Chapter 17 #2
I knew at once it was Adeline’s. The fortune was a dead giveaway.
I remembered the day she cracked open the cookie that contained it.
It was her first meal after being discharged from the hospital.
My mom was superstitious—hanging dried garlic up in the kitchen, forbidding horror movies for fear of welcoming demons into our house—and when Adeline read her fortune, Mom had immediately told her to burn it and pray.
But Adeline had just smiled, said that if the future was a lie, that meant she could make it whatever she wanted it to be.
With shaking hands, I took one of the tangled chargers from the bottom of the box and sat breathlessly on the edge of the bed waiting for it to charge enough to turn on.
After a few minutes, it did. I knew the code, and unlocked it.
There were no apps on the home page, apart from the ones you couldn’t delete.
But the background was what gave me pause: It was a photo of Adeline and Shiloh.
In it, Shiloh had her arm slung around Adeline’s bare shoulders, eyes narrowed against the sun so that I couldn’t tell exactly what she was looking at.
Adeline was turned away from the camera, a smile half-hidden in Shiloh’s neck.
There were more photos like that one in albums, sorted by day.
Shiloh and Adeline hand in hand, standing on the edge of a canyon like they were trying to decide if they wanted to jump together.
A photo of Shiloh, taken from behind, from the shoulders up, her collarbones bare, her hair fallen across her face.
I scrolled through it all—a montage of the two of them—until I couldn’t stomach it any longer, until my hands shook so badly I could barely even hold the phone.
I don’t know how long I sat there, frozen on the bed.
But it was long enough to prompt Naomi to come in and check on me.
She rapped her knuckles on the doorframe. “Roslyn? You okay?”
I didn’t turn to look at her. “Where’s Shiloh?”
“She went out—”
“Out where?”
“There was a dispatch she needed to handle.”
I turned to look at her over my shoulder, tears streaming down my face. “You don’t know where she went?”
Naomi’s eyes flashed wide. “Roslyn, what’s going on—”
“I need to talk to her now.”
“I don’t think that’s a good—”
“Where the hell is she, Naomi?” It was almost a shout, but my voice cracked.
Naomi flinched, and then gave me the address, stumbling over her words in her haste to get them out, like she was afraid of what would happen if she didn’t. Maybe she was right to be.
I got dressed, stripping out of my robe in favor of a denim jacket that belonged to one of the girls, or maybe all of them.
I slipped Adeline’s phone into my pocket and set out, taking a mirrored elevator down to the lobby.
The casino was swarming with people. I shouldered through the crowds and out onto the Strip.
Shiloh’s dispatch was remarkably nearby, which I realized was probably by Death’s design.
We never happened upon a place by accident.
There was always some dispatch that led us there.
The address Naomi had given me led me a few blocks away, to a concrete slab of an apartment building with tiny windows.
I took the stairs up to the third floor.
The door of the unit was open, and I smelled blood the moment I stepped inside that cramped little living room.
It was dark; the only light came from the TV, which was playing silently through a series of commercials.
The screen, I noticed, was badly cracked.
“Shiloh? Are you here?”
I stepped into a small dining room and saw her on the floor in the kitchen, sitting slumped against the fridge like she’d been shot. Her left cheek was spattered with blood. When I stepped into her line of vision, she didn’t blink.
I forgot myself for a moment—why I was there, the betrayal of what I’d found on Adeline’s cell phone, all that she’d hidden from me. I rushed to her like she’d die if I didn’t, pressed a hand flat against her heaving chest. “Shiloh, look at me. Are you hurt?”
Shiloh blinked slowly, came to. Her eyes were slow to focus, but when they did, when she saw it was me, she slapped my hand away and scrambled to her feet. “What the hell are you doing here?”
With Shiloh on her feet, I saw it, in the hallway off the kitchen: a small bloodied hand.
Stiff fingers with long nails painted pink.
A small wrist ringed black with bruises, bent at the wrong angle as if someone had gripped her tight and twisted it.
The rest of the body was, thankfully, concealed by the wall.
I heard myself speak. My voice thin and shaking. “I-is that a—”
Shiloh didn’t look at me. “Yes.”
“And is she—”
“Yes.”
“Who did this?”
“Doesn’t matter,” said Shiloh. “He’s gone too.”
I felt like I was going to be sick. I’d seen my share of death, but this was something different, something worse. I knew murders happened, of course, that people did gruesome and terrible things to each other all the time. But seeing it firsthand was different.
Shiloh’s gaze slid toward me. She looked annoyed and exhausted, utterly wrung out. “Why are you here, Roslyn?”
I held up Adeline’s cell phone.
Shiloh’s face went blank for a moment, but she recovered herself fast.
“We need to talk,” I said.
“Not here.” Shiloh made for the door, leaving me alone in the kitchen. I spared a last look at that hand in the hall.
Shiloh was waiting for me down in the courtyard, fumbling with her vape, her hands shaking.
“Look, Shiloh, you’re not okay—”
Shiloh pulled on the mouthpiece, exhaled hard. “I’m fine.”
“If you need a moment—”
“I said I’m fucking fine, Roslyn.” I’d never seen her so angry, and it frightened me, how much she looked like Death. “You wanted to talk, so let’s have it out.”
My chin quivered, but I fought the tears. I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of letting her see me cry. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
Shiloh dragged a hand through her hair, not looking at me. “I didn’t think it would be like this. I felt drawn to you from the beginning, and I thought it would pass, and when it didn’t, things just happened so quickly that I couldn’t find the right moment to tell you the truth.”
It wasn’t enough, and she knew it.
I could feel the tears coming, and my voice strained with the effort of holding them back. “I don’t know what you had with Adeline or if it was real or what it meant to her, but I don’t understand why you didn’t just tell me the truth.”
Shiloh reached out to me. “Roslyn, I wanted to—”
“Don’t touch me.”
Her hand fell.
“You led me on. I was starting to like you, and you knew that. You made me think that there was some chance of something between us when all you wanted was her.”
“You know that’s not true.”
“It is,” I said, cementing it as reality because it hurt too much to consider another alternative. “I know that now. We were both just trying to find the ghost of her through each other.”
Shiloh shook her head. “That might be true for you. But not for me. What I feel for you is different from what happened before, with her. I don’t expect you to believe that now, but it’s true just the same.”
“You’re right. I don’t believe it. I don’t believe anything you say.” I stepped around her, heading back to the hotel.
But Shiloh called after me. “You’re more than just your sister. You deserve to live and love and experience things that are more than just an extension of her. I wish you would accept that. I wish you could just see yourself the way everyone else does. The way Adeline did.”
“You say that like you know me, but you don’t. Not really. You know this”—I gestured to myself with a pass of my hand—“but it’s just grief. That’s all I am now: the loss of her.”
“That’s a lie.”
“It’s not.” It came out in a hoarse whisper. “When she died, she took the best of me with her. I’m just remnants now of the person I was before, with her.”
“You could be more than that if you would just let yourself.”
I turned then, left her alone in the courtyard. “Maybe I don’t want to be.”