I didn’t go to the east wing.
I went to the wall.
I’d never crossed it before, that was his to cross, in the geography we’d never spoken aloud, his side and my side and the cold plaster between, but that night I got up and I walked out onto the landing in my nightgown with my heart going like a trapped bird and I opened his door without knocking, and Lazarus was sitting up against his headboard in the dark, awake, of course awake, watching the door like he’d been waiting six years for it to open from my side.
“You heard,” I said.
“I hear everything in this house.” His voice was rough. He hadn’t used it much that day. “Wren. Go back to bed.”
“I’m not sleeping in his wing.”
“I know.”
“I’m not going to be her.”
“I know.” And then, so low I felt it more than heard it, the way I’d feel it through a wall in a living room six years on: “I won’t let you.”
I crossed the room. The floor was ice under my feet and I didn’t feel it. I stopped at the edge of his bed and we looked at each other in the snow-light, this boy who’d taught me how to survive the house and never once asked for anything back, and I was eighteen and grown and finished and terrified and I was so tired, sobone-tired,of being a thing that other people decided about. I wanted, just once, to be the one who decided.
“Then this is mine,” I said. “Not his. Not Iris’s. Mine.” And I put my hand against his jaw, the first time, in six years, that either of us had touched the other on purpose, with intent, in want, and I felt him go absolutely still under my palm, the way he’d gone still over my pulse, like a man reading something he’d been starving for the answer to.
“Wren.” My name came apart in his mouth. “If I touch you I’m not going to be able to stop wanting to keep you. Do you understand what I am? Do you understand what’s wrong with me? It’s not, it’s not normal, the way I, once I have a thing that’smineI can’t —” His hand came up and closed around my wrist, not to push me away, to hold on, the grip of a drowning man. “You’re the only quiet I’ve ever had. If you give me this and then you take it away, I will burn down the world to get it back. That’s not a feeling. That’s just true. That’s just what I am. So go back to bed, little lamb. Save yourself from me while there’s still a wall to do it.”
I have thought about that warning every day for six years.
He told me exactly what he was. He told me the precise shape of the thing I was about to make, and then he handed me the door and begged me to use it. No one has ever been more honest with me in my life. And I looked at the only person who had ever chosen me, in a house built to make me disappear, on the night I was supposed to vanish into a dead girl’s rooms, and I made the choice that put both of us where we are now.
I kissed him.
I climbed onto the bed and I took his face in both hands and I kissed Lazarus Frost, and for a moment he held still under it, rigid, fighting it, six years of that brutal restraint locked in his jaw, and then something in him simplybroke,quietly, the way ice breaks, all at once and silent, and his arms came around me and pulled me in like he was hauling me out of cold water, and he kissed me back like a man who’d been told he could finally stop holding his breath. His hands in my hair, on my spine, learning me with a desperate care, like I might be taken away mid-motion. He made a sound against my mouth that I had no name for then and have every name for now.Mine. Finally. Mine.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel it too. The relief of it. The terrible homecoming. The sense, for the first time in my whole scavenged life, of being something kept instead of something left.
That was the moment. That was the exact hinge of everything. If we’d stopped there, if we’d had even one more hour of just that, of the wall finally come down and nothing on the other side but each other —
But Marrowfield never gave anyone a clean thing.
Because over the slam of my own heart, over the sound of him breathing me in, I heard it start up somewhere down in the dark of the house. Faint. Mechanical. Patient. Six notes, and then six notes again, climbing the cold stairs toward us.
The lullaby.
The little brass music box, the one from Iris’s room, the one I would watch go into the fire and the one that would come back to me on a snowy sidewalk six years later, winding itself up, somewhere below, in the dark.
Lazarus went rigid against me. He pulled back just far enough to look at the door, and in the snow-light his face had changed into something I’d never seen on it, something that made the church-cold of his father look like nothing at all.
“He only plays it,” Lazarus said, very quietly, “when he’s decided.”
“Decided what?”
He was already off the bed, already moving me behind him, already becoming the thing he’d warned me he was.
“Which one of us he’s taking it out on,” he said. “Stay here. Bolt the door.”
And Lazarus Frost walked out of the room toward the sound of the lullaby, toward his father, toward the east wing, toward the last ordinary night either of us would ever have, and thenext time I saw his face, there was blood on it, and Augustus Frost was dead, and I was already, in my head, in a grey dress, beginning to build the lie that would save me and bury the only person who ever loved me.
CHAPTER 22
WREN —Then
