Izzy was sharing a strange look with their father, her eyebrows slightly raised. “Dad,” she said. “We don’t have to do this now.”
Eva looked between her father and sister. “Do what now?” She didn’t want to be walked around, talked around, as though she were a bomb that might go off. “Is something wrong?”
“No,” Dad reassured. “I’m simply fulfilling a promise.”
Eva swallowed. “You’re going to her funeral?” she guessed. That would be difficult. It was hard enough to get him down the mountain for his checkups. Eva didn’t know how far he could travel.
“Not exactly.”
Dread gnawed inside her. Something wasn’t right. Eva stood, but her father was an absolute bear of a man, and even on her feet, she didn’t meet him eye to eye. “Tell me.”
See me. Let me be strong in your eyes.
Dad crooked an unconvincing smile. “She’s coming here.”
Eva blinked. “What?”
“Well, nother,obviously,” Izzy cut in.
“Right.” Dad stumbled slightly over the correction. “Her ashes are being delivered. I promised Lottie we’d scatter them on the farm. Tell the bees she’s gone, like we did with your mom. Remember?”
Eva nodded, a knot in her throat as she clicked together what he wasn’t saying. Someone had to bring those ashes back to these mountains. Someone Charlotte had trusted.
There’s a strange kind of knowing that comes just before a storm. Pressure crowds between your ears. Old joints ache. The air grows wet and mineral. Eva held her breath so tight her lungs began to burn, thatknowingdrawing back into her mind the very storm clouds she’d tried so hard to shove away.
“Who?” she rasped.
Izzy furrowed her brows. “What?”
And maybe Eva was glass after all, because the question she pushed to the front of her lips made something in her crack.
“Who’s bringing the ashes?”
Chapter 2
Arthur
Istill think you should have shaved the beard. You look like a muskrat.”
I cranked down the van’s window and let the breeze sift through my fingers. Appalachia was sweltering, a humid and unbearable heat from which my broken AC offered no relief. Slick with sweat and beyond the point of exhaustion, I had no patience for the monster’s vanity.
“This isn’t about me,”it scoffed.“Don’t you wonder what she’ll think of you after all these years?”
“No.” I flexed my grip on the steering wheel, eyes skipping to the royal-blue urn strapped into my passenger seat.
I did not wonder, and I did not care. This was not a social call.
A glowing saffron sunset reached its fingers between the sentinel pine and birch hugging the ditch. Despite my insistence, memories of the last time I’d driven down this very road flooded in. They tasted as bittersweet as the last dregs of an over-steeped cup of tea.
“Do you think she’ll like your new tattoos?”
Instinctively, I touched the inside of my forearm where one ofthe sleeves of ink began. What had started as an act of defiance had metamorphosed into armor with every new design. Little black songbirds flew up my skin, the arc of a wing shading the scar beneath. Woodland details filled in the gaps between the varied species of birds and a curl of honeycomb rounding my left biceps.
The latter had been an impulse, really. A nostalgic dig of the knife that suddenly felt far too exposing. My face went hot.
“I do love it when you pine.”
I felt the monster tug our lips into a smirk and quickly rubbed the expression off with the back of my hand. “I’m not pining,” I muttered. I simply hadn’t expected coming back to feel like some kind of confession. I was a roll of film in a vat of chemicals, exposed too soon to the light. I was—
