epilogue
Ten Years Later
“We got something special for you,” I say, setting down our daughter’s bags at the foot of the stairs. “Do you want to see now, or wait until your party this weekend?”
“Now, obviously,” she says, rolling her eyes.
She’s just started doing that, and every time it reminds me that she’s growing up, that time is passing, each day another day without him in the world, each as impossible as the last. Next week will be the ten year anniversary, each year even more inconceivable than the days, that there can be life without him.
That there can be even one person living under our roof who doesn’t know the hollowness this world holds, who doesn’t feel his absence.
“Since today’s your actual birthday, we thought we’d have a celebration here at home,” Mabel says, closing the door behind us. “Just us.”
She pauses, a wistful look crossing her face, and I know she’s remembering him too.
There should be one more person in our family, one more plate at the table when we cut the birthday cake.
“Well, what’s the big surprise?” the kid asks, impatient as ever.
I wonder who she got that from. I know there’s no way to know for sure who her father is.
We’re both her father. That’s what the DNA says.
There’s no difference between us. We’re the same person.
Sometimes I think about that. How I’m just as much him as I am myself.
That makes me feel a little better somehow. To know he’s as alive as I am.
A long time ago, though, before I saw her face the first time, I decided to believe that he was her father. We get to have our daughter now, the one he always wanted. I have this piece of him here with me, someone to take care of outside of myself, a way to honor him. I have her, and me.
And I have Mabel, the girl of my dreams and sometimes my nightmares, the only woman who never bores me, forever my addiction.
She’s an equation without a solution, a riddle with no answer.
Even after ten years, there are parts of her I’ve never seen, doors in her mind that I can’t access. But I will die trying.
“It’s out back,” Mabel says, leading the way. “We had it done while you were at camp.”
The girl skips ahead, eager to see. For a second, she’s all long limbs and long hair, and I see someone else, the ghost of another little girl, in our hallway.
Outside, she pulls up short, gaping in shock.
“You built a castle?” she shrieks, all childlike wonder now. “ For me?”
Her words knock the breath out of me, and I’m glad she’s too overcome with her own emotion to notice her parents.
She launches herself off the back porch and hurtles towards it, diving inside.
I hear doors opening and slamming, and then she’s on the second floor, throwing open a window and waving, grinning ear to ear.
“I think she likes it,” Mabel says. “Maybe it’ll help her stay a kid a little longer.”
It’s not easy to impress a kid who has everything she’s ever asked for, but we seem to have managed. I could never say no to her. Saying no to her is saying no to him, and I couldn’t do that. Not after I failed him in life.
In all likelihood, we’d never have known about our daughter if he were here.
They never would have told us. That thought always fills me with fury, but not as much as the fury at myself every time I catch myself thinking that if I had to choose, I would have chosen him instead.
She would have been happy with her adoptive family, and we would have been happy with ours.
I love her more than I thought myself capable, but if it came down to never knowing she existed and having my brother back, I would still always choose him.
In every lifetime, in every timeline, I would choose him. I hope he knew that at the end.
“I’m glad you’re home for her birthday,” Mabel says, taking a seat on the top step.
I join her. “I wouldn’t miss it.”
In truth, I’ve missed a lot of days. Never a birthday, but a lot of others.
Becoming one of the world’s youngest neurosurgeons doesn’t happen without sacrifice.
But family is the most important thing. It always comes first. So when they need me, I’ve made it happen, no matter the cost. Mabel has done the same, determined to give our kids the family she needed growing up.
We watch the girl find one of the doors and traipse along the suspension bridge.
“Careful,” I call.
She finally finds the way out to the swings and drops down into one. The other one sways beside her, empty.
“Do you see it?” Mabel asks.
“What?”
“The other swing is moving,” Mabel says. “It must be her imaginary friend.”
I don’t tell her that it’s not imaginary.
It’s him. His ghost is always there beside her.
He hovers, never far away. I know that even though I can’t see him on the swing when it moves in the breeze, he’s here.
He’s never really gone. He’s beside us in the bed, making sure I never go too far when I wrap my fingers around Mabel’s throat.
He’s in our son’s eyes. And he’s in me. He will always be in me, a part of me, maybe the biggest part.
It doesn’t really matter which one of us died, because we are both still here.
For two decades, we were lived apart, one person torn in two, split in half, forced to live in separate bodies.
Now we live in one. Because I am him as much as I’m me, and he’s me as much as I am.
Like I promised Mabel all those years ago, the earth can’t hold us.
Nothing can separate us, not even death.
“Mom,” Hemlock yells, leaning back and forward to make herself go higher with each pump of her legs. “Come swing with me!”
Mabel climbs to her feet and ambles over. I watch them swing together. I wonder if she’s thinking about him, or about her own ghosts, her own childhood companion. As far as I know, she’s never seen Dahlia again. But there’s a lot I don’t know.
I used to think I knew everything, had all the answers, could fix everything.
I used to want to see that light go out, the one that haunts me now, that’s never far from my mind, whether I’m watching my family or standing over the operating table. Life is not something trivial, not something to be toyed and trifled with. It’s not a game.
Watching a man die didn’t make me powerful. It made me humble.
It took losing the game we were all playing to see that.
But sometimes I suspect Mabel played a little longer, a little smarter.
That she was still playing when we thought it was over.
I will probably always wonder. Because no matter what she says, I can never know what’s inside her mind, can never open up her brain the way I do my patients and find the answers in black and white.
Did she plan it all?
She always played the long game. Was that her final move, her checkmate?
