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“What did she tell you?” He said it so carefully. Like I was a startled deer he had to coax off the road. Like I had become another problem to manage. That hollow feeling under my ribs, there since the aviary, sharpened into a certainty that made me go cold.

“Is it true?” I said, my own voice sounding like it wasn’t even mine. “Did you give her up?”

“Did I…” He looked at me, stricken, but I couldn’t tell by what. That was the horror of it. I couldn’t tell whether it was from being falsely accused or from being found out. “What exactly did she say?”

“Please, just answer the question,” I said, looking at him, then looking away because it hurt. “Did you hand her over?”

“No,” he said, fast. Too fast, I thought. And then he said the thing that broke me. “No, I didn’t hand her over, but—”

“But what?”

“But it’s not…” His jaw tightened. The car drifted a fraction and he corrected it. “It’s complicated, Marlowe. It’s not a yes or no. I was supposed to bring her in. That was my job, the same as you were my job. And I did it, for a long time I did exactly what they told me to do, and by the time I tried to get out I’d already…” He stopped. The pause was hell. Then he continued: “She died because of me. That part’s true. Whatever else my mother told you, that part is true. I was too late, and I wasn’t brave enough soon enough, and a woman is dead because of me.”

And that was all I heard. I heard I did my job. I heard she died because of me. I heard that part is true. I’d asked him to tell me the simple truth and he’d reached immediately for but. It had tumbled out of him as tangled as guilt.

His mother had told me to watch his face. I had, and his face had said guilty. Now his mouth was saying it’s complicated, and suddenly I couldn’t breathe in the air between us.

“Pull over,” I said.

“Marlowe—”

“I can’t—” My throat closed. “I can’t be in this car.”

He didn’t pull over. We were on the highway. But he stopped talking. We drove the rest of the way home in a silence that felt brick-heavy and suffocating, and through it, I swore I could hear my own pulse. The blood in my ears. I kept my eyes on the window, on the redwoods with their ropey trunks like cinnamon leather swallowing the light. Somewhere in that darkness, I started to cry quietly, turned from him so he couldn’t see, though he knew. Of course he knew.

When he pulled up outside my apartment, it felt so final, so absolute, that I could do nothing but drown inside it. When he looked at me, he was still stricken by whatever the truth was, but underneath it, there was the pain of a man who, if pushed hard enough, might strangle his own mother.

“It’s not what she made it sound like,” he said. “I know I’m the last person who gets to ask you to believe me.” He didn’t reach for me, which both relieved and devastated me. He held onto the wheel. “But I need you to know that I would never—”

“I can’t right now.” I got out. “I can’t tell what’s real and what’s not—” I shook my head. “That’s exactly what she wanted, and I still can’t. I guess that’s how a spell works. I need to be alone. Please.”

He looked at me for a long, terrible moment.

“Okay,” he said quietly.

I went inside and didn’t look back, and I didn’t find out until much later that he never drove away.

Chapter Thirty-Two

My apartment was horribly dark and quiet. Dusk had left an ugly gray smudge across the walls. The fridge hummed. This morning’s mugs still sat on the table. And after the menacing beauty of the coven’s headquarters, my own home felt pathetic and threadbare.

I flipped on a lamp, saw Damian’s bag still lying on the floor, and burst into real tears, the kind that want to drown you.

I let the sofa have it. I curled into a ball and pounded my fists against it, sobs wracking me, loud enough that there was no question my neighbors heard. I cried so hard my eyes stung and my jaw ached and my vision blurred. Like none of it could stay inside me, and I could only rock back and forth, letting it out through pitiful cries and shudders. There were moments when I was certain I knew what I was crying about, and others when I only knew the ache of it. And there were moments when I told myself I’d misunderstood, that what his mother had said couldn’t be true, and others when all I could do was remember the look of guilt on his face.

I kept trying to build a version of it I could survive. Octavia had twisted the story. Damian had believed they would only scare her. He’d been so trapped himself that he couldn’t see another way out. Each possibility gave me a few seconds of air, but none survived the fact that he had known enough to look so guilty. Whatever had been done to him, he had given them a woman who was saving money and strength to pack her children into the car and flee. She had paid for his safety with her life.

Then my mind began assembling the defense. He had saved me. He had taught me to fight. He was trying to get out. He wasn’t that man anymore. But all of it could be true, and none of it made her less dead. None of it gave her children their mother back. If I stayed with him, I would be deciding that her life mattered less because losing him hurt me. I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t love him knowing it could have been me.

That was when I finally understood what I was crying about. I couldn’t be with him. I could understand him. I could believe he was sorry. I could love him so much it hollowed me out. But I couldn’t build a life with her buried beneath us.

I lay there for an hour, crying between moments of tear-puddled numbness. I would settle, staring at the wall, counting the little pock marks, until the pain of it took me all over again. I couldn’t remember the last time anything had hurt so much. Perhaps when my parents had divorced on a sweltering summer night, and my mother had dragged me to the car in my pajamas, and my father had stood on the porch, my teddy bear still in his hands, watching the car disappear from view. I’d never felt this empty and wretched and helpless about a man before. Damian was the first and only one who could destroy me with a look.

My phone lit from the table.

Callie: how did it go??

Priya: did she take the deal