Page 145 of The Final Cut

I wait thirty seconds before following, long enough that no one watching the hall will tie us too neatly together. When I step back into the ICU corridor, she is gone, swallowed by the hospital and whatever leash Isabel still has wrapped around her life.

Deacon stands outside Cal’s room. He looks at me once and knows.

Inside the room, Reva sits beside Cal’s bed with his hand in hers, head bowed, shoulders curved around grief she has not decided how to carry yet. She doesn’t look broken, though.

She looks like a woman whose whole past has shifted beneath her feet and left her standing anyway.

I go in quietly and take the chair on the other side of the bed.

Reva does not lift her head. “Where did you go?”

“To find answers.”

Her fingers tighten around Cal’s.

“Did you find them?”

I look at Deacon in the doorway, at Cal breathing between us, at the girl I love and the impossible road opening in front of her.

“A few,” I say.

“Are they bad?”

I reach across the bed and cover her free hand with mine. “They’re not simple.”

She lets out a small, tired sound that might have been a laugh if there had been more of her available for it.

“Nothing ever is,” she whispers.

No. It never is. But it’s figure-out-able.

I sit with her until the machine breathes again.

DELIA

AGE 22

Isabel is watching me watch Reva.

That means I have to be careful.

Careful with my face.

Careful with my hands.

Careful with the old, stupid part of me that still wants to reach for my sister and shield her when danger enters a room.

Reva does not understand this house yet. She thinks cages have locks.

She does not know a cage can be a glance across a table, a rosary around a wrist, a mother who has to love you from three steps away because any closer would draw blood.

She will learn.

I hate that for her.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

REVA