Her final revenge, to take what I loved most in the world, the one thing that could break me more completely than I could ever break her?
Is that why she didn’t light the match when we were both inside—because she wanted me to live, to suffer, like Royal forced her to do?
I remember his words in that room so often.
“One of us is going to be next.”
He knew. He foresaw it, even when I didn’t.
He knew she’d win, even before she made her final move.
When she went to the basement that day and talked to Jane without us knowing, did they come up with it then?
Can I trust her, even now, a decade after everything went wrong?
Is she still playing, even now? Or did her plan go sideways, and it was always supposed to be me on the lawn that night?
When she sent me back into the house for her cat, did she plan for me to never come out?
All these years later, when I’ve given her a house and a family, every material possession she could want and the child she never thought she’d have, does she still wish it had been?
Those are the questions that keep me up at night, ones that can’t be researched online.
These days, she’s the one more likely to be found online, slipping unknown into someone’s server, extracting information like she extracts a carpet fiber from a crime scene to tie back to a criminal who thought they got away with it.
She searches the way I used to, endlessly, fruitlessly.
The network around the Black Widow Killer simply vanished one day, though, blown away like a spiderweb in the wind.
They never found her. As far as I know, no one has. But I wonder.
Even though Mabel is not the Black Widow Killer, they’re linked in some mysterious way that transcends years of silence, like it did the first time.
Sometimes I think it was a mistake to let her go out there alone with her.
To trust her. I still wonder what they really said, if they hatched a plan that day, two spiders spinning an invisible web, an hourglass of venom measuring out the lives of their victims in drops of blood.
One day, Mabel could signal for her to return. She could decide that I’ve suffered enough, and it’s time to let me join my brother at last.
I think, when it happens, I’ll be ready. I hope I’ve made him proud.
Sometimes I wonder too, if Mabel is just waiting until our kids are grown, until it’s just the two of us, before she’ll unearth that body she disposed of and tie me to it.
There’s no statute of limitations on murder.
Or on her memory. And if anyone can find forensic evidence a decade later, it’s Dr. Mabel Dolce.
It does no good to wonder, but I still do.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. I pull it out and read the text. Then I stand and call to the girls. “The nanny’s almost back. Want to go in and have cake with Max?”
“Not yet,” protests the little girl. “Please?”
“Don’t you want to see your brother?” Mabel coaxes. “You haven’t seen him in a week. He missed you.”
“Ugh, boys ruin everything,” Hemlock says, jumping out of the swing before it stops. “I wish I didn’t have a brother.”
“Don’t ever say that again,” I snap.
“Sorry,” she mutters, stomping past me into the house.
“She’s just overstimulated from camp,” Mabel says, resting a hand on my arm. “She doesn’t mean it.”
“I know.”
She gives me a sympathetic smile, then stands on tiptoes to plant a kiss on my chin. I wrap my arms around her, turning her so we can look at the castle in our backyard, under the sprawling oak.
“Look at us,” she says. “Great kids, a beautiful home, our dream jobs. We really did it.”
I squeeze her to me and rest my chin on top of her head. “Are you happy?”
Her body twitches, but then she relaxes back into me. “Yes. Are you?”
“As happy as I have any right to be.”
“Good.” She draws away and squeezes my hand before stepping past me into the house. “I’ll set the table.”
I stand for another moment, watching the swings slow to a stop.
The late afternoon sun streams between the leaves of the oak overhead, forming visible rays.
They land on the suspension bridge of the wooden castle, and for just one second, I think I see a shadow moving.
But it’s just the hot August breeze rustling the trees, and the old orange cat sunning himself on the wooden planks.
No matter how hard I look, my brother is never there.
I stay another minute anyway, hoping for the impossible.
I know we can’t go back, but part of me doesn’t have to.
It never left. Part of me died that summer, and part of me still lives there, trapped in the crumbling remains of our wonderland.
When we went home, I sold off all the product, enough to fund several lifetimes of luxury.
I never made another pearl, and eventually, newer, trendier street drugs popped up to replace it.
But Alice is never too far, her opalescent hands reaching across the years, her ghostly voice whispering a reminder in my ear.
Not everyone who goes down the rabbit hole finds their way out.
While one of us wandered alone in the wonderland we created together, the other was lost in the one Mabel did. One where we were gods, where we decided who lived and who died.
Except we were never gods. We may have played god that summer, but we were always mortal. That’s why we forgot the one rule you can never forget. When you play with fire, someone’s going to get burned.
Inside, Max runs down the hall in his socks and launches himself into my arms. “Can I light the birthday candles?” he asks, wrapping his arms around my neck.
“When you’re older,” I tell him. “Let your mom do it this year.”
He pouts and hops off me and into a chair, leaning up on one leg, scouting for the best piece even before the cake is cut. After we sing and eat cake, Hemlock is all smiles, her earlier outburst forgotten.
“Thanks for the castle,” she says, wrapping her arms around me. “You’re the best Daddy there ever was. I love you, Mom.” She turns and hugs Mabel.
Mabel’s eyes meet mine over our daughter’s head, and she smiles her Mona Lisa smile, the one I still can’t read after all these years. Again it reminds me of all that I don’t know, all I will never know.
Most days, I think she’s done, that she put away the board the same day I did, when I finally witnessed the moment I’d always wanted and realized the truth.
All that time, I thought I was the puppeteer pulling the strings, even for my brothers. That I was the mastermind behind the game. But even the king falls in chess.
Some days, I wonder if she’s still on that board, the final piece standing alone—the queen.
Thank you so much for finishing the journey with me.