Footsteps.
My whole body goes rigid.
The sound is loud even through the rain. Shoes sliding in mud, someone approaching from the direction of the drenched cemetery path. Probably a groundskeeper. Someone who'll tell me visiting hours ended at sunset and I need to leave before they call the cops on the waterlogged freak having a breakdown at his brother's grave.
I don't look up. Don't have the energy to care.
"Rex."
That voice.
That fucking voice.
I lift my head just enough to stare out through my soaked hair. Bells is standing five feet away in the pouring rain, soaked through to the bone. Her white hair is plastered to her skull, makeup running in dark streaks down her cheeks. She's breathing hard, like she ran here, like she?—
Like she's been searching for me.
Why?
"How the fuck did you find me?"
Nobody knows I come here. This ismine. The one piece of my brother I don't have to share with the world.
And somehow, she's here.
Standing in the rain like a ghost, looking at me with an expression I can't read.
It isn't pity. I'd recognize pity. I've seen enough of pity to last several lifetimes. And it isn't horror either, even though she has to know. Has to have seen the pictures by now.
Has to understand exactly what…
"I just… I had a feeling," Bells says, still catching her breath.
"A feeling."
"Yeah."
It doesn't add up. None of it adds up. But I don't have the energy to push, to demand a real explanation, to do anything except sithere in the mud and stare at this woman who tracked me down through a Seattle rainstorm to a place she shouldn't know exists.
"You should go," I say. "There's nothing here for you."
Instead, she crosses the remaining distance between us and sits down.
Right next to me.
In the mud.
With her back against Nash's headstone and her shoulder almost touching mine, like this is normal. Like sitting in a cemetery in a rainstorm with a monster is just another fucking Tuesday.
"What are you doing?"
"Sitting."
"In the mud."
"Observant as always."
I stare at her. She stares straight ahead, at the rows of graves stretching into the gray distance, at the rain turning everything soft and blurred at the edges.