“You’re Jo,” Andrew says.
Harriett looks between her husband and me. She inhales and tears fill her eyes. Before I can say anything, she steps forward and wraps me in a hug.
“Jo,” she says, voice muffled by my hair. She steps back, wiping her eyes. “I’m sorry. We know who you are. We have so much to thank you for.”
My throat closes up, my own tears pricking the backs of my eyes. “Me?”
Andrew nods.
“You gave us the answers we’ve spent years searching for. I’m just sorry you had to go through what you did to find them,” he says.
My arm, still in its plaster cast for a few more weeks, twinges. The bruises on my neck and body have faded, with only my arm and my memories to remind me of everything that took place in that bunker.
“It was nothing,” I say, because I can’t decide on anything else—because thinking about it still knots me up inside. Maybe it always will.
“It was everything,” Andrew says.
I clear my throat, willing myself to not cry. I pull my hand out of my pocket, the bracelet tucked against my palm.
I don’t think I realized how hard or how long I’ve been fighting. Since the day my car spun off the road. Fear may have been the navigator, but I was always there, too.
I couldn’t fight alone. And because a dead Ingrid fought for herself, and for the others, I did.
“I wanted to say…” The words get tangled up behind my teeth despite a full week of preparing them. “I know this is going to sound…odd, but your daughter saved my life. She saved all of us. She led me to that bunker and wouldn’t let me give up, no matter how badly I wanted to. Without her, my brother and the others would still be down there.” Tears slip down my cheeks. “Your daughter was brave and stubborn, and I only wish I’d gotten to know her before all this. I know I can’t bring her back to you, but I wanted to give you this.” I hold out my hand, the charm bracelet dangling off a finger. “I found it out in the woods months ago. You should have it.”
Harriett’s hand flies up to her mouth, a sob behind it. Even Andrew is crying. He takes the bracelet in shaking hands, treating it like one would a fragile piece of glass.
“Thank you, Jo,” Harriett says.
I wish like hell I could give them more. But after a month combing through the Holdens’ property and the bunker, the police have found little to identify the kids who lost their lives inside. The identifications they have come from Finn, Aisha, and Sloane—the stories and the names carried through the ghostly inhabitants of my house for so long. The clothes left behind were burned along with most everything in the bunker.
I told the police about the room full of medications and the boxes of files from the Dyebucetin trials, but when the investigators went inside, half the room was ash and the other half had been cleared out. The cops think it all burned, but I saw those people in dark clothes descending into the flames after the firefighters pulled Holden and me out.
They think what’s left of Holden’s research is ash. I think someone is covering tracks. Cleaning up a messy truth. And considering the ease with which Cecily disappeared—gone like she never existed—maybe she was part of that cleanup.
Nothing simply disappears. There is always a trace. Somewhere.
After a few more tearful hugs, I head back down the porch and toward the car, where Nora and Finn are waiting. I climb into the driver’s seat.
“You okay?” Nora asks, once again squeezing between the front seats.
I give them both a small smile. “I’m okay,” I say.
Finn reaches over and threads his fingers through mine. He squeezes once, and I squeeze back.
As I turn my focus to the road ahead, I catch a glimpse of a girl, blond hair tied back in a ponytail, outfitted in running shorts and a Blackridge High cross-country team T-shirt. She’s standing in the grass of the Halstead house. And she’s smiling.
Ingrid. Not the Ingrid I saw before, haggard and in a hospital gown. But the Ingrid she used to be.
She lifts her hand in a wave. Then she disappears.
I want to thank her for helping me find my way out of the dark. But I think she knows.
Ingrid is free. And so am I.
Epilogue
Three months later
