A tattoo.
It's small—smaller than the star on his throat, tucked low on his left side where the ribs end, half-hidden in the shadow of his arm. Old ink, blurred soft and blue-black at the edges. I tilt myhead, and when it swims into focus, the whole world goes very still and very far away.
The tattoo is of a bird. A swallow, mid-dive, wings swept back against its body.
And clutched in its beak: a skeleton key.
I know this image. Because my father drew it—this exact bird, this exact key, the wings at this exact angle—in blue ballpoint at the bottom of the letter that came to me through Matvei Satyrin at Dani's wedding in Red Hook. Beneath the last line—Forgive me—was the drawing.
I spent four months staring at that little bird. I googled it until my search history looked like a conspiracy theorist's. Reverse image search. Ornithological databases. A very strange forum about Eastern European prison tattoos.
I found nothing. I'd half-convinced myself my father invented it, some private doodle, a dying man's hand wandering.
Until now, when it appears on Afon's ribs.
It has been there, by the look of it, for fifteen or twenty years.
My fingertip is resting on the swallow's wing. I can't seem to move it. The hut has gone so quiet I can hear the wood settling in the stove. I think, wildly,He's had the answer inked on his body this whole time and I've been carrying the question in a fireproof box in my closet on East Seventy-Eighth Street.
"Caroline," Afon hums. "What is it?"
I press the last strip of tape down over the gauze and smooth it flat. "Nothing," I say brightly. "You're all patched up."
13
CAROLINE
One thing that I, Caroline Oglethorpe, know about myself: I am pathologically incapable of letting things go.
Dr. Levinson calls it "perseverative cognition."
My college roommate called it "being the most annoying person alive."
Jaden, my Mercury-in-retrograde ex, called it "suffocating," which, like, fair, but also, maybe don't leave your Hinge profile active while we're dating and I won't have to perseverate about it,Jaden.
The point is, after discovering a tattoo on Afon's ribs that is a perfect match for the symbol my dead father drew in his final letter to me, I saynothing,and that might just be the hardest thing I've ever done.
By the time evening rolls around I'm vibrating at a frequency only Wolf can hear.
He keeps looking at me. Wolf, I mean. Those big brown eyes track every step I take around the hut. Every time I move fromthe bed to the stove to the bed again, his gaze follows, patient and mildly concerned, like he's a babysitter and I'm a wobbly-legged toddler getting a little bit too close to taking a tumble down a staircase.
Afon, on the other hand, seems to have bought my "nothing" wholesale. He spends the afternoon pacing in and out of the cabin doing Lord knows what. He obscures our tracks in the snow, then goes back out to check to be sure he did it right the first time. He disassembles and reassembles and disassembles and reassembles the gun so many times that I start to get concerned.
But still, I say nothing. Like the Cool Girl I am, I merely use the time alone to have a silent, contained panic attack that involves pressing my face into the wool blanket and screaming without sound.
The swallow. The key. My father's letter. Afon's skin.
What does it mean?
Fuck if I know.
Dinner is beans.
I know. Shocking. The plot twist of the century. We've ascended to the top of a mountain to escape armed drug runners, and the culinary landscape is just as bleak as the literal one. Afon opens two cans of kidney beans, heats them in a dented pot on the cast-iron stove, and divides them onto two tin plates.
"Bon appétit," I say sarcastically.
"Shut up and eat," he replies, which is his version of the same sentiment.
