The blood had pumped in my ears as I stared at the detective, a craggy-faced man with five o’clock stubble across his chin. His gaze kept flicking suspiciously to my neck, the bruises there already turning yellow.
I felt like I was on the verge of tears, but my eyes were dry. Too dry, almost.
He’s going to come back,Penelope said to me that afternoon, the sunlight already starting to feel like autumn.But you shouldn’t be here when he does.
I rub my arms like I can rub the memories away. They always hit me all at once like that, braided together, and the onslaught makes my heart feel heavy in my chest.
Still, I wonder where Theo is. If he really did bury himself, like Penelope said. Sometimes at night, I imagine Theo, still with the ruin I made of his heart, dragging himself out of the Jenkins house, so slowly that the cops never notice until he’s gone. I imagine him sinking into the wet mud and then getting pulled into the lake, deep in the sediment and river weeds, a corpse that’s not a corpse rolling across the sludge until he finally washes ashore.
I’ve never seen his body, though, so I don’t think it happened that way.
I leave the graveyard, following my usual hiking trail up to his cabin. It looks as it always does, when everything gets to be too much and picking my way through the overgrown woods to stand in this spot is the only thing that makes me feel calm. It looks abandoned.
Itisabandoned, the porch still wrapped with yellow caution tape from when the cops searched the house. That was the second time I got called out to the sheriff’s department, after they found some of Oliver’s drawings taped to Theo’s wall. Drawings of me. They told me about them with solemn, concerned faces, how they found them along with a cache of bladed weapons, similar to the axe Theo used to destroy Oliver’s family.
That second interview, that was when I knew the cops didn’t suspect me of anything anymore. They told me I was lucky to be alive, that he was almost certainly planning to kill me, or worse. I did not ask them to explain what their idea of “worse” was.
Those drawings are in police custody now, of course, along with his weapons. I haven’t bothered going inside the house. I just come here and look at it, my arms wrapped around my chest, watching it slowly rot away into the woods, its sagging porch covered with dead leaves.
32
CHLOE
The weather turns fast. I wake up on a Thursday to an unexpected chill in the house, and I turn the heater back on and settle into work again. By mid-afternoon, the wind starts howling, a long, sweeping moan that rattles the northern side of my house.
“Well, shit,” I say out loud.
I’m supposed to be working, although I haven’t been concentrating on it, just have the work chat pulled up on my laptop as I stare at the database, text and numbers blurring together. Honestly, I hope the power does go out. They can’t make me work if I don’t have Internet.
The wind batters against the picture window, although I can’t see much of anything with the curtains drawn. I pick up my phone and discover that my weather app’s icon has turned into a big snowflake.
There’s a text from Abi, too.
Just checking in! Did you get the wood I had sent over? The snowstorm’s supposed to hit today!
I set both my phone and my laptop aside and pull back the curtains on the picture window. To my genuine surprise, it is, in fact, snowing. And not a dusting, either: the air is full of the kind of thick, fluffy white flakes that I’ve always loved. In Boston, I would go for walks in snow like this, bundling up so the flakes stuck to my jacket like white confetti and melted into water when I came back into the heat.
But I don’t feel anything, looking at the snow now. It looks like static above the lake, and Theo’s peninsula is fuzzy in the distance, wreathed in a soft white glow. I breathe out, fogging the glass.
I wonder if it’s snowing where Oliver is.
The thought hits harder than I expect, and I yank away from the window, letting the curtain fall back into place. Sofia the social worker wouldn’t even tell me what city he’s in, although she did say he’s still in the state.We just want what’s best for him. I think we can all agree on that, Ms. Monroe?
Agitation works under my skin, but even I’m not feeling self-destructive enough to cross the lake in this weather. I was self-destructive enough not to do anything to really prepare, though, although Abi did in fact order a bunch of fire logs on my behalf, which were delivered yesterday. I had been annoyed at the time, although I’m feeling grateful for it now.
I should be okay on food. Cooking hasn’t exactly been a priority the last six months, so my pantry is already full of canned soup and boxed mac-and-cheese, and my oven runs on gas in case the power goes out. I suppose I could go fill up the bathtubs in the spare bathrooms, just in case. It’s not like I use them for anything anyway.
Blankets. I should pull the various blankets and quilts my grandmother left behind.
My laptop dings with a work notification, which I ignore. The snow howls and swirls outside. And I start to work throughthe things you’re supposed to do when there’s a snowstorm. Methodically. Numbly, which is how I’ve done everything since that night in August.
After all, numbness is the only thing I really feel these days.
I jar awake,my muscles rigid.
My first thought is Theo, the way it always is when I wake up suddenly in the middle of the night, even all these months later. Theo coming to fuck me, Theo slaughtering my neighbors—it could go either way.
This time, however, I realize quickly enough that Theo has nothing to do with it. The house is dead silent, my ceiling fan unmoving.
