Chapter 41
Is it really gone? Joel texts me. Can you tell?
Yes, I write back. I can tell. I am loading the jangling breakfast dishes into the dishwasher; Ella is curled up on the couch, reading the second book of the Libby series. I should really make her help with the chores, but it’s easier to do them myself.
I flex my bare toes, stretch out a leg experimentally. Everything feels fine. There is no underlying ache or supercharge of strength. My body has quieted, has resolved to a pleasant norm. I reach automatically to touch my hair, which has been shedding itself back to thinness.
It isn’t just me, either. I checked the groups: Everyone is better. Just like that, in an instant, she cured us all. She took it away, the slavering darkness at the center, the eating away of our personalities, the sickness, the wasteful endless erosion.
Sometimes your dad pisses off an immortal, and your whole life is a train thundering downhill toward the jagged cliff’s edge where the track has torn away. Sometimes the immortal changes her mind.
A lot of the Dows are mad—they miss it, need it. But I’m offline, I’m done.
What about you? I write.
It’s gone. I’m taking a break from the hospital. I haven’t lost a patient in a long time, not ready for that yet.
Good luck, I type quickly, before my thumbs can make their own plans.
Thanks. You too. I know it’s trite but I really do wish you well.
I wish you well too.
And that is that.
For the best. For the only, I guess. After demons and angels and almost-gods and probably goddesses, after all those desperate nights, his hands spreading mine against the floor, after Mr. Button and even Ella, the truth is that I killed his brother.
And he killed mine. Neither one of us was willing to relinquish our own brother so the other could live again.
There is no magic big enough to remake that, to mold it into something workable.
We both know that.
There is a knock on the door. I hurry to open it.
Alice is standing there, baby Bo on her hip. Her hair is freshly buzzed.
“Friend time!” she says with so much enthusiasm that I have to grin back.