Chapter 3
Margaux
I don't speak to Ezekiel for a week.
It isn't a strategy. I'm not punishing him, or — I am, a little, but that's not the main thing.
The main thing is that I don't have the words yet, and I refuse to go to him until I do, because the one thing I will not do is stand in front of that man and dissolve into noise.
I've spent seven years being articulate about my grief.
I will be articulate about this too, or I won't speak at all.
So I teach. I stand at the front of my classroom and I make the letters behave and I help the older boys wrestle long division to the ground and I do not let my voice shake, not once, not even when Mira asks me on Wednesday whether Mr. Ghost is going to come to school and I have to tell her I don't know, sweetheart, we'll see, in a voice as smooth as a pond.
I cook with Della in the evenings because the kitchen is the one place in this compound that's always made sense to me.
She doesn't push. She chops and I stir and after the first night, when she tried to apologize for keeping a secret she didn't actually keep — she found out the same morning I did, it turns out, and the not-knowing-who-knew is slowly resolving into a smaller, more bearable shape — after that first night she just lets me be quiet, and I love her for it.
And I visit the grave.
I know it's empty. I have always, in some way, known it was empty — the box held a stranger, I understand that now, the records were faked, the man I buried was somebody else's tragedy borrowed for the lie.
But the grief I poured into that ground for seven years was not faked.
It was the realest thing I've ever made.
And I find I can't just stop. Sunday comes and my body wants to go and I let it, and I sit at the stone with my own knees in the grass and I don't bring flowers this time, I just sit, because I need to be with the woman I was for seven years before I can figure out how to be the woman I have to become now.
She deserves a goodbye too, that woman. The widow.
The brave one. She held this place up. She doesn't get to just vanish because the dead came back. I owe her a Sunday.
Blythe comes to me on the sixth day.
My sister is two years younger than me and a foot calmer, an herbalist who talks to plants and reads people like weather, and she sits down across from me at the schoolhouse table after the children have gone and she folds her hands and says, "You have to talk to him eventually."
"No," I say. "I don't."
"Margo." She says my name the way only a sister can, with the whole shared history of us inside it. "He's alive. The man you've been mourning for seven years is alive and thirty yards away, and from what I'm hearing, he looks like he's the one dying now. Jo says his wolf is—"
"Good," I say.
She stops. Looks at me.
"I don't mean that," I say. "I don't mean that, Blythe, you know I don't mean it.
" And I don't. I hear myself saying these hard cold things all week — good, let him hurt, don't follow me, no I don't — and not one of them is true.
They're armor. They're the only armor I've got.
Because if I take them off, if I let myself feel the actual thing under them, I'll have to feel that the man I love is suffering, that he came home broken to find the home changed, that he watched me grieve from a tree line two years ago and didn't break cover because breaking cover would have gotten people killed, and if I let myself feel all of that I will forgive him before I've finished being angry, and I have earned my anger, I bled for it, I am not done with it yet.
"What I mean," I tell my sister, "is that I built a whole life on his grave.
I grieved him and I survived it and I became a woman who could live without him.
That took everything I had. And now he's back and I have to figure out how to be both women at once — the one who let him go and the one who wants to tear his door off the hinges and never let him out of my sight again.
And I don't know how. There's no instructions for this, Blythe.
They don't make a casserole for my dead boyfriend came home. "
She reaches across and takes my hand. "No," she agrees. "They don't. But you'll figure it out. You figured out the worse thing." She squeezes. "And you don't have to forgive him to talk to him. Those are two different doors."
She leaves me with that, and I sit in the empty classroom turning it over. Two different doors. My sister, the philosopher.
I break on the eighth day.
It's nothing dramatic. I'm grading papers after hours, the lamp on, the windows gone dark blue with dusk, and I'm taking the children's drawings down off the wall to make room for the spring nature ones, and I get to Mira's.
Mira drew a wolf. A grey wolf, lopsided and earnest the way seven-year-olds draw, and she's given it enormous white wings, angel wings, sprouting off its back.
And under it, in careful crayon, in the wobbling capital letters we've been practicing all month, she's written: MR GHOST CAME BACK FROM HEAVEN.
I sit down on the floor of my classroom, the second time in eight days, and I cry.
