39. Everly #2
I get a clean notebook—I packed three, because of course I did, a girl never knows when she'll need to write something down and mean it—and I open it on the desk beside Helena's journals, and at the top of the first page I put the date, and under the date I start a list.
Enya. I write her name first because she's the one I keep losing in the dark.
The one who slid me the good coffee my first week and asked for nothing back.
Who got kept in a cell off the Hollows until there was nothing left in her to keep, and who Callum ended with his own shadow because his were the only hands in the world that ever would.
I write Enya, and I don't write down what was done to her, because the doing belongs to them—but the name is hers, and the name is going somewhere it can't be cleared out overnight by a woman with a warden and a story.
Then the grad students. The ones who kept losing the ends of their own sentences at the kitchen sink.
I don't have all their names. I write the ones I have, and I leave gaps for the ones I'll find, and the gaps are their own kind of record, proof that I noticed a person was supposed to be standing in that space.
I write until my hand cramps around the pen.
The house holds very still around me while I do it: no footsteps overhead, no door easing open an inch, none of the small constant noises Concordia makes to remind you it's awake.
Just the scratch of the nib and the cold standing in the room like another presence reading over my shoulder.
It isn't a long list. It isn't a short one.
It's the exact length it is, and every name on it is a thing this school spent real effort making sure nobody would ever set down in ink.
When I came here in September I kept a count like this in my head and called it being careful.
The outsider with the Tupperware, marking who'd gone quiet, who'd stopped turning up, who got explained away with a withdrawal form and a shrug—keeping the tally because somebody ought to and nobody else was going to.
I was a stranger then. No standing, no power, a polka-dot suitcase and all four disciplines crammed into a body that was only ever supposed to hold one.
Now I'm keeping the same count at a desk, in the one house their whole order was built to keep grimoires out of. The records aren't in my head anymore. They're in ink, in my own hand, in a building no working of Catalina's can open or seal or burn.
I know what that makes me, and I let myself sit with it for a minute, because it's the kind of thing that deserves to be sat with.
It puts me one chair down from the woman whose journals are open at my elbow—not the surgery, not the burning, God, not yet, but the keeper, the one who writes the names down somewhere Catalina can't reach in and rub them out.
I can feel how easy it would be to slide the rest of the way into being her.
The cold of this house gets into your knuckles while you write, and after a while you could start to mistake that cold for clarity, for being right, and somewhere down one of these dark stairs there's a version of me who made that mistake and believed it for ninety-six years.
But my hands are still warm around the pen.
There's a tin of snickerdoodles on a windowsill because I baked them at two in the morning for people I'd burn the world down for, and I would like, very much, to go on being the girl who keeps the terrible list and bakes the cookies, for as long as this house will let me be both.
So I cap the pen and I lay my palm flat over the open page, the way you'd settle a hand between somebody's shoulder blades, and I leave every name where it is.
Still here, the names and me. Lately I'm starting to think that's worth very nearly everything.
That's when I notice Felix.
He's in the chair by the cold hearth, where he has apparently been the whole time, one ankle hooked over the opposite knee, his deck loose in one hand and a single card walking knuckle to knuckle, the way it does when he's somewhere else and being polite enough to leave his body in the room with me. I didn't hear him come in. I never do.
I open my mouth to ask how long he's been sitting there.
"Don't," he says, before I get to it. Light, easy, not looking up from the card. "It ruins the trick."
"Felix."
"I folded a corner an hour ago." Now he looks up, and the smile comes up higher on one side than the other, holding there, everything on the low side of it somewhere I still can't follow.
He turns his hand over. There's a card face-down on his knee with one corner creased over, a neat little fold, a place kept in a deck that doesn't have pages.
"Whatever you're sitting there deciding.
I already know which way it breaks. I bet on it an hour ago, and I'm not telling you the odds, because you'd only argue them. "
"That bad?"
"Didn't say bad." The card goes still against his knuckle.
"Said I folded the corner." And for one second, between the smile and the next breath, there's nothing behind his eyes at all—just the long dark hallway of every future he never makes me walk down.
"Tell me when you're ready," he says. "I'll be right here. I'm always right here."
I look at the names in my notebook. I look at Helena's sentence, the one that climbs and climbs and quits before it ever reaches the verb.
"Not yet," I tell him.
"I know." He goes back to the card, knuckle to knuckle, easy as anything. "That's the part I bet on."