Page 40

I keep seeing the floor plan. Bedroom 4: G. Maximova.

If she’d gone. If she’d done what she’s done her whole life, what Geoff was so sure she’d do. If she’d picked up her keys and slipped out the back door without telling anyone, and driven herself to that harbor to save her sister.

I’d have been in the study, on my laptop, an hour away. And I’d never have known until it was too late.

Upstairs, behind the curtains of the big bedroom overlooking the lake, a lamp is on.

She’s waited up for me. Of course she has.

I sit in the car and look at that light for a long, long time, until I can make my hands open.

GALANA

Ihear the car crunch over the gravel drive.

I’ve been sitting in the armchair by the bedroom window since Natasha’s driver brought me home at midnight. I’ve been wrapped in Mama’s cardigan and a blanket, with the lamp on, watching the drive. Leo called at four to tell me Caleb was safe, and it was finished, and he was on his way.

I didn’t sleep after that. I couldn’t. I needed to see him.

The headlights swing across the ceiling. The engine stops.

Then nothing.

I wait for the car door. For his footsteps on the gravel, for the front door. A minute goes by. Two. Five.

He doesn’t get out.

I stand up and go downstairs.

The gravel’s freezing through my socks. I don’t care. The sky’s going pale over the lake, and the air smells of wet leaves and frost, and my breath comes out in little clouds as I cross the drive.

He’s sitting in the driver’s seat with both hands on the wheel.

He doesn’t see me at first. He’s looking up at the bedroom window. At the lamp. He doesn’t seem to notice the lamp’s still on but I’m not in the window anymore.

I open the passenger door and get in.

He turns his head. Very slowly.

He looks terrible. There’s a cut on his cheekbone, small and crusted over. There are dark shadows under his eyes. His shirt is torn at the side, and the cuffs of his jacket are stained with something dark and stiff that I know exactly what it is, because I grew up in Papa’s house.

“You’re not wearing shoes,” he says. His voice is rough.

“No.”

“It’s freezing.”

“I know.”

He looks at me for a long moment. Then he looks back at his hands on the wheel.

They’re shaking.

I watch them. Big, scarred, steady hands that have never once trembled in all the days I’ve known him. Hands that held a cup of Mama’s tea like a toy, and put a ring on my finger, and pulled me into him on a kitchen counter.

Shaking so badly the leather creaks under them.

“I can’t make them stop,” he says quietly. Like a confession.