Again, she had that dizzying sense of being seen. Of beingloved.
A thousand emotions bubbled to the surface, each of them as indecipherable as the next. She’d spent so long with her own two hands wrapped around her neck, suffocating herself. Silencing herself. It was overwhelming, to suddenly feel so much all at once. She wanted very badly then to say something to him. Something meaningful. Something earnest. But she didn’t know where to begin.
Her voice raw from lack of use, she landed on, “I think there’s a rooster in the house.”
The beginnings of a grin dimpled his cheek. “If I know Price,” he said, crooking an arm under his head, “it wouldn’t be the strangest thing he has living under this roof.”
They lay like that for a while longer, watching the sun burn off the lingering haze. Slowly, the light turned from pale white to a warm, buttery yellow. Outside in the hall came the sounds of the house beginning to stir. Pipes rattled. Floorboards creaked. A shower kicked on a few rooms away. Eventually, Thomas drifted back to sleep.
She waited until she was certain he wouldn’t wake and then slipped out into the hall. Pulling the door softly shut, she drew up short. A rooster stood there, piebald and suspicious, eyeing her as though she were the stranger among the two of them.
And she supposed she was.
The moment she took a step in the bird’s direction, it fled, bobbling down the hall in a panic. She followed after it, feeling a little like Alice trailing after the white rabbit as she made her way down a crooked staircase and into a broad marble foyer.
After a brief search, she found the rooster perched atop a broad executive desk inside a sparsely decorated office. And he wasn’t alone.
Colton Price sat at the desk, his brow furrowed and a pair of round-wire frames sliding low on his nose. From the looks of it, he appeared to be doing a crossword. Behind him, a lopsided painting of a monarch butterfly unfurled in a wide mural of rich golds and honeyed browns. It made him look just a little bit like a winged creature himself, inhuman and imperial. His eyes flicked up to hers as she stood marveling at the funny juxtaposition of it all.
“Hello,” he said.
The silence that followed was pronounced. She wasn’t sure what to say to fill it—if she wanted to say anything at all. She knew he signed, at least a little. She’d seen him talking to his girlfriend in the hospital waiting room, he and Lane bent close together in a world of their own.
“You dance, right?” he asked, when she was quiet. “Walsh says you’re a ballerina.”
She nodded.
“Excellent.” He gestured to his crossword. “Five across, I can’t figure it out. The clue is a step in which one foot is beaten against the other leg or foot. I’ve got atthree letters in, but I haven’t been able to get the rest of it.”
She smiled over at him, finger spelling the answer. He watched her meaningfully and then snatched a pencil from out behind his ear.
“Battu,” he said. “Great.”
He didn’t say anything more—didn’t force conversation, didn’t pepper her with questions, didn’t divert to uncomfortable small talk. With Philip, the silence had always meant he was done with her. She was dismissed, discharged, put back on the shelf until he needed her next. With Colton, the quiet felt like an invitation. She took it, hovering in the open door and studying his profile.
She supposed there were similarities, if she really looked for them. They were both sharply featured, all angles and edges. They had the same dark hair and a pert, straight nose—though his fit his face and didn’t look too pretty. The resemblance stopped there, but it was enough.
The rooster let out an irritable warble. Colton set down his pencil and peered up at her. She wondered if he was doing the same as she’d just been—silently charting their similarities.
Finally, he asked, “Do you want to see our brother’s room?”
It was quiet there, too. In Liam’s room. They sat on the edge of a pristinely made bed, in a bedroom littered with dozens of headless trophies. She didn’t ask about them, and Colton didn’t explain. Instead, he handed her a photo. The frame was chipped gilt, the glass cracked down the middle. Years of sun exposure had faded the colors of the yellow kayak and orange life jackets, but the faces of the two grinning boys were unmistakable. The younger of the two was Colton, gap-toothed and sunburnt. And the older—
It was the boy from her dreams. The drowned boy, who’d been both enemy and friend. She ran a finger over the crack in the glass and felt a deep and terrible sadness. The sort of grief that didn’t have a name. For a heartbeat, she considered telling Colton but quickly thought better of it.
She’d been haunted by Mikhail, too, and in the end, it hadn’t been him at all.
Just a pitiful likeness, sent to lure her into the belly of a beast.
“I was thinking of redoing this room,” said Colton suddenly. He’d picked up an autographed baseball from its stand and was turning it over and over in his hands. “I’ve decided I’m tired of living in a tomb.”
That startled her into looking over at him. She’d had the same thought a thousand times in her chilly house back in Connecticut, with its vast, echoing halls and its perpetual chill. She watched without speaking as Colton set the baseball back onto its stand and rose from the bed. He positioned himself wordlessly against the dresser, his hands in his pockets. His eyes roved around the dust-laden space, drinking it in.
“It could be yours,” he said. “If you wanted it.”
In the photo, the two brothers smiled up at her. One living. One dead. Both hers. Her fingers tightened on the frame. She didn’t feel like she had any right to them.
“My mom will be wondering where I am,” she finally said. It came out rough-hewn and unfamiliar.
