CHAPTER 35
WREN
The longest night of the year comes in on a storm.
I’ve had two days to be the best lie of my life, and I’ve spent them well.
I’ve been soft. I’ve been saved. I let Lazarus believe he won the argument in the blazing light; I let him fold himself around me at night and I matched my breathing to his on purpose, in, and out, the metronome, the thing he came back from the dead for, and I felt him go under each night a little easier, a little deeper, six years of debt finally setting down its weight beside me.
He sleeps now. That’s the thing I gave him.
That’s the thing that’s going to let me leave.
There’s a particular cruelty in it that I’ll carry to my grave: the only reason I can get away from a man who reads me through walls is that I taught him, at last, how to sleep.
By eleven the storm has the whole town shut and white and roaring, and Lazarus is under, deep, slack, his arm a warm bar across me, his breath slow against the back of my neck.
I lie awake and listen to it the way he used to listen to mine, and I memorize it, because I know what I’m about to spend, I know exactly what it costs, and I make myself pay it with my eyes open.
In. And out. The quietest the world has ever been for either of us.
Then I slide out from under the only safe thing I’ve ever known, and I leave it sleeping, and I go to end this.
I take the music box. I don’t fully know why. It feels like mine now. It feels like the only witness I trust.
The truck won’t make the pass, nothing will, the plows gave up hours ago, so I walk, up Cradle Hill into the teeth of it, the snow sideways and stinging, Eli’s heavy flashlight in my coat and the brass box in my fist, and the cold is enormous and clean and it scours six years of careful nothing out of me with every step.
I think about leaving a note. I don’t. A note is just telling the dark where you’re going.
I think about Lazarus waking to an empty bed, to the absence of the one sound that ever quieted him, and I understand that the silence will tell him everything a note could and faster, that he’ll come awake into a world gone quiet the wrong way and he’ll know, the way I’d know, and he’ll come.
I’m counting on the head start. I’m counting on a storm that even a wolf has to walk through.
Marrowfield is where it has always been: at the top of the black hill, above the town, above the snow line, where nothing ever walked across the lawn.
Except it isn’t a house anymore.
Six years of weather have been into the bones of it.
The fire took the roof and most of the upper floors and left a black ribcage open to the storm, beams like burnt fingers against a sky the color of an old bruise, snow sifting down through the gaps into rooms that no longer have ceilings.
The grand hall where Augustus crouched to take my chin is a roofless box full of drifted white.
The third-floor landing where I turned a dead girl’s photograph to face the world is gone, just gone, fallen into the dark below.
Only the east wing still stands, of course it does, the worst part always outlasts the rest, squat and scorched and stubborn at the end of the ruin, one black window lit from inside with a low amber light, like an eye that’s been left open.
He’s waiting for me in the one room that wouldn’t burn.
I climb through the wreck of my whole adolescence, through the snow and the char, and I push open the warped door of the east wing, and there is Silas Frost, sitting at his dead father’s desk in a circle of lantern light with the cassette tape squared neatly in front of him on the scorched wood, and behind him on the wall.
I see it now, I see why this is the room he chose, there is a recorder.
An old reel machine, wired to the wall, the kind of thing a documentarian keeps. Salvaged. Cleaned. Waiting.
“You came alone,” Silas says, pleased, like a host. “Good girl. He’s still asleep, isn’t he. I wondered if you’d be able to do it.” His head tips. “You gave him sleep and then you used it to leave him. Father would have adored you. That’s not a victim’s move, little lamb. That’s a Frost’s.”
“I didn’t come to be a Frost.” I set the music box on the desk between us, next to the tape, and I watch a flicker of something cross his face at the sight of it, the only thing all night that wasn’t part of his plan. “I came for the four minutes. Play it.”
“That’s it? No deal? No begging?” He’s enjoying this, but there’s a hairline of confusion in it now, because I’m not afraid the way he came here to watch me be afraid. “You understand if you hear it, there’s no unhearing. You’ve built a whole little life on not knowing. You’ll never get it back.”
“I never had it.” I’m steady. The storm screams against the black window.
“Everyone in my life has held the truth just out of my reach because they were so sure I couldn’t carry it, my whole existence, somebody else deciding what I’m allowed to know about my own self.
You. Your father. The court. Even —” my voice catches, just once — “even the one who loves me. You all keep my own life away from me like it’s for my own good, and I am done.
So play the tape, Silas. Give me the worst thing. At least then it’s mine.”
For the first time, Silas Frost looks at me like he doesn’t entirely understand the animal in front of him.
He came for furniture. He came for a copy, a victim, a thing his father bought, something to inherit and decide about.
And instead there’s a woman across the desk who walked alone through a killing storm into the room where the worst night of her life happened, asking — demanding, to be handed the unsurvivable, because she’d rather die knowing than live as a stranger to herself.
“He really did pick well,” Silas murmurs, and something almost like respect, almost like fear, moves behind his beautiful inherited eyes.
“All right, little lamb. You want your four minutes.” He reaches for the reel machine.
“Let’s find out together what you really are.
I’ve only listened to it once. I had to stop.
” His hand settles on the switch, and he smiles, and it’s not the father’s smile anymore, it’s smaller, and it’s real, and it’s the first true thing he’s shown me.
“It’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard. And I grew up in this house. ”
His thumb moves toward the switch.
And through the storm, faint and then not faint, comes a sound that stops both our hearts at once: an engine.
Climbing the impossible pass. Tires fighting snow no vehicle should be able to cross.
Headlights swinging up the black hill, raking across the burnt ribs of the house, throwing the shadows of dead beams huge and reeling across the snow.
Silas’s smile spreads slow and enormous and delighted, and he takes his hand off the switch, and he sits back, and he looks at me with the pure joy of a planner whose plan has just walked, exactly on schedule, into the trap.
“And there’s my brother,” he says softly.
“Right on time. Awake. Off his leash. Five hundred feet of court order shredded on the way up the hill, every rule he’s minded for six years gone, the dog finally off the chain, and all of it on tape, the second he comes through that door.
” He folds his hands. “I didn’t need you to be furniture, Wren.
I needed you to be bait. You were always going to come, and he was always going to follow, and now I have you both, one of you a confessed killer, the other a paroled arsonist breaking a protective order to do violence in the dark, caught on a recording, on the longest night of the year, in the room where it all started.
” The engine cuts out below. A truck door.
Boots in the snow, fast, heavy, coming. “Sit down, little lamb. Let me wind the box. You both always did come when you heard it.”
And Silas Frost reaches past the tape, and past my whole sealed life, and takes the little brass music box in his hand, and begins, slowly, smiling, to play the lullaby, as Lazarus’s boots hit the east wing stairs.