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“No.” I shake my head. I can’t look at him. “Don’t touch me.”
He drops his hands, but he doesn’t step away from me. “Nothing has to change, Taylor.” It almost sounds like a plea.
I finally look at him. “What are you talking about?Everythinghas to change! We’re only here because Celine wasn’t waking up. And now that she has—”
“You can’t just pretend like nothing happened.” He’s just this side of shouting, but I don’t blame him.
Because I feel like screaming.
“Watch me,” I say instead, shoving past him toward my suitcase. “We have to leave. Now.”
“Fucking hell, are you really going to keep making the same mistakes over and over again?” He throws his hands up in the air. “Look at you, with that fucking mask back on—”
“What mask?” I whirl around to face him.
“The pretend-it’s-all-good face you wear whenever you’re doing something you don’t want to be doing. At some point, Taylor, you’re going to start hating your family for the choices you felt you had to make for their benefit. Choices no one ever actually asked you to make. Let me be the first to tell you: the fault isn’t theirs. It’s yours, and yours alone.”
His words flay me open, but I shake my head like that’ll keep the truth of what he’s saying at bay. I turn my focus to throwing clothes haphazardly into my open suitcase. “I’ll meet you by the car,” is all I say.
I sense his brooding. I sense him radiating that furious thrumming energy of his. Then I sense the breeze of his motion, which has a weird, scary kind of violence of its own.
A few seconds later, the door slams. My hands freeze on my remaining clothes. That ended so fast. So cruelly fast.
Fate ripped away my hope like a flower from the ground.
I drop the blouse in my grasp and turn into the room. My eye catches the snow globe on the shelf again. I find myself drifting toward it. When I pick it up, snow blooms inside the glass like white roses.
I don’t make the conscious choice to take it with me; I just float back to my suitcase, wrap it up in the blouse for safekeeping, and stash it away between layers of clothes like it’s something I have to hide.
A memory of the last time I’ll ever let myself believe.
71
TAYLOR
When I get downstairs, Ilarion is already loading up the vehicle. He’s changed, too, in the last few minutes. The air of unyielding confidence is gone from him. He just looks pensive and angry. More like an ocean in a storm than a mountain in the distance.
I walk my bag to the trunk. He takes it from me without a word. The silence is a good thing, though.
If there’s silence, there can’t be fighting.
I take one last look back at the cabin. Then I climb into the passenger seat and buckle in. I don’t look again. There’s no point now. It and everything that happened beneath its roof is all behind us.
We drive for hours without a word. The silence is suffocating me, but every time I glance at the map, we still have hours yet to go.
What is Celine thinking? Is she wondering where I am? Is she wondering where Ilarion is? What has she been told? Is she even capable of asking questions?
My only point of happiness is the knowledge that Dad is back, too. He’s been found, and he’s safe. Which means there’s a chance to salvagesomething.
By the time Ilarion finally breaks the silence, I have a plan in mind.
“We have to tell her,” he grumbles.
I don’t even glance at him. “No, we don’t. There’s nothing to tell.”
“This weekend—”
“Was a mistake,” I finish. “It never should have happened. That was my fault. I shouldn’t have agreed to come here with you.”
