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Lara tugged on Ian's sleeve and whispered, "She's not dead."
"She is to us," Andrew said.
Lara tugged harder. "No."
Ian turned to the child, surprised at the ferocity of her tone. "Lara?"
Lara swallowed. "This . .. now . . . We would make Miss Selena so sad, she would cry."
"Lara's right," Johann said softly. "Selena believed so much in all of us. It would kill her to know how we've fallen apart."
For a few minutes, no one said anything. Each of them stared out at the night.
And suddenly Ian discovered something, a gift that Selena had left behind. She was there, deep down inside, in the pit of his loneliness and his grief and his sorrow, she was there, sharing it with him, smiling up at him.
"We have to go on," Ian said quietly, and in his mind he heard her voice, echoing his, he felt the heat of her smile in the last rays of the setting sun. "As much as it hurts-and it's going to hurt for a long, long time-we have to go on. If we don't, we'll forget her. Day by day, one selfish word at a time, we'll go back to our own solitary lives, and one day we'll wake up and no one will remember Selena. There will be nothing in us to mark her time here. But if we listen to the part of her she's left in our hearts, she'll never be gone."
Maeve got to her feet and held out her hands. One by one, wordlessly, they joined in a circle. Ian was the last to stand, the last to reach out. He felt a split second's
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hesitation to touch them, but the fear was overshadowed by his greater fear of facing this loss alone, of facing every moment in his life alone from here on out.
He looked around, at the sad faces of his housemates, and felt a stunning gratitude for them. Maeve was right; they needed to touch each other now, to connect and share and admit the grief. He'd tried it alone, long ago when his father died, and he knew from experience that grief ignored could eat a man up from the inside and leave nothing behind.
Slowly, squeezing his eyes shut, he reached out his hands. Maeve took one; Lara took the other.
Images hit Ian hard, so hard he staggered back. For a second, he was caught up in the swirling pain of their emotions. A headache started at the base of his skull, radiated to his eyes.
You will teach yourself not to hear the voices. ...
Selena's words came back to him. He concentrated on other things: the feel of the wind, the taste of the sea in the air, the quiet rustling of the leaves all around. Gradually the pounding images faded, the voices merged into a dull, droning murmur not unlike the sound of the ocean at low tide.
He could almost hear Selena's voice in the gentle ebb and flow of their breathing. It is a beginning, Ian.
Great, bloated gray clouds rolled across the sky, cast lengthening shadows across the wagon. The road up ahead, pockmarked by muddy puddles, twisted around a bank of shivering red maple trees and disappeared.
Selena sat with her elbows braced on her knees, and her cheek cradled in one damp palm. An open umbrella was cocked above her head. The sky was ominously low, so close she thought she could reach up and trace a finger along its swollen underbelly. Only moments ago the rainy drizzle had stopped. She could still hear the rhythmic plop-plop of water down the sides of the wagon. Rivulets slid down the star points of her black
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umbrella and splashed on her gingham skirt. The fabric stuck in huge, moist patches along her thighs.
She missed the air at the coast already, and it had only been three days since she left.
There, the air was sharp and diamond-clear and smelled of salt and earth and sea. Here, in the wild inlands of Maine, the air was humid and heavy, as colorless and bland as a glass of watered milk. No breeze whispered through the endless acres of trees, and sunlight only broke through in patches of dazzling gold. And even when it rained, it was hot.
They turned the corner, and for the first time in three days, they were out of the forest. Green pastures rolled out away from them in several directions. Trees existed only in carefully planned pockets amidst the grass.
She cast a sideways glance at Elliot. He sat hunched foreward, the reins slack through his big, hairy fingers, his wet hat drawn low on his forehead.
She wanted to say something to him, but as usual, could think of nothing worth saying. She couldn't be cruel enough to speak to him of Lethe House or her family there, and without that, she had nothing at all to talk about. She'd tried to talk to him about poetry and literature, but he'd stopped that with a curt declaration, I don't know how to read.
After that, she hadn't known what to say, so she said nothing, kept her feelings padlocked inside her. Just sat there, mile after mile, unsmiling, watching the scenery change.
"That there's our community," Elliot said.
Selena turned, followed the invisible line of his pointing finger. Far away, nestled deep amid the rolling fields of green and gold, lay a huddled group of clapboard buildings, barely distinguishable from the gray sky. They looked different somehow from the other towns they'd passed through.
