21. Wren
WREN
The trailer door opens, and I'm on my feet before it finishes swinging.
Rowe fills the frame, and his eyes find me first—over Nova's head, past Jules's shoulder, past Teddy, who arrived an hour ago and has been standing by the kitchenette like a sentry.
“It's done,” Rowe says.
Nobody asks for details. Nova reaches up from the armchair and squeezes Jules's wrist. Teddy nods once.
“Thank you,” Rowe says to the room. His voice catches. “For staying with her.”
“She stayed with us,” Jules says. “She's ours now. We voted.”
Rowe's mouth does the almost-smile. Then his eyes come back to me, and everything else in the trailer stops mattering.
“Walk with me?”
I fold the blanket over the couch, say goodbye to the girls and the Fed, and then I'm out in the brisk late-night air with him.
We don't talk on the way. He walks closer than his old careful foot, close enough that the heat of his arm reaches mine through two layers of cotton. The carnival is dead quiet around us.
Inside his trailer, the lamp is still on from this afternoon. Rowe shuts the door. Leans back against it.
“Dr. Vance killed himself tonight,” he says matter-of-factly.
“That's what the town will know by the middle of the week.
His practice was failing. His wife left.
He'd been drinking. He went out to his barn with his father's shotgun.” He watches my face while he says it.
“There's nothing at the clinic. Nothing that leads to you. The scalpel, the—all of it. Gone.”
I sit down on the bench because my knees stop holding me upright, and I wait for it. I've been waiting all night—the horror, the guilt, whatever a good person is supposed to produce on demand.
What comes instead is an image of Paige opening the clinic on Monday. Safe. Making coffee in a building where nothing is waiting for her.
“Okay,” I hear myself say.
“Okay?”
“I keep checking.” I press my palm flat against my sternum. “For the bad feeling. It's like tonguing the spot where a tooth used to be. There's just… a space.” I look up at him. “Is that what it's like for you? The space?”
Something moves behind his eyes. He crosses to the chair and sits, forearms on his knees.
“Wren,” he begins, voice grave. “We need to talk.”
“I know.”
“I mean, really talk. All of it. And when I'm done—” He stops for a moment, looking at his forearms like he can see the scars through his shirt.
“When I'm done, you have to make a choice.
And I need you to know before I start that I'm not going to make the choice easy, because I've been trying for days to imagine leaving this town without you, and I can't do it.
I don't think I'm going to be able to let you go.”
I blink at him. The words feel equal parts warm and terrifying.
“Let me go,” I repeat. “That's an interesting phrase, Rowe. Are you planning to cage me? Like one of your animals?”
He doesn't flinch. He just looks at me with those sad gray eyes.
“My animals choose to be with me,” he says.
“Every one of them. Caesar could clear that enclosure fence in one jump. He knows it. I know it. He stays because the carnival is his home.” He drags a breath in.
“That's what I want. Not a cage. A choice.
But you can't choose without knowing what you'd be choosing, so...” His hands lace together.
Unlace. “I'm going to tell you where I come from.”
“Okay.”
“It's ugly,” he warns me.
“I've palpated a prolapsed cow uterus at two in the morning in freezing rain,” I say dryly. “Try me.”
The joke is a lifeline, and he takes it—almost cracking a smile—and then he begins.
“I was born in a compound. A commune. A cult. It called itself the Sanctum of Ash.” He takes a deep breath, his fingers clenching and unclenching.
“The men who ran it called themselves the Prophets.
There were women there who—we were bred, Wren.
That's the word for it. No birth certificates.
No last names. Dormitories full of children who didn't legally exist, which meant nothing that happened to us existed either.”
I go very still on the bench, hardly daring to breathe.
“They preached purity through pain. Punishment was the whole religion. And some of them—” His thumb finds a scar through his sleeve.
“Some of them had appetites the religion was built to feed.
There was a Prophet who chose me. When I was small.
Small enough that I didn't have words for what he was doing until years in.”
“Rowe—”
“Let me get through it.” He says it quietly, not unkindly.
“He's why I can't be touched. It wasn't the pain.
Pain, I could've—it was the gentleness after.
He'd hurt me, and then he'd clean me up so carefully, like he was rescuing me from himself, and my body learned that gentle hands are the second half of something terrible.
Twenty years later, it's still what my skin believes.
You can't argue with skin. Not when it screams at you.”
Tears are sliding down my face. I don't wipe them because wiping them would mean admitting they're there, and he doesn't need my crying to manage on top of everything else. I sit with my hands folded and let them fall.
