So many pieces are fitting together. “Augustus died two nights ago. Was that you?”
He looks at me like he regrets what he’s going to say. “I did plan to kill him. But scrutiny was too high after the sheriff found Fred’s skull. I hate that Augustus died naturally. He robbed me of the chance to give him a matching scar. The coward must’ve known I was coming.”
“You came back to Bottom Springs this summer to kill him.” One by one, he was going after all the men in the photograph. I take another step away. “Not for me.”
“Come on, Ruth. It’s complicated.” Ever starts to step toward me, then halts, forcing himself to give me space. “But I did lie to you, and I’msorry. You defended me even though everything Barry and the sheriff said is true.” His voice turns bitter. “I’m a freak and a sicko. A monster.”
More than that. Herman, Fred, Renard. He was a serial killer.
“Why didn’t you leave the minute I told you the sheriff found a skull?” I ask. “You could’ve disappeared and saved yourself all this heartache.”
“And leave you to suffer alone? Never.”
“But once we knew it was Fred’s skull and I was safe—”
“But you weren’t. With the sheriff dredging the swamp, I knew it would only be a matter of time before they found something pointing to Renard. I couldn’t leave you to face that on your own. I needed a plan to keep you out of prison, and I found one.” He takes a deep breath. “Besides…”
“What?”
“I thought if I made sure you couldn’t get caught for Renard, I could convince you to finally leave Bottom Springs.”
“You risked getting caught to stick around for me. Why would you endanger yourself like that?”
“I told you. It’s complicated.”
I turn from him to look out the window. I’m trying to process, but it’s so much, requiring a rewrite of my entire life. My father’s capacity for cruelness, the truth about the men in my house, Ever knowing I poisoned his dad, committing matching sins. I’m still searching for the emotions I’m supposed to feel, the terror and fury, but I’m strangely numb. I keep circling an unavoidable truth. I test it by saying it out loud. “If you’re sick, then I’m sick, too.”
Ever shakes his head. “Like hell. You did what you did to protect me. And you know what? The world’s better off without my father. I’m glad he’s dead. How’s that for sick?”
“What you did to Fred and Herman protected a lot more people.” I think of Mrs. Fortenot and Beth, who didn’t even wait around for Fred’s memorial to escape Bottom Springs. Lila and all the other kids whomight be haunted because of Herman. It will never happen to another kid. Ever’s long-ago jab comes back:It’s funny what you can see for other people that you can’t see for yourself.
And just like that, it all comes together. All the years of my life spent on the outside, tiptoeing in the background of classrooms and the church and my own house, all the philosophy and history I’ve read, all the love stories—every book, in fact. Every quiet rebellion, every time a fire stoked in my heart when something wasn’t right, every harsh word I bore witness to, every cruelty, every strike of the rattan cane, every night I cried myself to sleep, thinking life should be different. Each thought and feeling was a brick placed one right after the other, building a bridge to a new place, a new way of thinking that might’ve been impossible if not for those twenty-three years of pain. Now I know why my heart isn’t pounding in fear or regret.
I gather myself to my fullest. Everett stills. “Here’s how I see it. Fred and Herman. Your dad and Renard. Those weren’t crimes.”
“What?” His dark eyes scan my face.
“Killing them wasn’t the crime, Ever. It was the justice.”
“That’s not what the sheriff would say. Or your father.”
“Who cares about their paper-thin morals and self-serving laws?” My chest expands as I breathe deeply. What I’m about to say is my mightiest rebellion yet. “The kings get to make the rules, but that doesn’t make them right. All your life they’ve treated you like something unnatural and outside them. You know why my father is so powerful? Not because he’s wise or good. Because he has the ability to point to someone and cast them out of the Kingdom of Heaven.”
Cast them out of goodness, out of community. That’s how he’d gotten his start, after all. The foundation of his power was fear and exclusion, not holiness.
“Why should we have to love and obey a world that doesn’t love us back?” My voice rises above the pounding rain. “Renard treated me likeI was less than a person when he tried to rape me. And all those men told you that you were less every time they abused you. To them, we’re not people the way they are. We’re lower creatures. Animals. Beasts. You know what I say to that? Okay, then! I’m done trying to change their minds.” I swallow past the lump in my throat. “Twenty-three years of trying to persuade them, to make them love us, has gotten us nowhere. I accept it—we’re not human. So why should we be bound by human laws?”
Ever stands transfixed.
“Who would defend us if we didn’t defend ourselves? Who would’veeverstopped Fred and Herman and Renard if not you? Your father, if not me? Their rules don’t apply to us, Ever. We didn’t ask for it, we didn’twantit, but they forced us to become a law unto ourselves.”
How ironic that Augustus was the one who’d laid it out for me when I was a child. It had taken me this long to understand what he’d told me was a confession. Laws, religion, civil society—they were just veneers, constructions put in place by the powerful to tame us animals, impose control. Over so many years we’d forgotten, treating the constructions like they were part of nature. But nature doesn’t know good or evil. All nature knows is survival. How terrifying and freeing that right and wrong aren’t laws in stone but navigational instincts, like the kind of instinct a swallow feels for its place in a murmuration, like what guides geese north on a dark and starless night. My father, Augustus, the sheriff, all those men—they haven’t done anything holy. They simply wrested control over Bottom Springs like so many conquerors before them.
“Listen to you, Ruth.” Ever shakes his head. “I take back all my teasing about your fake college syllabus.”
“Don’t make light.”
“I’m not. You’re wasted here. You almost sound like a pastor, the way you talk.” He clears his throat. “But I know what you’re doing. You’re trying to justify my crimes.”
