Page 121 of Some Kind of Haunted

“You are letting this jail cell make you maudlin, young lady,” says another voice, but I’m used to her. She’s been with me since August. “I taught you better than to wallow.”

I turn my head and there they are. My ghosts. Amelia, the parental figure I never really had despite the ones who supposedly held that title, wearing her typical handknit sweater—with exquisitely rendered cables—over her work overalls.

I screamed when I saw her the first time, a misty shadow of the Amelia I knew and loved. It took time to accept it, to learn to expect her. More time to do more than see her—and even longer to actually hear her voice again.

I suppose at some point I just accepted I see ghosts. Considering the other things I can see, do, it’s not that big of a stretch.

Besides, everyone knows Midas is haunted.

But now there’s a new ghost, and I hate it.

Cleo. I can’t really see her. There’s a shimmer in the air in the direction of where I heard her voice. Kind of like the opposite of Amelia . . . who I saw long before I heard her.

I don’t know why it’s different. I want to be grateful, relieved, happy, to have this instead of just never hearing or seeing them again.

Because it’s not the same as being alive and here, is it?

Last night I had a weird dream that I think was just a regular old anxiety dream, about everyone I know dying but staying with me, just as ghosts.

The thought of losing anyone else is too much to bear, worse than staying in this loud, smelly, deliberately upsetting place, and I have to blink back tears. Or Amelia will scold me about that, too.

Neither one of them likes to talk about the sacrifices they made, but I know it means something. I know it matters. That’s why I made my own sacrifice. And I was right to do it. I know that, too.

Someone clears their throat and I look up. A guard is standing at my cell door—but so is someone else.

My heart trips over itself. It always has. It always will.

I am perfectly capable of admitting truths to myself, even if Logan Darling isn’t.

“Oh,” says Cleo, drawing the syllable out into a banquet of a meal. “So there really is a mystery guy after all. Damn. Can’t believe I didn’t guess that.”

“Shut up,” I mutter, under my breath, but I can feel my cheeks flush.

The guard lets Logan in, but I realize this isn’t like his last visit, all lawyerly and mad at me for confessing. Mostly because the guard leaves the door open and unlocked.

“You’re being released,” Logan tells me.

He doesn’t sound happy about this, which makes me wish I could hate him. I need to work on that.

But then he handles everything.

He gets my clothes back and leads me through getting changed, signing papers, and retrieving all my things. He leads me out of the jail into the sunlight. Somewhere along the way Amelia and Cleo fade away.

They’ll fade back in at some point. In and out. Sad and wonderful all wrapped into one.

And while we’re doing all this, bits and pieces of the other dream I had last night come back to me the way they always do.

In a rush of snippets I have to stitch together later.

Lexi and Harrison in that clock tower. The horrible things Harrison told her. Logan and Jack at the rock and Lexi running all that way, across the whole of Midas, to find them. The blood used to break the deal. The explosion.

I see it all, because I dreamed it all from my cell.

Harrison’s betrayal hurts, but it explains . . . so many things. I think it might take me years to fully unravel it all.

But if I’m honest, I find that losing him doesn’t hurt quite the way losing Betsy did. Losing my adoptive grandmother was losing someone who loved me.

Deep down, I knew Harrison never did. Even if I did think he was good and right and helping us. I assumed there was something wrong with me. After all, I’m a foundling, not a Bellamy.