“The seven of us got out together,” he says.
“Elias led it. He was—he stayed behind to draw the Prophets off while the rest of us ran. Logan set the fire that covered us. And there was a boy.” His jaw works.
“Zach. Five years old. He didn't make it out.
He died in Logan's arms in a field while the compound burned behind us, and my brother has carried him every day since.”
“The seven of you,” I whisper. “You, Logan. Elias, Silas. Cole. Jonah. Marek.”
“Brothers. Some by blood. Logan and I shared a womb. Elias and Silas shared a father. Silas and Marek shared a mother. The rest of us are brothers because we decided to be, which turned out to be the stronger glue.” He straightens a little.
“We were kids with no papers, no names, no schooling anyone would recognize. We should have scattered into foster systems and prisons and gutters. Instead, we stayed together. We fought for it. We learned trades. Real ones and crooked ones. Elias could talk a bird out of a tree by the time he was sixteen. Silas taught himself computers. Cole—” a ghost of warmth crosses his face— “Cole learned knives, which surprised no one.
We conned and worked and clawed until there was enough money for a truck, then two, then a tent.
Seven Sins Entertainment. Built out of nothing by seven boys who didn't exist.”
“And the carnival travels,” I say slowly. “Town to town.”
“Town to town.” He holds my eyes. “The Prophets scattered after the fire. Communes across the country shut down. New names, new towns, new congregations and school boards and hardware stores. Respectable men. Beloved men. Men no sheriff would ever look at twice.” His voice drops low.
“We look at them twice. We find them. We route the show through their towns. And they disappear.”
The paint on Samuel Harlan's house. Large, dripping letters. Ask Samuel about the scholarship boys.
“Harlan,” I say.
Rowe's whole body locks up at the name.
“Samuel Harlan is the Prophet who chose me.” Each word sounds like it's ripped out of his guts.
“He was born in this town. He came back to it after the fire and built himself a hardware store and a front pew and a scholarship fund. For boys, Wren. He personally interviews the finalists.” His hand is white-knuckled over his forearm now.
“In a week, we take him. And I'm going to stand in front of him as the man I turned into and take back what he carved out of me, and then he's going to stop existing, and no boy in this county will ever shake his hand again.”
I'm crying without sound. Both of my cheeks are wet, my nose is running, my chest is aching, and every cell in my body is pulling me toward him. I want to cross the four feet and wrap my arms around this man and hold him. It's a physical need, an instinct older than thought.
And I can't. His skin would scream. Gentle is what comes after. He told me why, and loving him means my arms stay exactly where they are.
So I give him what I can.
“The choice,” I say, sniffling. “You said I'd have a choice to make.”
“The trucks roll in nine days.” He's watching me like he's braced for a punch.
“You could stay. You'd have a life here.
The clinic will need a vet more than ever, and Paige is here, and it would be safe and clean, and nothing I've told you tonight would ever touch you again.” His throat moves.
“Or you come with us. With me. For all of it.
The road, the shows, the towns, the things we do in them.
A tiny trailer and a man who might never be able to hold you, and a family of killers who already love you, and I can't promise you—”
“Rowe.”
“—anything a normal man could promise, no house, no—”
“Rowe.” I wipe my face with both palms, finally, because I need him to see me clearly for this part.
“You have an elephant with a bad eye and a bear who holds grudges against entire states.
A lion, a zebra, a pony with opinions, three monkeys, and a menagerie schedule that would make most practices weep.
Not to mention Silas's doves and rabbits.
And you've been paying house-call rates like a sucker.”
He blinks.
“You need a staff vet,” I say like it should be obvious. “Full time. Travels with the show. I hear there's one available because her boss just died.”
The sound he makes is half laugh, half surprise. His eyes are wet and he doesn't hide it.
“Wren.”
“I'll miss Paige.” My voice wobbles, but I keep going anyway.
“I'll write to her. My parents moved to Arizona three years ago and we do video calls, so that's handled. Everything else in Thistlewood is a laundry chair and an exam table I never want to stand at again.” I look at him, at the space between us that we've learned to fill with everything except skin.
“You said your animals choose. Fine. I'm choosing. I go where the menagerie goes.”
He stands and crosses to the bench and sinks down onto the far end of it, closer than he's ever come on purpose. Just two feet away, the same cushion.
Then he lifts his hand and presses two fingers to his own lips. Holds them out across the space between us, hovering an inch from my mouth. His hand is shaking.
I lean in and kiss his fingertips, feather-light, barely there.
He doesn't flinch.