“What?” He couldn’t have looked more shocked if I’d slapped him.
“I’m tired of being your obligation. Your burden. If you’re going to protect me, do it because you want to, not because you have to. Do it because you want to be with me. If thatiswhat you want.”
“I’ve never wanted anything more in my life. But that’s not how this works. I can’t dishonor you by acting on—”
I took his hand, and his mouth snapped shut. “The way I understand it, we’re breaking new ground here, with Alina, and she is perfect. She isright. Why would it be any less right for you to feel more for me than simple obligation? Or are you afraid of making this any more complicated than it is?”
“Theonlything I fear is losing you,” he growled.
I smiled. “Then you have my permission.”
“Your...?” His confusion cleared, and his gaze dropped to my mouth again. Something seemed to spark behind his dark eyes, then he bent and kissed me so suddenly—so urgently—that I would have lost my balance, if not for the thick arm steadying me.
Vaguely, I heard the door open at his back. “Is everything—?” Mirela bit off the end of her question and quietly closed the door, but I couldn’t tell that Gallagher had even heard her.
“I feel like I waited a year for that,” I murmured when our kiss finally ended.
Gallagher chuckled. “I waited alifetimefor that.”
Delilah
That night, I listened from the bedroom while Lenore filled the others in on the changes in town, explaining the terrifying realities of martial law, and the new restrictions that meant for us.
Yet as I fed my daughter, instead of reaching for one of the newspapers she had left on the bed next to me, I picked up my phone and navigated to the screenshots I’d taken of my own school pictures, just minutes before I’d gone into labor days before.
I couldn’t read about the violence, grief and mistrust taking over the world outside of our cabin. The world that—one way or another—my daughter would have to live in someday. I didn’t want to infect her nourishment with my own despair.
So I opened my first grade class picture, to look at all the adorable, chubby faces of the kids who would grow up to abandon me when I needed them most. Back then, we’d been friends. We’d had no inkling of the wedge fate would drive between us. Of the bitter slice of life it would serve me. Of the violence and vengeance it would expect of me.
Yet the face I remembered best—Shelley Wells—wasn’t there. We hadn’t met until fourth or fifth...
I clicked on the fourth grade class picture and scanned three rows of kids in jeans and cute little dresses until I found her, across the picture from me. We’d met the first day, but hadn’t really become best friends until after Christmas.
When Alina began to fuss again, I burped her, then switched her to the other side and scrolled to my fifth grade class picture with my left hand. There I stood on the first row, between a ten-year-old Shelley Wells and the kid in the middle who held the little chalkboard denoting us as—
The phone fell onto the bed.
“What’s wrong?” Zyanya asked from the doorway, where she held a steaming bowl of leftover rabbit stew.
With only one hand to spare, I left the phone lying on the comforter and used my thumb and forefinger to zoom in on the chalkboard held by a kid whose name—if I was remembering him correctly—was Neal. Written in stark white letters, accented with flowers Shelley and I had helped draw, were the wordsMs. Essig’s Fifth Grade Class.
How could I remember that—drawing on the chalkboard used in the photo—but not remember my teacher’s name?
My finger trembling against the screen, I dragged the zoomed-in picture until I found the teacher standing to the left of the class. “It’s Rebecca Essig.” No wonder her picture had looked so familiar the other day. “She was my fifth grade teacher.”
“What?” Zyanya crossed the room with the bowl, and Gallagher and Lenore came in right behind her, probably drawn by the shock in my voice. “That’s...your sister? The one who survived?” Until that moment, I hadn’t been sure she’d followed the crazy story I’d told her to distract myself from labor. “She was your teacher?”
“Yes. But I didn’t remember that until just now. How could I have forgotten?”
Lenore shrugged as she sank onto the end of the bed. “I don’t remember half of my elementary-school teachers’ names.”
“The other day I thought she looked familiar, but I didn’t...” And just like that, a vital understanding slid into place in my head. I felt like I’d spent my entire life in that moment of confusion that comes when you wake up from a long nap and you’re not sure where you are, or why you were asleep in the first place. I’d lived a lifetime of unfocused assumptions, trying to rub sleep from my eyes.
And suddenly I was awake. Suddenly I understood.
“She knew.”
“What do you mean? What did she know?” Lenore leaned closer to look at the screen.
