Priscilla, probably, bringing him food, and now that he thinks of it, he is hungry.
“Just a second,” he says, eyes locked on the page.
He finishes the sentence and sags back, exhausted and elated. There’s still a lot to do, but he can see the ending now. He blinks, surprised to see how dark the room has gotten beyond the lamplit desk. The rain lashes the window as he turns toward the door and the promise of food.
But the bedroom door’s still closed.
He swore he heard it open.
Jaxon frowns. He’s just about to get to his feet when a shadow flits across the floor: a human shape, behind the chair. He’s starting to turn when something loops around his neck—and cinches. Sudden, and so tight that all he gets out is a wheezing sound of surprise before his whole throat closes.
He tries to stand, but the angle’s all wrong, and he’s forced back into the chair, hands scrabbling for purchase on whatever it is, but he can’t get his fingers under the edge. It’s slippery, and stiff. Like rubber. The black resistance band. The strongest one they make. He claws at it, mind and muscles screaming as he runs out of air, cranes his head back, trying to get air, trying to see his attacker, but his glasses have fallen off in the struggle, and the room is getting even darker. No, not the room, his eyes. His vision blurring. Blackness creeping in.
And then, stars.
Not dull green plastic stickers on the bottom of a child’s bed, but nebulae glowing with the light of suns, whole galaxies collapsing and reborn, a supernova blooming in front of his eyes, right before a black hole finally reaches out and pulls him in.
Millie
Chapter One
Two Years Earlier
MILLIE CAN’T REMEMBER THE LAST TIME SHEwore black.
No wait, she can. It was Halloween, three years ago. Her publisher threw a costume party, and since being close to them was the reason shemovedto New York, the reason she lives with four other people in a third-floor walk-up in the bowels of Queens, she went as a witch, complete with stuffed-animal cat and a pointy black hat, which might not have seemed edgy to anyone else, but if they’d known the shit she’d gone through growing up, they would have given her a prize. She’d spent the party taking photos with a dozen other YA authors, smiling like she was having the time of her life (and she was, as far as social media was concerned), then shoved the outfit in the back of her closet, where it had lived.
Until now.
Millie picks at her nail polish as, across the room, her aunt begins to sob again. She left the hat at home, for obvious reasons, but it says something that this is the only black outfit she even owns.
She doesn’t like the color—is it even a color? She’s never been sure—in part because it makes her look washed out, and in part because it feels tethered to the white she was always forced to wear growing up. They’re both so bland, so muted. Muffled. Stifled. Smothering. These days, her closet is full of bright, happy colors.
Like the nail polish.
Robin’s-egg blue. She started painting her nails so she’d stop biting them, but it didn’t work, so now the peppy blue paint is chipped and the nails themselves are bitten to the quick, and if her mom was here she’d tut about that, but she’s not. Obviously.
If she were writing this scene, she would start with the smell. The odor of well-meaning food mingling with the thick scent of the lilies, as if they’re trying to cover up the smell of death, even though the death isn’t here. They already did that part, with the caskets—closed, thank god, the last thing she needs is that mental image, living rent-free in her head—and now she’s sitting on her dead parents’ sofa, while people weave between the furniture like some kind of grieving stream. She can feel their whispered words, their eyes, hanging on her as if to say,What kind of daughter doesn’t cry at her parents’ funeral? What kind of monster isn’tsad?
The judgment comes wafting off them, because she isn’t grieving the right way, even though every website says that there is, in fact, no wrong way to grieve.
But society says otherwise.
They want her to cry, just like they wanted her to stand up at the funeral and share some happy memories, to talk about what wonderful parents Tom and Martha Mitchell were, so loving, so warm, so full of grace.
She couldn’t.
She can’t. It’s not because she isn’t sad. It’s just, when it comes to Tom and Martha Mitchell, she put her love—and her anger and her longing and all her bitter, ugly feelings—in a box inside a box inside a box inside a box until they were safe enough to pack away.
And she’s not about to bring them out again.
Not here.
Not now.
It was a car accident (in case you’re wondering).
Not terribly creative.
