23. Reva
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
REVA
Because I gave it to you.
For a second, the chapel has no walls. No floor. No door. Only her face staring into mine, both of us breathing too hard, both of us standing inside a truth that shouldn’t exist.
My mother is dead.
She has to be.
I saw the sheets. I heard the voices. I remember the police officer carrying me past blood and telling me not to look.
I looked anyway. Didn’t I?
The woman takes one careful step toward me. I step back so fast my hip bangs into the pew.
She stops at once, which is almost worse than if she had kept coming. She knows not to touch. She knows the shape of fear in me before I realize I’m showing it.
“Don’t,” I say. “Just…stop right there.”
Her eyes fill, but she doesn’t move again. I take a shaky breath in and let it out, watching her warily. My hand moves to cradle my wrist, searching for my bands. I need one thing in this room that makes sense.
I look at her hands. No rings. Short nails. A faint scar across one knuckle. Hands that held Cal’s like they had the right to do that. Hands that might have held me once, buttoned tiny coats, brushed hair back from my face.
My throat closes around a thousand questions that clamor all at once.
Where were you?
Why didn’t you come?
Did you know I was alive?
Did you know about Delia?
Did Cal know about you?
The last one is different. Harder. Because Cal is in a room down the hall with tubes in his throat and secrets in his bed.
“You…you’re supposed to be dead,” I say. “I don’t understand what’s happening.”
It comes out small. Mean. Broken in the middle.
Her face folds inward before she catches it, and she raises her hands as though to reach for me before catching herself and steepling them before her face. “I know. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Behind me, the chapel door opens.
Deacon steps into the aisle with both hands visible and his body angled between me and the door, close enough to catch me if my quaking knees finally quit, far enough away that I don’t feel trapped. Not by him or the room.
His gaze moves from the woman to me, then back again.
A muscle jumps in his jaw. “Not the best timing, Marisol.”
Something cold and certain settles in me as I look between them. Deacon knew. He may not have known that she would be here tonight. But he knew enough.
I reach for one of my rubber bands and snap it.
“You knew?” I ask. “You knew, and after everything, you didn’t tell me?”
Deacon’s face tightens. “I couldn’t.”
“You mean you chose not to. You picked her, and Isabel, and…all of that bullshit…over me. That’s…fine.”
His eyes close for half a second.
That apparently stings, and I push the guilt that thought gives me down, deep down where I don’t have to deal with it. I hate that I know I hurt him. I hate that hurting him matters while the woman in front of me is breathing with my mother’s face.
But I’m not sorry for it.
She looks at Deacon. Something passes between them. Recognition. Warning. A long history I have no access to and no patience for.
Then her eyes come back to me.
“I couldn’t come,” she says.
“No, you don’t get to do that.” My voice rises. “You don’t get to stand here and tell me sorry and make excuses. You don’t get to be in his room holding his hand, saying he promised to bring me back to you. Bring me back from where? From who? From the life where I buried you?”
Deacon says my name once.I cut him a look so sharp he goes silent.
The woman grips the pew harder. “Cal saved you.”
“Yes. Cal saved me. Cal raised me. Cal sat with me after the nightmares and taught me how to check locks, and Cal made pancakes when I couldn’t eat. Cal was there.”
“I know.”
“Stop saying that.”
Her lips press together.
I am shaking now. Full body. Teeth, hands, knees, everything.
The room will not stay where I put it, and I take an agitated step, and then another.
My mother is alive. My mother has been alive.
My mother knows Cal. My mother touched him like she loves him.
My mother stood in a hospital room and said he promised to bring me back to her, as if I was some borrowed thing.
As if I was stolen.
As if the story I survived was only one version of the truth.
“Where were you?” I ask.
Her breath breaks.
Deacon moves one step closer. “Little Ghost.”
“No.” I do not look at him this time. “She answers.”
The woman looks at the cross at the front of the chapel, and for a moment I think she is going to pray instead. I might actually set the room on fire if she does.
Then she turns back.
“With Isabel,” she says.
The name drops between us like a blade. My body goes numb and cold.
“What?”
“She made me come with her.”
The words are careful. Too careful. There is a whole locked room behind them, and I can hear things moving inside.
“She took Delia,” I say.
“Yes.”
“And you?”
Her eyes shine. “Yes.”
I step back again. The pew catches me. “And you let Cal raise me.”
Pain crosses her face so fast it takes on physical presence. “I begged him to.”
