Chapter 1
Margaux
There are twelve children in my schoolhouse on the morning the dead come back, and I am in the middle of explaining to a seven-year-old named Mira why the letter e at the end of a word can make the vowel before it say its own name, when the door opens and Della is standing in it with a face the color of paper.
I've known Della eight years. I've seen her after a battle, blood to the elbows, calm as a still pond.
I've seen her hold dying men and laugh at funerals and stare down wolves twice her size without blinking.
I have never once seen her look the way she looks right now, which is broken open, which is afraid, and the chalk goes still in my hand.
"You need to come to the clubhouse," she says.
"I'm teaching."
"Margo." Her voice does something it has never done with me. It cracks. "You need to come now."
Mira is looking up at me with her big serious eyes.
The other children have gone quiet the way children do when the adults stop pretending.
And I set the chalk in the tray and I tell them Miss Blythe will be over in a minute to sit with them, because Della has already turned and is walking, and a Della who walks away from her own sentence is a Della in the grip of something I have to follow.
The compound is wrong.
That's the only word I have for it as I cross the yard.
Wrong. There are wolves standing in doorways who should be working.
There's a conversation by the garage that's stopped halfway through, two men frozen mid-word, watching me pass.
Casket is on the clubhouse steps and when he sees me he flinches like I've struck him and looks away, and Casket has never in his life looked away from anything.
The whole compound has gone still and it's all pointed at me, all of it, a hundred eyes following the schoolteacher across the yard, and I feel like a woman walking to a sentence she hasn't been told.
"Della, what is it. Is someone hurt. Is it Blythe—"
"No. Everyone's fine. Everyone's—" She stops at the clubhouse door with her hand on it and she turns to me and her eyes are wet and I have genuinely never seen this woman cry.
"Margo, I need you to be ready for something.
I need you to know that whatever you feel, you're allowed to feel it, you hear me? Whatever it is. You're allowed."
"You're scaring me."
"I know." She pushes the door open.
The clubhouse is full and it is silent. Conrad is there, at the head of the long table, his hands flat on the wood.
Priest is by the wall, still as a held breath.
There are men I love lining the room with their backs to the panel walls and their eyes on the floor and not one of them will look at me, and in the center of it all, in the empty middle of the room where the light from the high windows falls, there is a man.
He's thin. That's the first thing. Thin in a way that's wrong on a frame I—
I stop.
I stop the way you stop when the floor isn't there. Some animal part of me has already understood and is trying to drag the rest of me back from the edge, and it can't, it's too late, I've already seen.
He's bearded. His cheeks are hollow. His clothes are wrong, cheap and dark and unfamiliar, the clothes of a stranger.
His hair is too long and shot through with grey that wasn't there before.
His eyes are sunk into shadow and the color in them — I know that color, I'd know it underwater, I'd know it in the dark, I have looked into that exact warm brown ten thousand times — the color is dimmed, gone tired, gone empty, like a window with the lamp behind it almost out.
But the way he's standing.
The way he holds himself in space, shoulders just slightly curled in, taking up less room than his body deserves, the apology that lives in his posture, the thing I used to tease him about — you're six foot two, Zeke, stop trying to fold yourself into a smaller man — that way of standing is his.
It is so completely, unmistakably his that my body recognizes it before my mind will let it, and the seven years I have built, brick by terrible brick, every Sunday and every empty morning and every slow inch of survival, all of it comes down at once.
"You're dead," I say.
My voice doesn't sound like mine. It sounds flat. It sounds far away.
"Margo—" he says, and oh, God, the voice. Rougher than it was. Older. But underneath the wear it is his voice saying my name and the sound of it goes through me like a blade goes through paper.
"You're dead." Louder now. The flatness is breaking up and something white is coming through the cracks of it, something that isn't grief and isn't joy and is hotter than both.
"I watched them put you in the ground. I picked the flowers.
I chose what they buried you in — I chose your jacket, the grey one, because you always said it was the only nice thing you owned.
I sat with the box the night before. I put my hand on it.
I talked to it." My voice is climbing. "I put flowers on your grave this Sunday.
Four days ago. I sat there for an hour and I told you about Mira's reading and I came home and now you're—" The word breaks in half. "You're standing there."
He takes a step toward me.
I take a step back.
I see what it does to him. I see the step land like a fist. He goes white under the beard and stops dead and every wolf in the room flinches at the same time because they can all feel it, the whole pack felt my step backward like a struck bell, and good.
