Epilogue
Gabi's on the porch rail again.
She got up there the way she gets everywhere now — hand, foot, hand, no hesitation, no checking to see if anybody's watching — and she's standing on it with one fist around the post and eleven months of opinion in her face.
"Gabi. Down."
She looks at me.
Walking since seven months. Climbing since eight. There is not a surface in this house she hasn't been on top of, and every single time I say down I get exactly this look.
The one that says and then what.
"Gabi."
She lets go of the post.
"Gabi —"
She steps off.
And she doesn't fall right.
Not the way nineteen pounds falls off a four-foot rail. She goes down wrong — too slow, like the air got thick — her arms out and her shirt lifting and her hair going up off her forehead, and she lands on both feet with a soft thump and stands there.
Two seconds. Maybe less.
Crull's head comes up off the lumber pile. Fen's line goes taut at my sternum from wherever he is. A dog starts barking in the bunkhouse.
Gabi opens her hand.
The dark gathers under the skin of her palm and surfaces. Small. Dark. The size of a dime. The way it's done maybe ten times in eleven months.
It doesn't sink back down.
I wait for it. I've waited for it every time. It sits there in the middle of her palm in the flat afternoon light and it doesn't go anywhere.
She looks at it. Then she looks at me, to see what I'm going to do about it.
"Well," I say. "There you are."
She wanders off toward the trees eating a leaf.
Madison comes out with a dish towel over her shoulder and watches her go.
"She did the thing."
"Off the rail?"
"Yep."
"I told you she'd figure it out." Madison leans on the post. "She's been doing it off the bottom stair all week. I thought she was just bad at stairs."
I look at her.
"She's not bad at stairs," Madison says.
Down in the grass my daughter sits down hard, gets up without using her hands, keeps going.
"The mark on her palm stayed dark this time," I say.
Madison doesn't ask what that means. She never has.
She carried her six weeks with a clock ticking that somebody else set, and went down to a basement every morning with a phone in her hand and made the woman who built it account for every hour, and she's known what her daughter was going to be since before the rest of us did.
"Good," she says.
"Good?"
"She's going to need it." Madison flicks the towel at a fly. "There's a whole world out there of people who'd have liked her in a room with a number on the door. She should be hard to keep."
Gabi reaches the tree line.
A year ago the trees were where the bad guys came from.
I let her go.
***
Harek comes out with coffee and hands me a cup and stands there watching her chew bark.
"It's the equinox."
"Is it?"
"Today. This afternoon, technically. Same length of day and night." He drinks. "Then it tips."
"That mean something to you?"
"It means the beans go in next week."
That's the whole ceremony. The fae drinks his coffee and thinks about beans.
I do the math anyway, because I can't not.
A year ago today we were running.
That's it. That's all of it. I've tried. I know we were in a truck. I know it was cold. I know somebody's blood was on me and I couldn't tell you whose.
***
Fen comes out at noon, and Gabi abandons the trees and charges for him at full speed, falling over twice before she gets there.
He catches her without looking, settles her on his knee, and she immediately starts trying to get back down.
The bunkhouse is loud across the yard. Somebody's got music on. Janet's out there with three of them and a folding table, and whatever she's teaching, two of them are laughing and one of them is crying, and Janet isn't stopping for either.
"Fen."
"Mm."
"Do you remember where you were a year ago?"
He doesn't answer right away.
Gabi gets a fistful of his shirt and hauls herself higher.
"No," he says.
I look at him.
"I wasn't there for it, Jen. I know the year happened. I have pieces." He steadies Gabi when she nearly pitches herself off his knee again. "Mostly I remember what things smelled like. That's what's left when nobody's home to make memories."
"Fen..."
"It's all right."
"It isn't."
He thinks about it.
"No," he says quietly. "It isn't."
I put my hand on the back of his neck.
He leans into it about a quarter of an inch, which for Fen is practically collapsing.
"I've got the same blank spot," I say. "Mine's just fear. I couldn't tell you one thing about last March except that I was afraid. Everything else is gone."
"Then we both lost a year."
"Yeah."
Gabi catches his thumb and immediately decides it belongs in her mouth.
"I'm going to remember this one," he says.
"This year?"
"This day."
He watches Gabi work determinedly on his thumb.
"The trees. The music. Her teeth." His eyes lift to mine. "Your face."
"My face?"
"The way you're looking at me."
I smile.
"Oh, Fen."
"What?"
"You're turning into a romantic."
I laugh.
"What do you want this year?" I ask.
"Normal."
I glance at Gabi, who has now discovered his sleeve is also edible.
"You've met your daughter, right?"
He looks down at her, then back at me.
"No."
"What?"
"I've met our daughter."
He smiles.
Then he laughs, and I hold onto the sound.