Why? There was nothing on earth I wanted more than to go. Escaping was the dream that used to keep me going. It was also the possibility I’d sacrificed, the future I’d foreclosed, to strike my deal.
So no matter how mesmerized I was by his proximity, if Everett chose to leave, there could be no us in the way I’d only just allowed myself to begin to imagine.
“I don’t get it.” He took a step toward me, but I backed up and he stopped, hurt on his face. “This is what we’ve always talked about.”
I’d have to lie. “I don’t want it anymore.” I crossed my arms. “I thought about it, and it doesn’t make sense to leave. I’m happy here. I have a job and family. It was just talk, you know? Foolishness.”
“Liar. Why are you acting like this?”
“It’s not my fault you took it too seriously.” Now I was the one plunging the sword.
His eyes widened. “Whoareyou right now? Seriously, who am I talking to, because it isn’t Ruth Cornier.”
“I don’t—want—to—go,” I said, raising my voice, parents downstairs be damned. “If you do, fine. But you can’t drag me against my will.”
I’d finally horrified him. His pleading expression closed up. “I would never do anything against your will.”
We stood looking at each other for a long, tense moment, my hands clenched in the effort of keeping my true emotions off my face. Then Ever pressed his hand to his heart and twisted an invisible key—just a second, the briefest touch—but I knew what it meant. He was locking away this moment, never to be resurfaced. He turned to the window, swung a leg over the ledge, and vanished into the rain.
I stood there staring at the window but not seeing it. Then, like a dam cracking, the grief poured out. I sank to the floor and cried so hard it felt like I was breaking myself in half. And still, I couldn’t get my body to express the true fullness of my grief. I was the architect of my own misery. No amount of sobbing was equal to the pain.
I was losing Ever. From this day forward, everything would change. He’d been more than my best friend—sometimes a person was bigger than that. Sometimes they were your freedom. The whole woods, the channel through which you first fell in love with the earth, felt at home in it. Sometimes a personwasyour home, the love you learned to growfor yourself, stored in another’s body. Sometimes they were the way your body first learned what it wanted. Sometimes they were an awakening.
He’d been all of it, and now he was gone.
30
NOW
I slam Barry’s car door as the sheriff’s and my parents’ cars come screeching to a halt.
“I don’t have anything to say.” I pull up my long dress and race across the lawn to my front door. I don’t want to talk to Barry—not after what he pulled with Everett in the parking lot. And the sheriff and my parents are only here to harass me. I want to be alone in my small sanctuary, lock the door and pretend my house is hallowed ground.
“Ruth Sarah Cornier,” my father booms, “you stop this instant.”
Like a magic spell, I go rigid on the grass. So many years of obedience and it’s like my body isn’t fully mine. I remember Ever tapping my temple.Is he in there? Is this his?
All four of them—Barry, the sheriff, my mother, and my father—storm across the lawn in their pressed church clothes. The low heels and ironed button-ups are a disguise: no matter what they’re wearing, they’re an army, here to launch an assault. I steel my spine.
“You idiot.” To my surprise, the sheriff shakes his head at Barry. “You tipped our hand. Now what if he skips town?”
“You can’t blame the boy for getting excited,” says my father. He’s still in his white robe from church, the gold thread on the massive crossesadorning his shoulders catching in the sun. “The Duncan kid was being deliberately provocative.”
“Tipped what hand?” I ask the sheriff, focused on using this ambush to at least learn whatever secret Barry referenced in his anger.
“He won’t skip town.” Barry says it bitterly, like a child unused to being criticized. “Ruth’s still here.”
I think of Ever’s haste to leave Bottom Springs. Had he caught wind he was going to be scapegoated somehow? Is that why he was so eager to leave?
The sheriff clears his throat. “I don’t think—”
“Someone tell me what’s going on,” I demand, taking everyone by surprise.
My mother’s look is censorious. “Don’t interrupt your elders.”
I’m this close to screaming that I’m twenty-three years old and don’t care about rules I never agreed to when the sheriff turns to my mother and says, “No, Ruth’s right. It’s time.”
He mops his gleaming forehead. The mid-July afternoon heat is so thick it nearly ripples in the air. Sweat trickles down my back, but the last thing I’ll do is invite these people into my house.
