“Hey,” she says.
“Hey.”
I’ve been sitting on something since last night. The gap in her story. The thing she stepped over. I didn’t press then because the timing was wrong and she’d already cracked once, and I wasn’t going to be the one who cracked her again.
But it’s morning now.
“Mara. Why did you really come looking for me?”
She goes still. Not surprised but more likeI’m busted.
“I told you. The guilt. I couldn’t?—”
“Guilt got you to the perimeter. Guilt made you ask around. But guilt doesn’t keep you sleeping in burned-out buildings forweeks. It doesn’t keep you circling the Rot after a man tells you that people who go looking disappear. Something else kept you going. Don’t bullshit me, Mara.”
She runs her fingers through her dirty hair. “I went to your apartment,” she says. “After you disappeared. I still had your spare key. I don’t know what I was looking for. Something. Anything. Some kind of clue about where you’d gone.”
I know what she found before she says it. I know because I know what’s in that apartment. What’s in the back of that closet.
“The boxes. You found my boxes?”
Mara nods.
My father’s things. Three cardboard boxes that arrived at my door months after he disappeared. I figure it was whatever was left of his office, cleared out by some admin, delivered without explanation. I remember carrying them inside. I remember pushing them into the back of the closet. I remember shutting the door.
I never opened them.
Not once. Not in all the months between his disappearance and my decision to enter the Hunt. The grief was too raw. The anger was too hot. Opening those boxes would mean sitting with his handwriting, his notes, his things. It meant accepting that the man who wrote them was really gone. I couldn’t do it. So I went looking for answers out in the world instead. Entered the Hunt. Lost it. Became a Runt. Got bound to three men and trapped inside a dead mall. End of story.
I should have looked in the fucking boxes, but I figured they were probably just full of meaningless junk. His office wouldn’t have sent me anything sensitive or confidential.
Would they?
“I opened them,” Mara says. “I know I shouldn’t have. But I was looking for anything that might tell me where you’d gone,and when I saw the boxes, I just…” She trails off. “I opened them.”
“What was in them?”
“Letters,” she says. “Unsent. Addressed to you. And other stuff, written in the weeks before he disappeared.”
“What?”
“You never looked at them?” she asks.
I shake my head and wait for a scolding. But she doesn’t bother. What would be the point?
“He knew something was wrong, Vi. He was scared. He didn’t say of what exactly, but he was trying to tell you something. Trying to leave you something in case he couldn’t say it in person. It was all stuffed in a larger envelope marked ‘old brochures,’ like he was trying to throw off whoever might find them.”
I don’t speak. I can’t.
“There were notes, not just letters. Loose pages of handwritten stuff with names and dates. Numbers I didn’t understand that didn’t mean anything to me. But they were in the same envelope as the letters. I figure he kept them together for a reason.”
She looks at her hands, then back at me. “I read the stuff, all of it. And I couldn’t square it with the man I thought he was. The man I told you he was.” Her voice drops. “I’m not saying I was wrong about everything. I’m not saying he was clean. But I’m saying I don’t know anymore. And I couldn’t live with that and also live with the last thing I ever said to you.”
I don’t know anymore.
It’s not a reversal or an apology, not at all. Instead it’s the thing I’ve wanted to hear since the day she told me my father deserved what happened to him. An admission that her certainty might have cracks in it.
And underneath my relief, there’s something else that’s sharp, hot, aimed at myself. Because I’d had those boxes. I had them the entire time. And like an idiot, I couldn’t bring myself to open them. Mara, who believed he was guilty, was the one who actually sat down and read his words.
