I stared at him. My hands started shaking.
Our eyes met, and a long moment hung between us as frogs sang in the darkening trees by the lake. He was serious now. This wasn’t a joke, and he wasn’t teasing.
“Coming back to you now, huh?” he said softly.
Was it? I remembered him at the dam.… I remembered someone’s face in front of mine when I was choking up water. I remembered someone shouting for help. But I could not see who rescued me. I’d never been able to see that face. Not in the two years since the accident.
I tried to deny it. “You didn’t… did not. You weren’t the one who got me out of the water. Who rescued me?”
It was Eddie. Had to be. When I introduced Eddie to my father, I said, “This is the guy who saved me.” It was Eddie’s only redeeming feature in my father’s eyes.
“I pulled you out of the water,” Fen insisted quietly. “You have to believe me, Jane.”
I believed him. I couldn’t say why, but we both knew it. Some things you can lie about. But the way I was feeling, like my chest was bursting with dam water and the world was spinning around us, like there was nothing but the weight of what we shared… that was real.
We both stood together, staring off at the lake, then at each other.
“Why?” I asked in a small voice.
“Because.” He shook his head, and there was that emotion in his eyes again. He was upset. Over me? “I don’t know why. You fell in the water. I jumped in after you. It was just instinct. I’ve been over it a thousand times. Why me? Why didn’t someone else do it?”
I gripped one elbow against my side to stop the trembling. “You were… just there.”
“Maybe,” he said, shrugging with one shoulder and shaking his head. “For a long time, I’ve been dismissing it as just a random part of my life that just happened for no reason. Then here you are again. Now I don’t think it’s random anymore. I was right the first time. We’re connected, Jane Marlow.”
He tilted his body inward to show me why he’d been standing at an angle. It wasn’t the bag he’d been hiding, but a tattoo on his far shoulder. A tattoo that looked like a pre-Raphaelite painting of a beautiful, drowned girl in a river, surrounded by flowers.
Ophelia, fromHamlet.
“Got that a year ago,” he said.
“Sweet holy night,” I murmured, brain sputtering. “That’s… a dead girl? I’m…”
“I know. I was embarrassed to show you, but there it is,” he said, covering it up with his hand. “It’s weird. I’m weird. I’m screwed up. That’s not fair to you. You’ve been haunting me. And I don’t know what to do about it.” He paced away from me and turned around. “I probably shouldn’t be here, huh?”
“What do you want from me?”
He shook his head. Shrugged again. If he was trying to play casual, it wasn’t working. His eyes betrayed him. There was nothing casual about the way he was looking at me. I didn’t know much, but I knew the longing there. I wasn’t sure how because I didn’t remember Eddie ever looking at me quite like that. Didn’t rememberanyonelooking at me like that.
I glanced away, flustered. “I’m with your brother.”
“Do you love him?”
“What kind of question is that?”
“What kind ofansweris that?” he said, confidence rebounding. “Do you love him, yes or no? Simple question, really.”
I loved the way Eddie looked. I loved the way his arms felt around me. I loved the way people looked at me when I was with him. But none of those were the right answers. And I was taking too long to get toanyanswer because all I could think about was how Eddie had lied to me about rescuing me from the dam.
My silence said more than I’d intended.
And I could tell by how the corners of Fen’s mouth slowly curled, it said something to him, too.
Heels clicked, and a sweet floral scent wafted behind me. “Fen-jan? My shining star? What in the name of the saints are youdoing out here?” Jasmine reached for Fen and pulled him toward her, staining both his cheeks faintly with her lipstick. “What’s going on? Are you upset?”
“Mama,” he protested, sniffling briskly. “I was, uh, returning a dog toy that was left in the record shop.” He awkwardly handed me Captain Pickles with those long fingers of his. “I didn’t know you’d be here.”
She gave a cursory glance at the crumpled bag in my hand as I tried to compose myself and hide my wild emotions. She was quick, though. And sharp.
