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“When did she think it was? What year?”
“She asked if the children were sleeping. I guess that means the fifties, at least. I don’t know. But she wasn’t afraid.”
Ahead of us, the trees parted to reveal the dark cove, a tiny patch of sky, a few glittering stars that vanished as I looked at them, the fog rolling in and growing thicker by degrees. At my feet the open mouth of the sea.
“That was her mistake,” I said.
He turned to me. “What?”
“She should have been afraid of you. She would have been if she’dknown the truth about who you were. What you were doing. What you would do.”
“Everything I did was—”
“For me? For us?” I shook my head. “When you watched Shelly choke to death, who were you thinking of then?”
He didn’t answer, and I looked at him for a long time, my eyes streaming with the cold. Willing myself to stay strong, to see this moment through. Realizing as I did that it was already over.
My grandmother hadn’t been afraid of Adam—but I was.
I didn’t want to be afraid anymore.
“Then what happens now?” he said finally. “How does this end?”
“I’m going to give you a chance,” I said. I raised my other hand, pointing: into the cove, into the dark, where that distant island stood hidden in the mist. “I’m going to giveusa chance. You know this story, right? Crossing the ice to that island, that was hers. Her love, her memory. But you took it from her. You used it against her. You made it yours—and mine.”
He took a nervous step backward. I moved toward him.
“So now we’re going to finish the story. We’ll cross the reach. We’ll start over together, if that’s what you want. You wanted another way. This is it.”
“Delphine—”
I shook my head, baring my teeth against the wind. “Maybe we’ll both get a new beginning. But this—everything you’ve done, all the lies, all the death—it ends here.”
I stepped onto the ice.
27.
He stared at me, his face twisted. I took another step.
“It won’t hold us,” he said.
“It might. It’s been cold,” I said, and marveled at the grit in my own voice. I sounded so brave, so sure. And I wasn’t lying: It had been cold. Cold enough that I had stood by the shoreline just that morning and observed that the ice stretched much farther into the reach than it had a few months before. Cold enough that a person could walk very far out indeed—if she was careful and if she didn’t weigh too much.
But he hesitated again, and in that moment I wondered if he would change his mind after all. If he would run, run away from the promises he’d made and the terrible things he’d done. I still wonder what would have happened then. Maybe I would have let him go. Let him live with it. A lifetime of looking over his shoulder, wondering when fate might come to collect the debt he owed. But as I watched him watching me, something flickered over his face. Love, maybe—or just something that disguises itself as love, a spark of that madness that makes even prudent men foolish, reckless, dangerous.
The madness that makes a bland, devoted husband gamble awayevery penny in his joint bank account on a series of bad investments. Or a loving father willing to kill for love, for money, for the sake of protecting what he holds most dear. Or a young man willing to risk the frozen reach for a chance to hold his love in his arms—or bold enough to imagine he’ll find a way out, as the walls close in.
The madness that disguises itself as courage, that you don’t recognize for what it is until it kills someone you love.
The ice was firm beneath my feet as I began to walk. Carefully but quickly, opening the distance between us.
“Wait,” I heard him call. I turned.
“Come on,” I called back. He was on the ice now, twenty feet behind me. His face was obscured by shadow and fog, but I could see the shape of him, the cadence of his movements. Tentative, but getting bolder.
He was starting to believe.
He took another step and another, and I watched for a moment more before I turned away. Kept walking. The fog was thicker than ever, and while I wasn’t the one who believed in signs, in fate, I did believe in this one: as if the sea itself knew what was about to happen and wanted to shield it from view.
