Chapter Eighty-Four. Ingrid
CHAPTER EIGHTY-FOUR
INGRID
Mom stands onstage, holding the Miss Lone Star Princess crown, with the girls lined up behind her in their evening gowns, hands linked like a single shining chain.
I can’t find the sheriff, so I make my way to Ben, and my heart is racing. Outside, the snow keeps coming, piling up against the windows, straining the roof, the wind roaring like an angry thing. And I wonder how long it will go on, how long we will be trapped here and how unprepared we are.
Ben, who’s been pacing back and forth to keep Mabel moving, stops and faces me.
“One of the doors was open,” I say, the words coming in a tumble.
The man stationed to watch him straightens. “What door?”
“At the end of the hall.”
“No way. I checked that one myself.” He scans the room, jaw tight. “Where’s the sheriff?” Then he stalks off, disappearing into the dark corridor.
The noise of the pageant swells behind us—applause, nervous laughter, the metallic crackle of the mic—but Ben and I are left in a pocket of shadow, only a few feet from everyone else, and yet apart.
A gust of wind slams against the glass. And my mind is a war of questions—what that open door means, and where Abel is, and how I’ll keep Mom warm enough through this endless night, and what Kennedy Claire might have done, and her last words to me: You never could think straight around him—but when I open my mouth, the one that comes to my lips is, “Why didn’t you try harder?
All these years. There were a million ways you could have contacted me. ”
His eyes meet mine. “I hoped you were happy,” he says, in that simple, matter-of-fact way Ben says everything.
Ben was always a quiet kid, but when he spoke, you felt like you could believe him.
I think of the time I showed him some of the pictures I’d developed myself.
They’re good, Ben said, and though my mom had already gushed over the pictures, going on about how talented I was, and buying a frame to hang one up in the stairwell, I didn’t feel it was true until I heard it from Ben.
I believed him then.
And I believe him now.
“I’m sorry,” I tell Ben, and I am sorry. Sorry he lost Izzy too. Sorry he lost his own family, sorry that I ever doubted him.
His face relaxes, like I’m the first person to see him in a long time, see him, and not just the things he’s been accused of.
And in the dark, without the beard, he looks like the boy who gave me my first kiss.
And I wonder if he sees me right now. Or if it’s Izzy he’s looking at.
He never got to say goodbye to her either.
I lean in before I can stop myself and press my mouth to his. His lips are cold, but the kiss is warm, familiar. And despite it all, I feel something certain slip into my bones, like remembering the words to a song my heart knew all along.
And then a gunshot cracks the air.