Then two hours through New Jersey, another hour to pass Manhattan, and as the sun starts to set pink and gray over the pine trees we’re now somewhere between upstate New York and New England.
And reality has set in.
I press my hand to my mouth, my throat thick, my stomach turning and mind spinning.
Mom will find out. Of course she’ll find out. She’ll find out as soon as she stops getting invoices or starts seeing her payments bounce back. And then she’ll..
Then I’ll…
Could she tell them I’m crazy, truly? Call the cops, tell them I’m a hazard to myself, some kind of manic firebug on the loose?—
Exceptno,Gwenna. She couldn’t; there’s no record. No crime. From the church. No proofIever did anything. She made sure of that.Shemade sure of that.
You think I wanted a lunatic for a daughter?
No, I think, staring at the dusky roads whipping past.I think you didn’t wantmefor a daughter.
Headlights flash; someone’s merging from a side road and nearly clips us. Callahan leans on the horn and jolts me out of my stupor.
“Sorry,” I hear him murmur from the front. No one answers.
Reality hits me. This is insane. This, more than anything I’ve ever done, is actually insane. Going back to Caliburn, a place where the student body hates me, where the tuition is probably astronomical, where for all I know I’m still liable for destroying God knows how many priceless manuscripts.
And that’s before even touching the whole quest for the Holy Grail thing.
“What am I doing?” I murmur. “What am I doing? What am Idoing?”
I don’t mean for anyone to hear me, but Morgan does, of course. “Hey.” She shuffles a little closer to me across the black leather bench seat, wraps an arm around my shoulders. “Take it easy. You’ve had a long day.”
A choked sound comes out of my throat that’s maybe a sob, maybe a muffled shriek.
“I can’t,” I say. I shake my head back and forth, panicked energy starting to spring up from my chest. “I can’t, I can’t…”
“Shh, shh, shh” Morgan says, stroking my hair. “You didn’t actually want to stay there, did you?”
“I…no,” I admit. But the choice was never binary. It wasn’t simplymental hospitalorback to Caliburn.I could have left and gone anywhere. I could have left and gone?—
Out the window: Sarrasford Exit. I close my eyes. Feel as the car starts to climb—we’re going uphill—towards campus?—
I open my eyes.
God. The gates. The walls. The familiar black silhouettes of the buildings, of the chapel steeple, of the trees…
It’s too much. I have to close my eyes again.
I hear only the dull clicking of the turn signal, feel the slow lurch of speed bumps and stops and the sweep of forward motion until we stop, a long stop, and I realize we’ve arrived.
I open my eyes. In front of us Lanz is unclicking his seatbelt, scooting along the middle seat to open the right-side door, and next to me, Morgan does the same and gestures for me to follow.
“Come on,” she says.
No one else moves, and that’s when I realize Lanz was justopening the door for us.Sheepish, self-conscious, meeting no one’s eyes, I slip across to the side door and out, my breath billowing out in the snap of cold air that greets me. I look around—at the stark black trees, the drifting snowflakes, the white plush of ground cut through with brick footpaths—and then back to the car, at just the wrong time.
Blue eyes. Caught on mine.
“Gwenna,” Lanz breathes. “I?—”
“Let’s go,” clips out a voice from inside the car—I don’t know whose—and Lanz blinks, obeys, disappears inside the door.