Good. Let them feel it. Let every single one of them feel one heartbeat of what I've felt for seven years.
"I can explain," he says.
"You left me." I'm not crying. I want to note that, for the record, for whatever record there is — I am not crying, I'm past crying, I'm vibrating with something the body doesn't have a name for.
"You let me grieve you for seven years. You let me wear black for a year.
You let me visit a hole in the ground every week of my life and talk to a stone and you were—" I look at him, really look, the thinness and the beard and the dead-tired eyes and the aliveness of him, the obscene, impossible aliveness.
"You were alive. The whole time. You were alive. "
He doesn't deny it. He just stands there in the falling light and lets me say it, and the not-denying is its own confirmation, and I turn to Conrad.
Conrad, who married Della, who held the compound together through three wars, who I have trusted with my life and the lives of my children more times than I can count.
"You knew."
He doesn't say anything. His hands stay flat on the table. His face stays stone. But he doesn't look away from me, and he doesn't deny it either, and his silence is a yes so total it might as well be carved.
I turn to Priest.
"You knew."
Priest holds my gaze. There's something in his face that might be sorrow, but he's quiet too, and his quiet is the same yes.
The whole room. The whole pack. My family.
The people who came to my classroom and ate at my table and called me sister, who watched me lay flowers on an empty grave Sunday after Sunday after Sunday, who watched me learn to live again at a cost they can't imagine — they knew.
Or some of them knew, and the rest of them are finding out right now, the same as me, and somehow that's worse, somehow the not-knowing-who-knew is a fresh wound on top of all the others.
I turn back to him. To Ezekiel. To Ghost, apparently, because Della called him that on the way in and I'm only now hearing it, Ghost, of course, of course that's what they'd call a dead man who isn't dead.
He's looking at me like I'm the only thing in the world.
He's looking at me the way he used to, the way that used to make me feel like the sun came up because I walked into a room, except now his face is a stranger's face and his eyes are dim and seven years stand between us like a wall I can't see the top of.
I think, distantly, that I should feel joy.
Somewhere in me there must be joy — the man I loved is alive, the worst thing that ever happened to me didn't happen, the universe handed me back the impossible.
There must be joy in here somewhere under the rubble.
I'll find it later. I'll dig for it for months.
But right now there's no room. Right now I am so full of fury and shock and grief-turned-inside-out that there isn't a single inch of me left for joy, and that, more than anything, more than the beard or the thinness or the seven empty years, that is what I will never forgive: that he stole my joy from me even in the moment of his return. That he ruined his own resurrection.
Because I had imagined it. That's the thing.
In the first year, before I learned not to, I used to lie in the dark and imagine exactly this — the door opening, him walking through it, the mistake corrected, the dead made undead.
I built the scene a hundred ways. In every one of them I ran to him.
In every one of them there was light, and weeping, and my body crossing a room without my permission to throw itself against his.
I never once, in a hundred imaginings, pictured myself standing frozen in a doorway taking a step backward.
I never pictured the fury. I taught myself eventually to stop the imagining altogether, because hope is a knife you keep sharpening on yourself, and a woman has to put the knife down or bleed out.
And now the thing I stopped letting myself want is standing in front of me in the wrong clothes with the wrong face, and the version of me that would have run to him died somewhere in those seven years, quietly, without a funeral of her own, and I'm only finding out right now that she's gone.
"Don't follow me," I say.
"Margo—"
"Don't. Follow. Me."
I walk out. The pack parts for me. Nobody touches me.
Della reaches out and I move past her hand.
The light outside is too bright and the air is too cold and the mountains are too big and I walk across the yard with my spine straight and my chin up because every window has a face in it and I will not give them anything more than they've already taken.
I make it to the schoolhouse.
I make it inside, and I shut the door, and the children are gone — Blythe must have come, thank God, thank God for my sister — and the room is full of small empty desks and crayon drawings on the walls and the alphabet running along the top in my own careful hand, and I get exactly three steps before my legs stop being legs.
I go down between the desks. I sit on the cold plank floor in the middle of my classroom with the children's drawings looking down at me and I put both hands over my face and I come apart.
Seven years. Seven years of Sundays. Seven years of the empty side of the bed and the second coffee mug I couldn't make myself throw away and the slow brutal arithmetic of building a life with a hole in the center of it.
Seven years of being the brave one, the steady one, poor Margo, isn't she strong, look how she carries on.
Seven years of grief that I earned and survived and made into something I could live inside.
And he was alive.
He was alive the entire time.