“She’s a good kid,” I tell her.
Rose bites her bottom lip, swinging her gaze to look out through the window into an endless night. Then she propels herself out of the chair.
“I’ll show you your room,” she says. “Me and Soph got it ready for you when we heard you were coming.”
“We just made the bed, nothing special,” Sophie insists, falling into step with Rose. I watch them, tense, but Rose is gentle with Sophie, accepting her hand when she reaches for it as they take me down the hall, Onix padding behind us.
My room is small, but well furnished, with a large vanity, a queen-sized bed—“I switched the comforter with mine, because I know you like green,” Sophie declares proudly—and a trunk at its foot that I open to find dog food and toys. Sophie sticks to me like a burr, and I observe how she’s changed in the short time that I’ve been away,regressing back to the days when she would cling to her trusted adults so closely that we’d trip over her. Even though she’s yapping away, telling me all about her talented new friend, the cabin’s extensive collection of art supplies, and the mirrored closet doors that make it easier for her to practice her dance moves, there is a desperation in her cadence that confirms to me that her world has been upended. There was a time when Sophie was a daddy’s girl. When her favorite time of day was when her dad, who worked longer, less flexible hours than her mom, came home and launched her into the air. Now she has to live in a world in which he is only a memory, the once unquestionable certainty of his existence now broken.
“Let her rest, Sophie,” Winona says. When I turn, she’s leaning against the doorframe, watching us with her arms crossed. “She’s probably had a hard time the last few days, and it was a long drive. She’ll come back out for dinner.”
Her gaze flickers reflexively to my hands. I look at them, then hurriedly tug down my sleeves: dark bruises have blossomed around my wrists. Our eyes meet, and her brow raises in a subtle but grave question, and I recognize, with horror, that what I’ve been seeing in my best friend’s face isn’t just grief, but unease.Shit.Those sharp instincts that can pick up on her clients’ subtle emotional shifts are going to get us in trouble.
Luckily, Sophie doesn’t seem to notice.
“Oh,” she says, walking to the door. “Sorry.”
“Don’t worry, nugget,” I say. “I’ll be out soon.”
Winona ushers Sophie to the kitchen, but Rose lingers, watching me like a ghoul from the door. When they are out of sight, she closes it behind her, and I exhale, relieved to be able to end my performance.
To my surprise, Onix walks over to her and nudges Rose’s hand with his nose. I watch as she scratches behind his ears.
“He’s very sweet,” she observes. “We don’t keep pets. Their lifespans are so short that losing them doesn’t seem worth it.”
I don’t want to think about Onix’s eventual demise, especially with mine so imminent.
“Alphonse had cats,” I say. “Bunnies too, at some point.”
“Alphonse had a lot of things the rest of us haven’t,” she says. Her mouth thins into a line. “I’m sorry. I tried to convince her not to do this.”
It’s Margaret West’s confident cadence, coming from a spindly thirteen-year-old girl’s mouth.
“So you don’t think I should die,” I say blithely.
“No,” Rose confirms. “Julian has offered everything to keep you. He’s always been willing to help us, you know, but his wealth has never beenours. We’re women. We’ve only been able to keep our own property reliably in the last fifty years or so. He’s got a head start centuries long, but he was willing to give it up for you, and that more than anything made me see that he was serious about this. I don’t mean the money—it’s never been about wealth, for him. It’s about what it enabled him to do. He’s always struggled the most with the question of his existence, you know. By being able to promote innovation, he gives himself meaning.”
I know this, but hearing Rose reiterate it so plainly still sends me reeling. That Julian is willing to throw his entire life’s work down the drain for a few meager decades by my side leaves me with an indescribable feeling. It’s not joy, exactly, but something stickier, messier, drenched in sorrow. What had he said, when he told me he loved me again?Life at your side would feel meaningful enough to end.
“She won’t take the deal, though,” I say.
“She won’t,” Rose says. She sighs, crosses her arms. “I’m not stupid enough to come to you demanding you have empathy for her. Butyou can’t imagine what it’s like. To be so powerful, yet so powerless, for years on end. To be almost destroyed multiple times over for existing. You might think that what she did at Ulrich Corridor was overkill, but she did it to protect us. She had no choice.”
Help me.Harold’s final grimace, his unheard death rattle.
“She murdered a room full of people in cold blood,” I say, disgusted.
“Because someone first tried to murder me,” Rose insists. “It’s a mass shooting in America. We’re a minor calamity. The news cycle is probably already on to the next one.”
I swing my feet against my bed’s footboard, and the impact booms through the room like a firework.
“Is that how you justify it to yourself?” I muse.
Rose doesn’t respond for a moment, but I can tell I’ve struck a nerve.
“You’re mortal,” she says eventually. “You have a desire to live, but also the knowledge that you can’t live forever. For us, it’s a choice, and a hard one. I miss Alphonse every day, but I envy him too. He was tired of living just for the sake of it. The life he chose for himself…it was full of possibilities. Leila saw it as betrayal, but I understood why he chose it. I understand why Julian is choosing it now. And if I’m honest, I’d love to choose it too. Having to start again from childhood is exhausting.”
“What’s stopping you?” I ask.