He’d kept her on the phone for nearly an hour last night, until her head nodded forward and the phone slipped out of her hand. At some point, he must have hung up. When she woke to Adya standing over her, it was to find her phone battery close to dead and her implant still on, sound plugging the dull ache of overexposure in her head.
Now she tucked her legs up under her and asked, “Is it a family heirloom?”
Colton glanced up from wiping down his armrest with an antibacterial wipe—he didn’t like germs, he’d told her in the boarding line, after a man in their immediate vicinity had sneezed six times in rapid succession. “Is what an heirloom?”
“The watch.”
“Oh.” He braceleted the timepiece in his free hand. “No.”
He didn’t say more. He didn’t say anything at all until they were airborne, the seat belt light clicking off. “There’s too many people on this plane.” He tugged the brim of his ball cap over his eyes. “I can feel myself getting sick.”
Lane glanced up from the book she’d snagged in the terminal kiosk. “Do you think that maybe, sometimes, you have a tendency to make a bigger deal out of things than necessary?”
He angled his chin just so, one dark eye peering out from beneath his cap. He didn’t address her question. Instead, he said, with utmost solemnity, “If I catch a cold, it’ll be your fault. I’ve been forced on this trip against my will.”
“I highly doubt there’s a single person in the world who can force you to do something against your will,” she said, and returned to her book.
“You’d be surprised,” he shot back. Then, a half a beat later, “I’m going to close my eyes.”
Outside the window, the clouds streaked past in wind-whipped threads. For the better part of an hour, she lost herself in a chapter. When she glanced up, it was to find Colton awake and watching her. He didn’t strike up a conversation. He didn’t look away.
Desperate for something to do with her hands, she reached for the barf bag in the back of the seat, folding it into a clumsy origami swan. Testing out the aerodynamics, she tossed it into the air. It sailed dolefully across the armrest and landed square in Colton’s lap. His eyes dropped to her misshapen creation.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said.
“Yeah?” He picked up the swan, examining it from all angles. “About what?”
“I have this memory, from when I was small. I don’t know if it’s relevant.”
“Tell me,” he said, without missing a beat.
“When I was a little girl, my parents used to take me to Walden Pond to skip stones across the water. My dad was great at it. He always found the best pebbles for skipping. They would make it halfway across. Mine just sank. Straight to the bottom.” She peered up at him to find him gone perfectly still. Something unidentifiable flinted his gaze. “One morning we got there early, before anyone else. I wanted to gather all the best pebbles before he had a chance, so I ran from the car. My parents were furious, because two boys had drowned there the week before.”
Colton’s throat corded in a swallow. The swan sat clutched between his fingers in a death grip.
“I managed to get a whole fistful of stones before I found the body,” she went on. “It was a boy. He was lying half in the water and half in the mud, and I thought at first I was imagining him.”
Sunlight glanced through the window in a golden lens flare and she could briefly see herself reflected back in it. She stared down at her fingertips. The nail of her index finger was nearly picked to the quick. Out in the aisle, the snack cart rattled past.
“Keep going,” Colton said.
“You’ll think I’m crazy.”
“I won’t.”
She shut her eyes. It was too hard to look at him. Cold, disapproving Colton, with his smiles like a knife. She was certain he was judging her—little glass Delaney, her head packed full of daydreams. But all these years later, she could still recall every detail of that chilly March morning. She held on to them the way one clung to a dream. In fragments and in colors.
“He was dead,” she whispered. “I was so sure of it. But when I called to him, he cried out. When I told him to move, he listened. When I reached out for his hand, he took mine. He was like ice. I’ve never felt anything so cold.”
“What happened?”
“He disappeared.” She opened her eyes to find him staring. “One minute he was there, the next he’d been swallowed up by the sky. By the time my parents came running, he was gone. They thought I’d been playing some sort of game. But it wasn’t a game. I saw him. I felt him. And then—”
She tailed off, apprehensive. The way he was looking at her—sunlight turning his eyes a rare, honeyed brown—put a funny sort of thrill in her chest. He looked like a boy, for once, instead of something too sharp to touch.
“When Nate was coming back to life,” she said, “Adya told me she followed him straight to me. I always thought maybe I imagined it, but what if that’s who I am? What if I’m the kind of person who looks into the shadows and sees something dead looking back?”
With unconvincing nonchalance, Colton asked, “What if you are?”
