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I plopped onto the bed and pulled my knees up to my chest. “You won’t believe me.” He wasn’t ready to hear about monsters, about shadows with teeth.
And as long as he was invested in his disbelief, he wouldn’t be able to tell me what he knew because that would mean admitting to the truth of the things he had to have seen and experienced.
Maybe it was time he and Celia faced what they refused to see. An idea blossomed, fully formed, in my mind. I almost laughed—it seemed ridiculous. But maybe it would work.
“Do you think you could convince Celia to come out to the folly? Tonight, after dinner?” I asked.
He shrugged. “As long as we’re not staying out past twilight,” he said. It seemed so natural to him: a rule he obeyed without questioning why darkness might be so dangerous.
“We shouldn’t need to. Just be there, okay?” It was probably a stupid idea. But I couldn’t keep doing this on my own. I had to try something. “Oh, and can you get some booze?”
“In this house, that is never a problem,” he said. He looked at me intently. “Maybe you should see a doctor or something.”
“You don’t really think that would help, do you?”
He paused. He wanted to say yes. He wanted to think that the mysteries of Harrow could be solved with skepticism. Instead, he shook his head. “I wish I knew how to help.”
“Be at the folly,” I told him. “If you want to help, be there.”
When Desmond was gone, I curled tighter around my legs, hugging them close. Had I really spent the week doing normal things? The evidence suggested that I had. Not least among that evidence was my hand, which had no sign of an injury.
Or had it been real but somehow also a dream? I muffled a scream of frustration by biting my arm and flung myself back on the bedspread.
“I hate this place,” I told the ceiling. “For the record.”
Harrow’s silence seethed with hatred of its own.
—
I was buzzing with nerves as I walked out across the lawn and toward one of the paths into the trees. As before, I didn’t have to think about where to go to find Bryony. I found her immediately, sitting under a tree with a textbook open beside her, scribbling in a notebook. When she spotted me, she pushed up to her feet all at once, letting her notebook drop to the ground beside her.
“Where the hell have you been?” she demanded.
I let out a strangled laugh. “Good question.”
“I thought you weredead,” she snapped. “First, you completely freak out at my house and run away, and then your skinliterally falls apart in chunks in my handand you don’t think to check in and let me know you’re okay? It’s been almost a week, and now you just walk up like nothing happened! What’s wrong with you?”
I sagged, tension I hadn’t known I was carrying flooding out of me. “It did happen?”
“You mean you nearly getting yourself killed? Yes, it happened.” Her eyes searched mine, and a small frown played across her lips. “Why do you have to ask?”
“Because that’s the last thing I remember before this morning,” I said. “You and the folly. But apparently, I’ve been taking walks and spilling soup and being totally normal, and my hand is fine, and nothing’s wrong, and I don’t understand how that can be true.” I was babbling. I shut my mouth with a click of teeth.
Her mouth hung open in a tinyo. “I thought you were avoiding me,” she said.
“I was. Before,” I told her. “After I came to your house. You looked at me and... I know you saw it. Whatever’s inside of me.”
“Oh,” she said, brow furrowing. “That’s why?”
“Of course that’s why,” I stammered. “You did see it. Didn’t you?”
“Yeah, I saw you randomly bleeding all over everything,” she said, rolling her eyes.
“Okay. But...” I started. Stopped. “I thought youwantedme to leave you alone. Isn’t that what you keep telling me? That you don’t want me bothering you?”
“Idon’twant you to bother me,” she said, folding her arms. “I just wanted to know if you were dead or not, that’s all.”
“You helped me,” I said, slow realization working its way through me. “Last night—last week, I mean—you didn’t even hesitate. If you hate me so much, why would you help me?”
