Donna picks up her fork and resumes eating her dinner. “You’ve picked your side. I would like for you to get out of my house.”
“I didn’t pick a side. I’m doing this for me, because I—”
“I don’t care who or what you’re doing this for. You’ve made your decision and now I’ve made mine. Get out of my house. This is a family dinner.”
Not a single person at the table says a word. Harriet is motionless, and then she’s not.
She pushes back from the table, folds her napkin neatly, and drops it next to her plate. “If that’s what you want.”
She hesitates—hoping, I’m sure, for someone to come to her defense.
But no one does, and I have to watch as Harriet moves carefully around the chairs her family occupies, seeing herself out of the room.
She keeps her face angled down, but that neat bun of hers makes it easy to see her face.
The way her eyes shine in the candlelight.
The way she’s pinching her lips together.
Harriet and her hopeful heart.
“If you cared about what I wanted, you would have talked to me instead of my sister,” her mother says tartly, just as Harriet is about to leave the room. She tilts her head toward the hallway. “Fetch your coat on the way out.”
I can’t bear to watch Harriet walk out alone.
I reach for her hand and tug her into me as my magic explodes in a rush, relieved for the outlet, spinning around us both and wrenching us forward through time.
Harriet is wooden against me, one hand fisted in my shirt and her forehead pressed to my collarbone.
I sift one hand through her hair to cup the base of her neck, the other holding tight to her hip.
But it still feels like I can’t grip her close enough. I want to stop the roaring around us and find a time and place where no one knows us. Where there aren’t expectations or consequences. Where there isn’t a clock counting down above our heads or memories of a darker, lonelier time.
A teasing glimpse of the dark, lonely future that awaits. I want to stop. I want to breathe. I want to hold Harriet.
We land back in the storage closet of the Crow’s Nest with a dull thump.
It feels like I’ve taken a barrel to the head.
Flipped down a flight of stairs and rolled the entire way down.
Time reminds me in no uncertain terms that I don’t get to want things.
I’m a slave to the role I’ve been assigned. There is nothing but this.
Harriet steps back, her hair curtained around her face. She won’t look at me, and that’s another sort of disappointment entirely.
“Harriet.”
“I need to get back to the front,” she says, her voice subdued. “We’ve been gone awhile. I’m sure Sasha is wondering where I am.”
Never mind that we both know that only a handful of seconds have passed for Sasha. Harriet wipes quickly under her left eye with the back of her hand. Something in me splinters.
“Harriet,” I try again, reaching for her.
“’M fine,” she mumbles with a sniffle.
“Please don’t cry.” I grip her elbow gently, trying to tug her back into me. “I can’t stand it when you cry,” I confess to the top of her head.
“I’m just—I can’t talk about this right now, okay? I need—I need to get back to work.” She presses up on her tiptoes and brushes a quick kiss to my cheek, avoiding my eyes the entire time. “I’ll see you up there.”
She’s gone before I can convince her to stay. I wait before I follow her, caught between coming and going. Something is holding me here in this tiny room and the light bulb above me flickers, a manifestation of my indecision. Off and then on and then off again.
I reach to fix it just as light bounces off of dented metal, pushed back on the top shelf. I step closer to inspect it. A coiled chain. A cracked face. Flecked green paint and an arrow that never points where it’s supposed to.
Ice settles in my gut.
There, on the top shelf of the tiny supply closet in the very back corner of Harriet’s antiques shop, is a compass with a broken chain.
A compass I’ve held in the palm of my hand. A compass that should be at the bottom of the Atlantic.
Harriet was right. She does have something that belongs to me.
Because that compass is mine.
My stomach dips the same way it used to when my boat was cresting waves I couldn’t see the top of.
Up and then down, down, down— tumbling over itself.
I can’t—I can’t get a deep enough breath.
I should feel elation. Relief. The key to moving forward is right in front of me, gathering dust on the back shelf of a supply closet.
But all I feel is panic. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be.
Hide it, my brain whispers. Hide the compass. Harriet doesn’t need to know.
I hesitate for only a moment before I find an old crate and toss it underneath. I push it to the very back of the shelf, then step away.
I’ll deal with it later. When Harriet isn’t so sad and when I don’t feel so out of control.
It can wait.
Tomorrow, maybe. Or the next day.
But I can’t be here any longer, my control hanging on by a golden thread looped tight around my rib cage. I close my eyes, tug on that quickly fraying strand of magic, and disappear.