And beyond its disparate parts, the night itself watched her.
Something buzzed against her thigh. Lucy frowned, grasped for it. Jillian was texting her—texting a few things, too quick and too blurry to make out. It was hard to focus on the new words. Her eyes kept drifting up to the old ones. To the words sent at 3:21 p.m., just a moment before Natalie Baker had called out to her.
I can’t help but feel you’re relieved he’s gone.
Even then, in the giddy haze of that beautiful night, it burned to read. He was her grandfather. She loved him. And of course she was relieved he was dead. Who wouldn’t be relieved that someone they cared for was no longer in agony? All the IVs and catheters and injections, all the nights tossing and turning in his hospice bed, all the mornings he shouted himself awake from the pain—he had been so ready for it to be over. Everyone had seen it except his own daughter.
But death was never over in the Easting house, even after the dead themselves were gone.
“Why is it my responsibility to make her happy?” Lucy mumbled to the night. “Nothing makes her happy. Maybe if we’d crawled into his casket togeth—”
Shh, the night said.
“Okay,” Lucy whispered obediently. She understood. That kind of talk didn’t belong here.
Something within the trees shifted. And now that she was paying proper attention, she could see that the night had faces.
It had two faces, at least. One of them she couldn’t quite see. The other was a girl’s, peeking out from the edge of the tree line’s curtain. Her skin was yellowed gray, crinkled like faded paper. As indistinct as she was, Lucy could make out freckles across her cheeks.
The girl smiled. Closed-mouthed, at first. And then her lips widened, and split open.
And then it was daylight, and Lucy was gasping for air.
She scrambled upright, and immediately regretted it. There was an ache in the base of her skull, sharp as a fireplace poker, and between the movement and the searing daylight, it surged. After an overcast couple of days, the sun had unfortunately found its way back to the mountain. It painted her dorm’s white walls an eye-watering gold.
“You talk in your sleep,” someone said.
Lucy rubbed at her temples. Whitney. For a dizzy second, she’d expected—Well. She wasn’t sure, now that she thought about it. In her dream, she’d been talking to someone else.
“Sorry,” she said automatically. She didn’t talk in her sleep. She never had. But she’d save any arguments for when her head wasn’t about to crack open. “How did I get home last night?”
When she chanced a look up, Whitney was looking at her from her desk chair, a crease between her eyebrows. “You got in around three.Loudly.”
Lucy looked down then. She was still fully dressed—she could feel her bra’s underwire. Her shoes were off, along with one sock. Otherwise, it looked like she’d walked in last night and collapsed.
Lucy had gotten to the party at nine. She’d greeted Natalie, then talked to Sequin Girl for maybe five, ten minutes. She walked into the kitchen, picked up a seltzer. Turned to the guy standing next to her. And—
And then what?
Whitney’s ever-present stoneface softened an inch. “Are you okay, or…?”
“Fine,” Lucy said. Though even as she spoke, she was feeling for her phone. She found it under her pillow, neatly plugged in.
Five texts from her mother, which—she would give herself the gift of looking at those later. She turned first to the volley of texts from an unknown number.
The first was time-stamped at 9:51pm:
Hey babe! It’s Natalie!! Hope you’re feeling a little better. Can you text me once you get back to your dorm? I know you’re in the capable hands of the campus shuttle, but you know.
The second, time-stamped at 1:15 a.m, read:
Okay, assuming you got back and crashed? Give me a call tomorrow morning when you read this? Just want to make sure you’re okay. Party was a success. . . got a couple hours of scrubbing ahead of me, tho
Lucy cupped the phone in her hands and took a deep, somewhat shaky breath. If she was reading these right, she left the party before ten. The party wasoverby 1:15.
But according to Whitney, she hadn’t made it home until three.
Her fingers trembled a little as she tapped out her reply.
