Chapter One
Two Years Earlier
MILLIE CAN’T REMEMBER THE LAST TIME SHE wore black.
No wait, she can. It was Halloween, three years ago.
Her publisher threw a costume party, and since being close to them was the reason she moved to New York, the reason she lives with four other people in a third-floor walk-up in the bowels of Queens, she went as a witch, complete with stuffed-animal cat and a pointy black hat, which might not have seemed edgy to anyone else, but if they’d known the shit she’d gone through growing up, they would have given her a prize.
She’d spent the party taking photos with a dozen other YA authors, smiling like she was having the time of her life (and she was, as far as social media was concerned), then shoved the outfit in the back of her closet, where it had lived.
Until now.
Millie picks at her nail polish as, across the room, her aunt begins to sob again. She left the hat at home, for obvious reasons, but it says something that this is the only black outfit she even owns.
She doesn’t like the color—is it even a color?
She’s never been sure—in part because it makes her look washed out, and in part because it feels tethered to the white she was always forced to wear growing up.
They’re both so bland, so muted. Muffled.
Stifled. Smothering. These days, her closet is full of bright, happy colors.
Like the nail polish.
Robin’s-egg blue. She started painting her nails so she’d stop biting them, but it didn’t work, so now the peppy blue paint is chipped and the nails themselves are bitten to the quick, and if her mom was here she’d tut about that, but she’s not. Obviously.
If she were writing this scene, she would start with the smell.
The odor of well-meaning food mingling with the thick scent of the lilies, as if they’re trying to cover up the smell of death, even though the death isn’t here.
They already did that part, with the caskets—closed, thank god, the last thing she needs is that mental image, living rent-free in her head—and now she’s sitting on her dead parents’ sofa, while people weave between the furniture like some kind of grieving stream.
She can feel their whispered words, their eyes, hanging on her as if to say, What kind of daughter doesn’t cry at her parents’ funeral? What kind of monster isn’t sad?
The judgment comes wafting off them, because she isn’t grieving the right way, even though every website says that there is, in fact, no wrong way to grieve.
But society says otherwise.
They want her to cry, just like they wanted her to stand up at the funeral and share some happy memories, to talk about what wonderful parents Tom and Martha Mitchell were, so loving, so warm, so full of grace.
She couldn’t.
She can’t. It’s not because she isn’t sad. It’s just, when it comes to Tom and Martha Mitchell, she put her love—and her anger and her longing and all her bitter, ugly feelings—in a box inside a box inside a box inside a box until they were safe enough to pack away.
And she’s not about to bring them out again.
Not here.
Not now.
It was a car accident (in case you’re wondering).
Not terribly creative.
A drunk driver who veered into their lane.
He died too, for what it’s worth.
Comeuppance matters, in the narrative sense. It’s certainly more satisfying as a reader when the scales balance out. Then again, if this were a book, Millie Mitchell would be crying.
The irony is that Millie’s always been an easy crier. A boyfriend once said he felt like her feelings were a jack-in-the-box, just waiting to pop up and scare the shit out of him.
They broke up a few weeks later.
The point is, Millie’s more than capable of crying.
She just . . . doesn’t feel like crying now.
Her younger sister, Freya, is being the good daughter, making the rounds, dark hair scraped back, eyes bloodshot, like she hasn’t slept since the accident.
She’s wearing pencil-thin slacks and a black cashmere sweater, and Millie feels a tiny pinch of anger as she picks at her tights. She was never allowed to wear pants.
Her fingers start rapping on her dress, restless to go, to get to work, to write.
She needs to get her daily words down.
Three thousand. That’s how many she needs.
Rain or shine, she does them every day.
It started as a form of discipline. It helped her finish her first book, helped her make her deadlines, and somewhere along the way, it became a bit of a ritual, an obsession, and it’s not like she thinks something bad will happen if she doesn’t do it, but she also can’t be sure that something won’t.
As far as what the bad thing is, who knows. After all, three days ago she wrote her words, and her parents’ car still crashed.
But maybe it could have been worse.
Freya could have been with them.
Her hands twitch at the thought, and instead she tries to think of where she left her characters, of the scene waiting to be finished.
Lestrand, her latest hero, the dark and brooding heartthrob ordered to slay her heroine, Nadina—only to fall in love with her instead.
Not that they’ve gotten there yet. Right now he’s warring with himself, his duty.
There was a ball, and in order to get close enough, he asked her to dance, and—
A hand falls on her shoulder, and Millie jumps. A well-meaning neighbor, or maybe a friend. Theirs. Not hers. Obviously. They say how sorry they are, and she musters a sad, tight smile, a perfect mirror of their own.
“Do you need anything?” they ask, and she wants to say, Yes, I need to write.
When she published her first book—a book she wouldn’t have even been allowed to read in the house where she grew up—the publisher asked if she wanted to do a signing in her hometown, and her heart tightened.
“Surely your family would love the chance to come out and support you,” they said.
And Millie did an awful thing.
She lied and said her parents were both dead.
And now they are.
And sure, that was four years ago, but it feels like she whispered it into the universe, and somehow, eventually, the universe heard.