My mother looks at Deacon again, and whatever she sees in his face makes her stop talking. Good. Maybe he can be useful in this wreckage he helped keep hidden.
Deacon’s voice is low when he speaks. “This room is not safe for the whole truth.”
I laugh. “That’s your concern right now?”
“Yes.”
The answer is immediate enough to cut through me.
He looks at the chapel door, then at the hallway beyond it. “You came here off pattern. We came through service routes, but Isabel already proved she can reach phones she shouldn’t be able to reach and people she shouldn’t own. If she knows about this meeting, she’ll use it before we make it back.”
My mother stiffens, which is enough to tell me something else. She is afraid of Isabel too.
“I am not leaving with her,” I say, indicating the woman standing in front of me.
“No one asked you to,” Deacon answers.
My mother flinches. Tiny. Controlled.
I look at her again, and the anger shifts under my feet, hitting some new unstable place.
She looks older than she should. Too thin.
Eyes like mine, yes, but exhausted in a way makeup cannot fix.
She does not look like a woman who has been free.
She does not look like a woman who walked out of my childhood and decided not to come back because she found something easier.
That would be simpler.
I need simple, and I’m getting anything but.
Cal is in a room down the hall with tubes in his throat because Isabel sent a bullet and he stepped between me and it.
My sister is in a hotel with bandaged wrists and knees because Isabel put her on a chapel floor.
Sabine is dead on stone stairs because she opened a door.
Deacon is standing in front of me, keeper of other people’s truths and lies.
And my mother is alive.
The thought comes again, impossible.
My mother is alive.
Deacon steps closer to my side. “We need to go.”
I want to argue but he’s right. And I have yet to visit Cal.
My mother looks toward the chapel door. “Just…is Delia safe?”
Her voice catches on Delia’s name. The answer comes from me before Deacon can take it.
“She’s with us.”
Marisol closes her eyes, both hands going to the pew. For the first time, she looks close to falling.
My hand twitches, but I don’t reach for her. I can’t. Deacon does, though. Just enough to steady her elbow.
She looks at me. “Can I see her?”
“No.”
The word comes out fast, and her face goes still.
I hear myself breathe and try again, because Delia deserves to answer for Delia. “I don’t know. Not tonight. We can’t risk you leading Isabel to her.”
“Okay.”
I turn toward the chapel door before I do something reckless like ask her to hug me or slap her or demand fifteen years of answers in a hospital where cameras blink red over every hallway.
At the door, I stop. I don’t look back at her.
“Cal loves you?”
Silence.
Then her voice, thin and broken. “And I love him.”
I grip the door handle until my fingers ache.
“He’s not dead yet.”
“No,” she whispers. “He isn’t.”
Deacon opens the door and checks the hallway before motioning me through. The hospital air hits colder after the chapel, all disinfectant and fluorescent light. I start toward Cal’s room because I came here to see him, because that purpose is the only thing holding the rest of me together.
Deacon falls into step beside me.
I do not look at him.
“We are going to talk,” I say.
“I never assumed otherwise, Little Ghost.”
“But not now.”
“I know.”
“If you knew my mother was alive and kept it from me because you thought I couldn’t handle it—”
“No.”
The word is quiet. I stop.
He stops with me. His face is pale, his side probably hurting, his eyes steady in a way that makes me want to break things. “I kept it because Cal asked me to. Because Marisol asked him to. Because Isabel would have used the knowing to pull you straight to her, and then she would’ve killed you.”
My throat tightens. “That sounds like everyone deciding what I can survive.”
“It was.”
“I’m tired of this, Deacon.”
“We will talk,” he says. “I will take whatever you give me for it—but later. See Cal first.”
See Cal. The words pull me back to the only reason I walked out of Nash’s bed and into this nightmare.
I go to the ICU door. This time, no woman stands beside his bed. Only Cal, and Shiloh in a chair.
Cal is pale. Still. Breathing because the machine insists on it. His hand lies open on the blanket where my mother’s had covered it minutes ago. I slip inside, cross the room, and take that hand in both of mine.
It is warm, which nearly brings me to my knees. Deacon stays at the door as I bend over Cal and press my forehead to his knuckles.
“You absolute asshole,” I whisper. “You have so much explaining to do.”
The monitor keeps beeping, steady and indifferent.
I close my eyes. Behind my lids, my mother says my name like a prayer she was never allowed to finish.
I hold Cal’s hand harder.
“You promised,” I whisper. “So live.”