Dad went on. “After that, you can sprinkle her ashes. Set her free.”
Arthur shut his eyes tight, nails digging into the wood of the ash box. “Why don’t you just do it?” he muttered.
“What?” Dad asked, surprised.
“She would have wanted it to be you, anyway.”
A beat of heavy silence weighed down the space between them. Isobel watched her father, holding her breath. Dad shook his head. “No,” he said. “It has to be you, Arthur.”
“I don’t think I can.”
“She needsyou,” Dad repeated. He held Arthur’s gaze. “Whenever you’re ready.”
Chapter 7
Arthur
It was happening again. The sea of grief. The lapse in control. I didn’t want the Moreaus to see me coming apart like this, as naked as the day I’d burned the bloody clothes. The woman in that urn hadn’t given a shit about her black hole of a son, collapsing inward and swallowing anything light and good.
So why did I still care about her?
I shouldn’t have even been the one to do this. All morning, I’d fought the slow rise of dread in my chest as we prepared to spread her ashes. Jack’s words made the anxious feeling calcify. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe.
Whenever you’re ready.
I wasn’t ready.
“Arthur?” Izzy’s concern bled into her voice.
I shoved to my feet and thrust the box full of Mom’s ashes into her hands. “I need a minute,” I rasped.
The monster weighed as heavy as fresh, ripe fruit between my ribs as I stomped toward the house. I had to consume something, fast. The last time I got this hungry, I woke one morning with a crow stiffwith rigor mortis stretched between my hands, my bare feet dark with forest soil.
I felt smaller and smaller with every step forward. I used to want that. The smaller I made myself, the easier I was to handle, and for so long that was all I’d wanted to be.
“Don’t cry for her.”
“I’m not!” I snapped back, forgetting to lower my voice. Maybe it didn’t matter. I was far enough from the Moreaus now that they likely wouldn’t hear me talking, presumably to myself.
At the top of the hill, I gripped the iron gate, surveying the cottage and the state of the yard, grown even more wild since that morning. The weathervane rooster atop the cottage wore the daytime moon like a crown jewel on its head. Errant skeins of prickly greenbrier stretched down the trellis and onto the porch, where scarlet bee balm spilled from a hole in the siding like the innards of a butchered pig.
All Eva’s rage.
The wildness shouted her name. In a sea of bad feelings, it was strangely grounding to latch on to something so concrete, even if that something was her bitterness toward me.
Her golden, gentle magic had always felt like something out of a folktale. She did impossible things, like pulling seeds from deep in the earth with nothing but desire and will. She woke the world up with every footstep, every laugh.
But she wasn’t laughing now, and the wildflowers her magic had yanked to the surface had a wretched kind of violence to them, their stems slightly twisted, the roses and greenbrier overpacked with thorns.
I wondered what she’d do with me, if given the chance. I doubted she’d be gentle, after all I’d done, and all I’d left her to bear alone.
The monster stopped me in my tracks and made me bend and pick a flower, wrapping my fingers around the bright red cluster of petals.“You need to consume.”
I swallowed hard. It was better than killing an animal, but still, I hated that I needed it. Hated even more that I was scared of what I might become if I refused.
So I crushed the flower in my fist and let it wither. The fragile bloom hardly sated the gnawing and desperate hunger inside me.
But it was something.
