Flustered, she threw down her pencil. “How am I supposed to notice that? That’s the tiniest, most infinitesimal detail.”
Colton’s face cracked into a grin.
“Don’t laugh at me,” she said, her annoyance deepening. “I’ve been sitting here for hours. I can’t feel my foot.”
“I’m not laughing at you.” He held out his hand. “Come on.”
She drew back from him, suspicious. “Where?”
“Just come with me. I want to show you something.”
Reluctantly, she slid her fingers into his hand and let him tug her onto her feet. He drew her after him into the vaulted corridor, passing through one room after another until they came to a stop in the carved rotunda. The empty pavilion was wide and bright, capped in an alabaster dome.
Disentangling his hand from hers, Colton headed to a wrought iron overlook and leaned into it, his weight on his forearms. She followed suit, the railing biting into her palms, her heartbeat unsteady. She hadn’t let herself be alone with him—not since he’d found her shivering in the meadow, the shadows bounding around her like voles. Not since she’d backed him into a hasty confession beneath the knotted arms of an old oak.
“I don’t want to be your friend, Delaney.”
Beneath them, a crowd of tourists pushed in across the first-story foyer, scuffing shoes dry on the entryway rug and shaking rainwater from their umbrellas. For a while, she and Colton stood in silence and watched a mother shepherd her bundled children back out into the rain.
“Everyone down there looks exactly the same as at home,” Colton said. “Most planes are like that. At a glance, they’re hardly different. But they’re all colored in different shades. Take that man there, for example.” He pointed toward a stout visitor in a navy parka, who’d just emerged from the gift shop wielding an overwrought snow dome. “Why do you think he bought that?”
“Maybe he has an affinity for snow globes,” Delaney said.
“Why? They’re tacky.”
“How predictably pretentious of you.”
“People buy snow globes for the sentimental value, Wednesday, not because it’s the height of interior design. Think about it. Maybe he had a wife. Maybe she loved it here. Maybe she died. Now he comes here once a year on the anniversary of her death and does the tour and then buys a globe. He takes it to her grave and leaves it by her headstone. He does it for himself, not for her—because it makes him hurt a little less. It makes him feel like he’s keeping her alive.”
She wasn’t looking at the man anymore. Now she was staring at Colton. He stayed fixated on the crowd beneath them, his throat bobbing in a swallow. “Back home, he looks the same,” he said. “Same eyes, same hair, same terrible blue parka. But his wife is still alive. He doesn’t come here alone. His house isn’t full of cheap commemorative glass. In another world, on another timeline, he’s still a whole person, instead of half of one.”
“Colton—”
“You can’t always puzzle something out just by looking at it,” he rushed to say. “Sometimes you have to dig a little bit to uncover the truth.”
She frowned. “Are we still talking about the Poussin?”
“Obviously.”
“Because it doesn’t feel like it.”
Silence fell again, and for a while they watched the crowd ebb and flow across the foyer—all shades of people, fractured in ways she couldn’t see from her bird’s-eye vantage. She felt a mounting pressure to say something, but before she could, Colton rapped a knuckle against the railing and asked, “Have you been avoiding me?”
“Maybe a little bit,” she admitted.
He slid her a sideways glance. “You haven’t come by the house.”
“I’ve had a lot on my plate. Adya has been having a hard time since the incident at Ronson’s.”
It felt like an understatement. Delaney and Colton had stepped back through the sky to find ambulatory lights flashing, a nervous Whitehall dispersing the gathered crowd of students.“She’s fainted,” he’d said, signaling for a glass of water. “Only fainted.”
But Adya hadn’t fainted. She’d been flung outside of herself, tailing after a living corpse. The entire incident had spurred Mackenzie into investigating with renewed vigor, but for Delaney, it only kept her up at night. All she could see when she closed her eyes was that hollow stare, a face slowly grafting itself back together.
Next to her, Colton was still surveying the bustle of the foyer.
“Tell me something true,” she said, because she needed a distraction.
A smile sharpened in the corner of his mouth. “I’ve named the butterfly Gregor.”
