“No, wait, it was one time, years ago, before I went to—”
“Jesus Christ, Liam,” she says, hovering a hand over her mouth. “Is that why she disappeared on me? Is that why she stopped talking to me after you went away? After Dad died? Those girls—are they, are wefamily?”
“No.” The word catches like glass in my throat. “They’re not mine.”
“So, what, you fucked her once three years ago and you’re threatening to kill Jockey over her?”
“No. Yes. Fuck.” I run my hands over my face. “It’s complicated, Margot.”
“Yeah, sounds pretty fucking complicated,” she bites back, wounded. “You were fucking my best friend and she cut herself out of my life because of the guilt and the lies?Why, Liam? Why her? Why couldn’t you just screw someoneelse, someone that didn’t mean so much to me, someone Ineededwhen you were gone and I was all alone—”
She’s fully crying now, big miserable tears streaming down her face, and I know this is about more than me and Lexie, it’s about me being gone, and us losing Dad, and Margot keeping her spine straight and her chin up all this time. I reach for her but she pushes me away.
“You were supposed to come back and change things,” she says in anguish. “Fixthings, not make them worse! I would have left, you know. I’m good! I could have gone back to the city, I could have built a life for myself, a good life, but instead, I was stuck here, waiting for you, just to find out you’ve betrayed me, and lied to me, and left me stranded fornothing!”
“Not nothing,” I say, my voice threadbare. “Not nothing, Margot, I wouldn’t do that if I didn’t…”
Margot sniffs, wiping her eyes with her sleeve. The door is still half-open, and cold, angry wind keeps whipping in in harsh blasts. It’s already afternoon, the light through the clouds hazy and burnished. It smells like snow.
“If you didn’t what, Liam?” Margot finally manages on a sad, endearing little hiccup.
I stare at my sister, and try to swallow the emotions rising up in me, like I have for so many years. Truth, and sadness, and grief, and desire, and a gasping, gaping black stretch of loneliness. I shouldn’t say it, even if it’s the truth. I should let Lexie go, and Margot too. I should be the one stranded with this town and Milo’s ghost. I should die on this war path, and set everyone free.
“Love her,” I say instead, softly and it blasts into me like a tidal wave how true it is. “I love her.”
Margot blinks, tears rising again, but her tortured expression softens and she shakes her head. “What?”
“I can’t explain it,” I say. “But she was the only other thing that kept me going in there.”
“Oh,” Margot says, like that’s all the explanation she could ever need. “Liam, I had no idea…”
“I should have told you. Before, a long time ago, when…I just didn’t realize,” I admit. “How real the feelings were.”
Silence falls between us as the sun falls behind the horizon, and the mean wind blows meaner, promising a storm.
“Liam,” Margot says suddenly. “She’s not safe. You have to warn her—”
“Margot, what about you? You’re—”
“No. Go.Go.” Margot has me by the elbow and is dragging me toward the door. “I’ll lock myself in here. I have my phone. I’ll be OK. Go and find her, we’ll go from there.Hurry.”
“Margot,” I say, turning on the threshold and catching her hand. I hold her eyes. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet, Liam,” she says, eyes darting past me, seeking something in the steeping dark at my back. “I have a feeling this night is just about to begin.”
* * *
“Lexie!” I bang my fist against the door, and am answered again with silence. The car’s gone, and I’m trying, unsuccessfully, to quash this horrible sinking feeling in my gut. Dark has fallen, stretching black fingers through the woods, and it feels like the wind is chasing me. “Lexie, open up! It’s Liam!”
But it’s no use. I loop the house, try the back door, peer in each of the windows—but nothing, no trace. She’s gone.Where?To the city? To see her mother and the girls? To work, catching some overtime hours? Is she at some bar with Ramsay, or at his place?
I want to believe that any of these are true, that any of them are even real options. But the back of my neck is burning, and I keep getting that flayed, exposed feeling that someone’s watching me, that eyes are on me, that someone’s coming—
Crick crick!
Something in the woods. I flinch, looking sharply to that stoic sentinel line of trees: watching me. Tendrils of mist rise up of the frosty earth, catching between the black trunks. Two glints, bright as coins: a shadow stops there beyond the overgrown lawn, tall and bleak, one foot raised and a thick tail twitching.
“Fuck,” I say. The wolf watches me down its snout, unimpressed. It’s not a coyote, Margot was right, but it doesn’t belong here, it doesn’t even fit into the landscape. My heart drums against my chest. The wolf watches me. I watch it back, and after another raw moment of us watching one another, it turns with a flick of its tail and vanishes into the woods.
