Amy introduces us to her sister, Kristy, and niece, Ellie. Henri-Prime holds Henri-Two out for Kristy to take and falls into a fit of coughs. Something passes over Kristy’s and Ellie’s faces, as if they’re worried. But Henri-Prime waves as Amy goes to her.
“It’s fine, just a cough from the cigarettes.”
“You’re not still smoking, are you, Ma?” Amy scolds.
Henri-Prime gives her daughter a haughty look. “Not unless tobacco has become a cash crop in the apocalypse.” Amy rolls her eyes as Henri waves to the yard around her. “It’s just the cold, so let’s get inside where it’s warm. Or at least it was...” She points to the open door. “Now we’re heating the neighborhood.”
Kristy locks the gate behind us as Henri leads us inside. I introduce Henri to Cara, Taylor, Jamar, and the Kid, then we sit quietly, letting Amy catch up with her family. Ellie plays with Henri-Two, making her squeal with laughter.
But Henri’s eyes are on me. Then they drift over to Cara and the others before coming back to me. She wraps a blanket around hershoulders and looks like she wants to ask me a question. Like where Jamie is, maybe.
She coughs again. Kristy gets up to get her a glass of water and comes out of the kitchen with a pitcher full, offering some to the rest of us. Eventually Taylor and Jamar sit with Ellie and keep Henri-Two busy.
When Kristy asks Amy to help her with dinner, Cara offers to help as well. Ellie asks her aunt if she can bring Henri-Two outside and after Amy says yes, Taylor and Jamar follow them.
Leaving just me, Henri, and the Kid.
“The Kid, huh?” Henri asks, looking at him. “I like your name.”
“Thank you,” he says. Maybe at this point he doesn’t even remember his own name. I’ve been calling him the Kid so long, he just goes with it.
Henri chuckles and falls into another fit of coughs.
“Are you okay?” I ask. “Really?”
She nods. “Yes.” But her voice is so hoarse, and she’s so skinny. “You brought my daughter all the way up here. Which I assume means you went all the way down to her. So, yes, I am more than okay. Really.”
“That’s not—”
“I know what you mean, Andrew. And I’m still telling you that today, for the first day in a very,verylong time, I am wonderful.” Still, she coughs again. Like a lie detector test narcing on her.
“Are you sick?” asks the Kid.
“I think so,” she tells him. “But don’t worry, it’s not the flu. You can’t catch what I have, sweetie.”
“What is it?” I ask. She stares at me for a moment, almost like she’sscolding me for asking. Then she shakes her head.
“I guess it could be a cold? Pneumonia? Could be...” She trails off and shrugs. “Could be I’m just getting old. Even just surviving can take it out of you eventually.” Before I can ask anything else, she brings up the only topic that she probably knows will get me to stop asking questions. “Where’s Jamison?”
The Kid also turns to me. He asked me the same question and I gave him a half-assed lie about him taking a trip to make sure we were safe. I guess the Kid deserves the truth, too. He’s been with us this whole way; he deserves to know where Jamie went.
So I start with the day we left here. I tell her about going to Reagan Airport and finding out the rumors of the EU convoy were just rumors. Then our trip down to Florida, including the run-in with Fort Caroline, Jamie getting shot, and his revenge mission once he found out they were still looking for him.
“That doesn’t seem very like him,” Henri says once I’m done. I look at the Kid to gauge his reaction, but his face is blank.
“It doesn’t,” I say.
“The two of you have been through a lot,” she says. “So I understand how that can change a person.”
“But it’s not that he suddenly wants to become a mechanic or likes mushrooms. It’s a fundamental shift from who he was.”
She nods slowly and takes a moment to clear her throat. “And that change isn’t something you can ever accept.”
Of course it isn’t. He’s going to kill someone—actively choosing to do it, not because he’s trying to save me or himself. Hethinkshe’s protecting us, but that’s not true. We could easily hide; the two of us couldgo back to his cabin. It was his plan all along, so I can’t understand why he couldn’t just do that. Why he had to go looking for Rosewood.
But then it all clicks into place.
This whole time, he’s been keeping everyone we’ve grown close to at a distance. Even after we left, he said he wanted to take Amy to Henri, then go to the cabin, just the two of us. We could have done that, left Faraway together, but he chose to go after Fort Caroline.
