and not once, in six years of doing it, did I ever turn that same mercy on the twelve-year-old I used to be. The original stray. The girl nobody came for. I’d built a whole religion out of refusing to abandon the unwanted, and I was still, every night, abandoning her, the one in the grey dress, the one who did the unforgivable necessary thing and then locked herself in a cell of self-sufficiency and threw away the key.
It took a wolf coming down off a mountain to make me see it. He looked at me the way I look at a dumped box of half-feathered chickens at my gate,who threw this away, and how dare they, and you’re mine now, I’ve got you,and I couldn’t stand it, because I had spent six years being able to give that exact look to every creature on earth except myself.
That’s the life Lazarus Frost walked back into. Not an empty one. A full one, a good one, a barn full of the saved and a woman who’d finally, almost, learned to be all right alone.
It was the best thing I ever built.
And I’m about to leave all of it, the troughs, the strays, the lock, the quiet, six years of hard-won armor, and walk back up the exact hill I spent all of it running from, because the wolf taught me the one thing the sanctuary never could: that showing up for the unwanted, the real, dangerous, costly version of it, eventually means showing up for the most unwanted thing of all.
Which is the truth. And the girl I left in the snow. And, at the very bottom of it, under all the armor, the twelve-year-old in the grey dress I’ve been refusing to go back for.
I’m going up the hill for all three of them.
The strays will be all right. I made sure. It’s the one thing I’ve always known how to do.
CHAPTER 25
WREN
The music box sits on my kitchen counter all day like a small green heart I cut out of someone.
I try everything. I put it in a drawer; I can hear it not-playing through the wood, the way I used to hear Lazarus not-sleeping through plaster. I put it in the freezer, which is insane, I’m aware it’s insane, and then I take it out because the cold felt like mercy and I don’t deserve mercy. I think about putting it back in a fire. I don’t, because the last time I put it in a fire it came back to me on a snowy sidewalk six years later in the hand of a man I sent to prison, and I’ve learned my lesson about what burns and what doesn’t.
What I want, what I can’t stop wanting, all day, like a tongue going back to the broken tooth, is to wind it. To hear the whole thing through. Because here is the rot at the center of me, the thing the witness stand never got out of me: I have never been able to bearnot knowing.I would rather have the worst true thing than the kindest empty space where a fact should be. It’s why I turned Iris’s photograph around when I was twelve. It’s why I went up the steps into a dark house instead of driving away. Not-knowing is the only thing on this earth I’m more afraid of than him.
And there is exactly one person alive who can tell me how that music box survived the fire. Who knows what’s left, and what’sgone, and what it would take to put me in a cell beside the one I built for him.
Six hundred and forty feet up the hill, the answer is lying awake, listening for my light.
Eli texts at four.Thinking about you. Locks are a real thing I know about, offer stands, no agenda., E.It’s so clean it makes my eyes sting. A man with no agenda. I didn’t know they still made those. I text back,I’m fine, please don’t come by,and I deleteplease don’t come byand retype it twice because I need him to understand it’s not coyness, it’s a quarantine, I am a contaminated thing and the kindest people are exactly the ones I have to keep outside the fence. I send it. Three dots appear. Disappear. He’s a good man trying to figure out how to takenofor a yes-shaped reason, and I want to scream at the phone,you have no idea, the last good man who got close to me is the one I destroyed.
Night comes early up here in December. By five it’s full dark and the snow has started again, fat and slow, and my hand is on the porch-light switch before I’ve admitted to myself that I walked to it.
Turn it on. I’ll come down.
I tell myself it’s for the truth. The music box, the fire, the exact dimensions of the cage I’m in. I’m going to get my answers and give him nothing, I’m going to be smart, I’m going to be the woman who outmaneuvered twelve jurors and a defense attorney, I am in control of this.
I am the dumbest animal in any story ever told.
Except that isn’t the true thing either, and I promised myself, somewhere on the walk down his hill two nights ago, that I was done telling myself the small clean survivable versions. So here’s the real one, the one underneath: I am not turning on this light because I’ve surrendered. I’m turning it on because two nights ago I stood one inch from him in the dark of his own threshold and understood that the dark is where Augustus kept everything, every girl, every secret, every soft terrible thing he wanted believed had run away, and the dark is where I made Lazarus into a monster, on a stand, in a grey dress, with a bruise I gave myself. The dark is the country we were both born in. And there is exactly one way I know to un-make a monster I built in the dark, and it is to choose him, on purpose, in the light, with my porch lamp burning down the whole black valley like a struck match for any soul in Hartsend to see.
Not a secret in the shadows. Not the wolf and the lamb where no one’s watching, the way his father would have wanted it kept. A woman turning on a light.
I turn on the light.
It takes him four minutes. I count them. I stand in my own living room with every lamp blazing this time. I want the light, I’m done meeting him in the dark, the dark is his country and I won’t visit it again, and at four minutes exactly there are slow boots on the steps and a soft knock, considerate, a man who minds the rules even now, and I open my own door to Lazarus Frost for the first time in the light in six years.
The cold comes off him. Snow in his hair, on the shoulders of a black coat, and underneath it all of him, the whole changed massof him filling my doorway, and the worst part, the part I will never confess to anyone, is that my body recognizes him before my fear does. Six years of careful nothing and one look at him on my threshold and everything in me that I drowned comes up gasping.There. There he is. There’s the wall. There’s home.
“You turned it on,” he says. Quiet. Almost wondering. Like he didn’t fully believe I would.
“For answers. Not for you.” I step back to let him in, which is its own kind of confession, and I hate that he hears it. “How did the music box survive the fire.”
He steps inside. He doesn’t take off the coat. He looks around my small bright ordinary life, the kettle, the kicked-off boots, the calendar with nothing written on it because I have no one to make plans with, and something moves across his face that’s almost grief, like he’s reading the six years off the walls.This is what she built without me. This little quiet box. She was always so good at quiet.
“It survived,” he says, “because I took it out before.”
“Before what.”
