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Good night, sweet Finn.
“I need to see Dare,” I tell Sabine, because she and I both know who she is, who she really is.
She shakes her head and she’s firm, and her eyes are vicious because her daughter is gone and never coming back, and Dare and I are both here instead.
Somethingsomethingsomething is off though, something is off and I look out the window and there is a peaceful pond, and benches, and someone is feeding the ducks. Someone who is wearing a hospital bracelet, just like mine.
“Where are we?” I ask Sabine and she smiles and it’s grotesque.
“Oakdale Sanitorium,” she grins.
No. A mental hospital?
That can’t be.
“But it is,” Sabine answers, and I don’t know if she read my thoughts or if I said them aloud.
“You’re disturbed, poor girl,” she says. “And so is Adair. Growing up the way you did, it’s no wonder. Your mother was with her own brother, Dare’s step-father molested him and abused him… obviously you’re both from bad blood.”
“We’re not crazy,” I shout, but I’m not sure and I struggle and she smiles. There’s a sharp pain in my arm and she leaves and everything goes beyond black to oblivion and I’m in a sleep so so deep that I can’t dream.
Days pass and finally, finally, Dare comes to see me, when he’s strong enough.
He’s paler, but he’s the same. His dark dark eyes penetrate me and he grasps my hand.
“We’re not crazy. We’ve fixed it before, we’ll fix it again,” he tells me. There’s promise in his voice but I’m so tired. “You have Finn’s heart, so he’s not really gone.”
“Is this even real?” I ask him, groggy from the medicine they pump into my veins. “Maybe we’ve been crazy all along.”
Dare smiles and his smile is real and it’s bright and it penetrates my fog.
“You don’t believe that.”
“I don’t know what to believe.”
“Believe in me,” he instructs, and I do.
Because Dare is mine and he lives free.
“I want to live free, too,” I tell him.
“And you will,” he promises.
Days pass with nurses coming in and out, to make sure I take my pills, the colorful pills that will keep my body from rejecting Finn’s heart. I’ll have to take them forever and their waxy residue gets stuck on my tongue. But I take them, because I have to keep Finn’s heart alive. It’s the only part of him I have left, and he’s my brother and I love him I love him I love him.
Oakdale and its grounds look so much like Whitley. The halls, the rooms, and one day, one gray day, I find Finn’s journal.
It’s hidden in one of my bags and I know it’s his because it says.
The Journal of Finn Price.
The end is the beginning, one of the pages says. I don’t know about that, but I know the middle was jumbled up and changed and changed and changed.
But it can all be changed back.
I have to believe that.
Destroy the ring, it says. You have to you have to you have to.