But it's a different crying than the first. The first was the world ending.
This is something letting go. I sit there with a seven-year-old's drawing of a winged wolf in my lap and I cry for the simple impossible fact of it — he came back — the fact I've had no room to feel because the room was full of fury, and now, finally, with the wax of Mira's crayon under my thumb, I find a corner of the joy I knew had to be in here somewhere.
It's small. It's tangled up with grief and rage and exhaustion.
But it's there. He came back. He came back from heaven, says the wolf with wings, and the children believe it, and maybe the children are wiser than the adults, the way they so often are.
I stand up. I wipe my face. I put on my coat.
And I walk to his cabin.
It's full dark by the time I get there, the guest cabin at the edge of the compound with one window lit. I knock before I can talk myself out of it. There's a pause, and then the door opens, and there he is.
He looks terrible. Up close, in the lamplight, with no room full of staring wolves to distract me, I can see exactly how terrible.
He's gaunt in a way that frightens me, the cheekbones too sharp, the hollows under his eyes like bruises.
The beard makes him a stranger and the thinness makes him an old man and the eyes — the warm brown eyes I would know anywhere — are dim as a banked fire, tired past tiredness, the eyes of someone who has been awake inside a nightmare for seven years.
He doesn't say anything. He just looks at me like I'm the answer to a question he stopped letting himself ask.
"Tell me everything," I say. "From the beginning. Don't leave anything out. Not the parts you think will hurt me, not the parts you're ashamed of, not the parts you've never said out loud. Everything. And then I'll decide what to do with it."
He steps back and holds the door.
We sit at the small table by the window, across from each other, two cups of coffee neither of us drinks going cold between us, and he tells me.
He tells me about the office at two in the morning.
About Conrad and Priest and the locked door and the folder full of cages.
About the choice — and he's careful to call it a choice, he doesn't hide behind I had to, he says I chose, and I make a private note of that, that he gives me the truth even when the truth is the worst version.
He tells me about the week he had before the funeral, the seven mornings he memorized me while I hummed in the kitchen and didn't know.
His voice breaks on that part. He tells me about the raid, and there he goes quiet and says only that there are things he did that week he'll never say out loud, and I don't push, because I can see in his face that the not-saying is the only mercy he can give himself.
He tells me about the seven years.
The violence. The deprivation. The constant exhausting vigilance of being one wrong word from a bullet.
The suppressants — he had to take them, had to chemically choke his wolf down to nothing so the humans in Cerberus would never smell the shifter in him, and the suppressants are what damaged the bond, what scarred the road between man and wolf, what left him barely able to shift at all.
He tells me about Vault and the basement in Tennessee and his two fingers that didn't set right.
He tells me about the dinner he ate with the man who runs Cerberus, smiling, memorizing.
And he tells me about the cemetery. Two years ago. The tree line, forty yards, the sunflowers. Seeing you alive and grieving me was worse than dying would have been, he says, and I have to look at the cold coffee for a while.
When he's done he sits with his ruined hands flat on the table and he waits. He doesn't ask for anything. He just waits, like a man waiting to hear a sentence read.
I'm quiet a long time.
"You chose the mission over me," I say finally.
"I chose the mission to protect you," he says. "And the pack. And people in cages neither of us will ever meet."
"You don't get to make that choice for me." My voice is very even. "Whether I was worth protecting more than I was worth being honest with. That was mine to make, and you took it."
He doesn't argue. He just says, quietly, "I know. I've known that every single day for seven years."
I stand. I walk to the door. I put my hand on it, and I turn around, and I look at the gaunt broken stranger with the eyes of the man I love, and I say, "I don't know if I can forgive you."
"I don't know if I deserve it," he says.
"That," I tell him, "is not your decision either."
And I leave.
But here is the thing I learn that week, the thing that surprises me, the thing nobody tells you.
I leave that night — and I come back the next day.
And the next. I bring him a real meal because he's clearly not eating.
I sit at the table and we don't talk about the mission, we talk about Mira's reading and the long division and whether the thaw will hold.
The anger doesn't leave. It walks in with me every time.
But so does something else, something that won't be ordered to stay home.
Forgiveness, it turns out, is not a single act. You don't do it once and it's done. It's a thing you have to drive to. Over and over. Day after day. A commute.