It’s not hard to imagine a young Ellis—in my mind, wearing a miniature version of the adult Ellis’s knife-crease slacks and glen check blazers—hungry for knowledge, formore,and bursting with fury when that need was denied.
“Anyway, when Ellis was ten our parents went abroad for the winter. They were supposed to be gone a couple months, so they left Ellis with our grandmother in Vermont. Only then there was this terrible storm…They got snowed in, and the power went out, and Nana died.”
“Oh god.” I don’t even want to think about what that was like: Ellis, solitary in that house with her grandmother dead, her parents gone. “What did she do? How—?”
Quinn arches a brow. “Ellis was alone for four weeks. It took three weeks for the snow to melt, but the power company was stretched so thin with all the outages that they didn’t get around to fixing our grandmother’s house that whole time.”
It would have been freezing cold, the snow pressing in against the windows and the grandmother’s body slowly rotting upstairs. And as it got warmer, the stench permeating the house inch by deadly inch. I imagine Ellis shutting doors to keep out the smell, barricading herself in smaller and smaller spaces until there was nowhere else to run.
“It was six miles to get to the nearest neighbor,” Quinn went on. “And with the snow…I mean, Ellis was ten. She decided it made sense to hole up and wait it out.”
As indifferent as my own mother might be, I can’t imagine her allowing something like this to happen. I have to keep reminding myself that Ellis’s parents had left her with her grandmother, that they had every reason to think she’d be safe.
Only she wasn’t safe.Clearlyshe wasn’t safe.
“But then your parents came back. So she…she was all right.” I stare at Quinn, half begging them to end it. Knowing Ellis is here, that she survived, isn’t enough. I need the story to be finished.
“They came back all right,” Quinn says grimly. “They came back early, in fact. But Ellis had already run out of food. Our moms weren’t supposed to return for another three weeks. Ellis didn’t have anything to eat….She ended up strangling her pet rabbit and eating him. Raw. You have to understand—she was desperate….She didn’t have a choice.”
Nausea lurches up my throat, the taste of bile and old gin flooding my mouth, convulsive and sickly; I swallow it down. Ellis…She—
“I did have a choice, actually,” a voice says from behind us. Quinn and I both lurch around so quickly it sends the room spinning all over again.
Ellis stands in the doorway, one hand braced against the frame, resplendent in a tailored suit. Her expression is so neutral that I can’t tell if it’s an affectation or if she genuinely doesn’t care what we’ve said—whatQuinnhas said.
Her hand drops back to her side, and she arches a brow. “It was eat my rabbit or eat the dog. And I wasn’t going to shoot Muffin.”
“Of course not,” I whisper, so softly I barely even hear myself say it.
“I’m sorry,” Quinn is saying, already on their feet, swayingslightly, their face gone green. “I shouldn’t have said anything. Ellis…”
Ellis’s lips press into a sharp smile. “It’s all right, Quinn. Felicity understands. Everyone has a backstory.”
Our eyes meet across the room. I feel like I’m seeing Ellis Haley for the first time, turning over memories like fresh stones: When I told Ellis about Alex, she never said it wasn’t my fault. She’d said,You didn’t have malevolent intent.There was a difference, which Ellis—Ellis the writer, Ellis alone in the dead of winter—understood better than anyone.
“I was coming down to tell Felicity I’m going to bed,” Ellis says. She toys with the corner of the nearest accent table, as if caressing the grain of the wood. Or as if she has more to say, something she’s holding back.
I discover what that something is an hour later, when I go up to bed myself and find a folded square of paper on my floor, tied shut with a length of black ribbon: coordinates and time, signed with Ellis’s name.
Another Night Migration.
The coordinates take me back to the church an hour before nightfall the following day. The setting sun casts a yellowish hue over the clapboards, the shadow of that upside-down cross stretching long and black across the dirt—nearly to the forest’s edge.
Ellis leans against the wall by the door. Beside her is a gun.
I stop at the tree line, staring at her from twenty feet away. Although of course that distance would mean nothing to someone with a finger on the trigger. “What is that for? Where did it come from? You—”
“Don’t worry,” Ellis says, pushing herself to standing. “It’s nothing sinister. Quinn keeps this rifle in their car for self-protection—it’s a southern thing.”
A southern thing.My throat is still so dry I have to swallow against it several times before I’m even able to speak again. “I’m not asking why Quinn has it. I’m asking whyyouhave it.”
“For the Night Migration,” Ellis says slowly, as if I’m perhaps a little bit stupid. “Flora Grayfriar’s death. It’s one of the last loose ends we need to tie up: we need to reframe how she died. How Margery killed her, rather.”
I shake my head. “There are too many versions of that story. Which one are you claiming is real?”
Ellis picks up the gun and props it against her shoulder. I feel like my head is full of marbles, all of them rolling over each other, bumping against the walls of my skull, too many to count. I can’t think straight with thatthingin Ellis’s hands.
“I still don’t understand why you need a gun.”
