I won't lie to you. Going there is walking into the fire. But the alternative is waiting here for the Council to find you alone in the house where your aunt died, with no weapons and no knowledge and no one who knows what you are.
There is an enrollment packet at the bottom of this envelope. A scholarship already arranged. Housing already arranged. A bus ticket for Thursday.
You don't have to go. You could run. But they'll find you running.
I'm sorry I can't give you a better choice.
No signature. I turn the page over and there's nothing, just the cream paper and the pressure of a pen that was held hard against it.
The enrollment packet is thick, embossed with a crest I don't recognize.Everpine Academy. Excellence. Bloodline. Legacy.The bus ticket is tucked inside the front flap, Thursday's date printed across it, a route that ends in a Colorado mountain town I've never heard of. The scholarship letter has my full name, full tuition, room and board, effective immediately.
Today is Thursday.
I sit for a long time after I finish reading. The enrollment packet stays open on the table. The bus ticket stays on top of it. The letter stays in my hand.
I look at the photograph again. The woman with my cheekbones, her whole body tilted toward something warm and good, her hand raised mid-gesture, completely unguarded.
I wonder what she was laughing at, if it was something my father said, if he was someone who made people laugh easily, if I would have been like him or like her or something in between.
I'll never know any of it. I've known that my whole life and it's never felt as heavy as it does right now, looking at this photograph with a letter that says they died screaming.
One week after this photograph.
The doctor said Rosa's cough was aggressive. Fast-moving. Unusual for her age, unusual for someone who'd never smoked, unusual in ways he listed carefully and that I understood but could not do anything with. I kept thinking: unusual. Not impossible. Just unusual. I thought about asking him what could make a healthy person's lungs fail that fast and I didn't, because part of me already didn't want to know.
I think about the marks on her door. Paint that doesn't quite match.
She was carrying this for eighteen years. She chose it, knowing what it might mean. Carried it. Never said a word. She's dead. And I'm sitting at a kitchen table with a bus ticket to a place that killed my parents, and the only person left who knew me is gone.
I pack one bag. Everything I own fits, which says something about eighteen years in this house, in this life assembled carefully around a lie.
I move through the rooms for the last time. Rosa's bedroom still has the shape of her in it, the slight depression in the mattress, the book open face-down on the nightstand that she'll never finish. I close the cover gently, face-up, so the spine doesn't break.
It's a stupid thing to care about. I care about it anyway.
The tea mug is still on the kitchen counter. Small blue flowers on white ceramic, from the shop where she bought them yearsago. We got two, one for each of us. Mine broke the following summer and she gave me hers without making it into anything.
My throat closes hard and I have to stand still for a moment with my hands on the counter, breathing through it, until it passes.
I wrap the photograph in a shirt and put it at the bottom of the bag, underneath everything else. The letter goes in the front pocket where I can reach it without digging.
I pour Rosa's tea down the sink. The sound of it is ordinary, water hitting ceramic, the faint smell of cold tea filling the small space of the kitchen. I wash the mug with dish soap, rinse it, dry it, put it back in the cabinet in the spot it always occupies, between the green mug and the cracked white one she kept because it was from a set she got as a gift.
No one is coming back to this house. There's no reason to leave it clean. I do it anyway because she did it every night without fail and I am not ready to stop being someone who does that.
The front door closes behind me with a click that seems too small for what it is.
The street is so ordinary it almost makes me stop walking. Two kids on bikes, one of them standing on the pedals, the other watching him. A woman with a stroller, head down, scrolling her phone one-handed. Someone's dog barking two houses over, that repetitive frantic bark that means nothing.
The sun at a low morning angle cutting cold and sharp between the houses, catching the frost on the grass that hasn't burned off yet, turning it briefly silver before it's gone.
I stand on the front step and the world moves around me. That's the thing about grief. The world doesn't adjust. It keeps doing all its small ordinary things and you have to figure out how to move through it, still raw, still with all your nerve endings exposed, while a woman on a porch across the street watersplants that don't need watering and a kid on a bike wipes out and laughs.
My parents are in a photograph at the bottom of my bag. Someone tore them apart.
The calculation is ugly and it comes out the same every time I run it. The Council knows where I am. Staying here gets me killed, maybe looking like a fast-moving cough, maybe not. Running gets me killed slower, with less information and more fear.
Going to the Academy gets me knowledge, gets me into the same building as people who may remember my parents, gets me closer to understanding what I am and what it means.