And the universe answered.
Mercifully, the neighbor (friend? colleague?) drifts away.
Millie goes back to tapping her thigh. How long is she supposed to sit here?
Surely it’s been long enough. She’s going to leave at some point; it might as well be now.
She gets up from the couch, and heads for the front door.
She makes it halfway down the front steps when she hears the door slamming in her wake.
“Where are you going?”
She turns and finds her sister, Freya, cheeks flushed, hands fisted at her side.
“Back to the hotel,” she says. She booked a room in downtown Richmond, couldn’t bear the thought of staying in that house. Even for Freya.
“I can’t believe you’re just going to leave.”
Millie sighs. “What do you expect me to do?”
“STAY!” she snaps, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. Like it’s the easiest. They stand there on the front path of their dead parents’ house, scowling at each other.
Millie is twenty-seven to Freya’s nineteen, and those eight years might as well be a chasm.
It’s not just the age, or the fact that in Millie’s mind, Freya will always be a little kid, a smaller, dark-haired carbon copy trailing in her wake, one hand on her favorite teddy and the other on Millie’s sleeve.
It’s that sometime before Freya hit double digits, their parents changed.
Not like, they got older and a little more lenient.
More like they’d been body-snatched. While Millie grew up going to church four days a week and being told she couldn’t read fantasy novels because that was how the devil gets in, Freya’s adolescence either coincided with or brought about some tectonic shift within the Mitchell house, something Millie would obviously have been grateful for if she hadn’t already left.
Instead, she came home from college that first Christmas and found a house lit up with lights, a tree with presents underneath and Santa ornaments, even though Santa had been banned her entire childhood because he took the Christ out of Christmas.
But her parents had had some kind of falling-out with their church (a church she had been begging them to leave for years), had broken free and taken Freya with them, but left Millie behind.
She’d stood dumbfounded in the living room, tears sparkling in her eyes, not because it was beautiful, which it was, but because it wasn’t fair.
It felt like some kind of punishment, like they were saying Freya deserved something Millie didn’t.
And when she called them out on it, her dad accused her of being dramatic, and her mom told her she was being selfish.
Freya was oblivious, humming “Jingle Bells”—not even “Drummer Boy, or “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” or any of the ones Millie had been forced to sing—and Millie spent the whole holiday putting on a smile, and pretending to be happy instead of hurt, pretending this was the life she had instead of the one she’d always wanted, now given to someone else.
And she tried not to turn that anger on her sister. To keep it focused on Mom and Dad. But it was hard.
When Millie turned thirteen, she was given a purity ring and told to keep her knees together when she sat.
When Freya turned thirteen, they let her have a sleepover at the nearby roller rink.
With boys. And every time Millie so much as brought up the absurd disparity, her parents acted like she was blowing her own past out of proportion, misremembering her life, and she couldn’t take feeling gaslit every second she was home, so she stopped coming. Three years, without a visit.
And it was awful.
And it was easier.
And then they went and died, and she didn’t really have a choice.
So she’s here, but she can’t get her little sister to understand.
They may be at the same funeral, but they’re not mourning the same people. Freya doesn’t get why Millie doesn’t love them, and Millie doesn’t get how Freya can. Freya doesn’t remember Millie’s parents, and Millie doesn’t recognize Freya’s.
“I have to go,” she says, keeping her voice steady. “I’m on deadline.”
Freya throws up her hands. “Oh, forgive me for thinking Mom and Dad are more important than dragon porn.”
Millie rolls her eyes. “There are no dragons in this one, and it’s not porn,” she hisses. “There are a few very tasteful fade-to-blacks, which you’d know if you ever read—”
“I have,” snipes Freya. “And you know what I think?”
“I guess you’re going to tell me.”
“I think you’re better than that.”
“You used to like my stories.”
“When I was a kid! But I grew up. And you should, too.”
Millie flinches. She used to sit on the edge of Freya’s bed and make up fairy tales.
And sure, most people grew out of that, went to parties, had a life.
But if she’d done that, she wouldn’t have gotten an agent before she was old enough to drink.
Wouldn’t have sold a book—even if it wasn’t the kind she’d thought she wanted to write.
“You could be really good, Mill,” says Freya, which is about as backhanded as a compliment can be.
She must have learned that from their mom.
“Instead, you’re dumbing yourself down. On the page, and off.
You think I haven’t seen those videos you make?
And the voice you put on, like you’re still in high school. ”
The arrows hit their mark—she doesn’t know a single writer who wants to spend every waking hour shilling for readers, trying to be shiny enough to catch their attention in ten-second chunks, putting in a hundred thousand words of work only to be told they’re not doing enough, but it’s the way it is.
Millie grits her teeth and tries not to let it show.
“Yeah, well,” she growls, “who do you think is going to pay for you, now that Mom and Dad are gone? I am. With those books. So if I were you, I’d stop shitting on my life, and let me get on with my work.”
Freya flinches, as if slapped.
Millie wants to pull her close, to tell her everything will be okay.
But saying it won’t make it so.
And she still has three thousand words to write.