I moved closer to her and wiped it away with a napkin.
She rocked her chair some more, and then seemed distracted, staring into the blank television screen. I made sure she was set for the night and began to pack away her leftovers in the kitchen.
“Say . . . I meant to tell you last time,” she called abruptly from the living room. “She was here.”
I closed the lid on a plastic container. “Who was here?”
“Your sister.”
Marlow.
I didn’t say her name out loud. I raised my head. Something in my core began to tremble.
“Why? What did she want?”
“She was really quiet. Didn’t say much. Knocked on my door out of the blue and I answered. She didn’t even come inside. Said she was really sorry about Sawyer. That she loved him like a brother and thought I should have something.”
My chest had already begun to pound. Banging on the inside, crying out to be released.
“I didn’t know if I should even bring it up to you. But then I kept thinking about it. Maybe you should come over and take a look.”
I found myself walking slowly toward her. Each step as if I were moving through a thick pit of waist-high sand. Each beat of my heart thumping in my ears, pulsating with dread.
I turned to face her in the recliner. She held it up with two fingers.
My throat became a drought. I reached out with cupped hands. She dropped it in them.
The knight figurine went cold with my touch.
He promised. He promised to always have it with him.
My veins went icy from the thought of it. The thought of what she could have done.
I pictured the accident. The truck loud and barreling, hard to ignore as it sped down the road. I imagined how cold his body must have been, lying in that ditch covered in snow. Where was she when he was dying, when he was taking his last breaths? The knight somehow ending up in her hand, her single cut dripping blood on its helmet.
How did you get it, Marlow? How did you take it from him?
CHAPTER 49
ISLA
2019
The farmhouse grew larger every day, the emptiness starting to take over every corner, every crack. I could sense it bulging, creaking with agitation, wanting to reach out to someone else. Someone who wasn’t as empty. Someone who wasn’t dead inside.
I left the position at the gallery. On my last day, the gallery owner hugged me and told me to come back whenever I was ready. I felt my chin dig into the top of her shoulder as I stiffly let her squeeze me. We both knew I wasn’t coming back.
I had begun to shut myself out and away from anyone who knew me. Slowly taking each piece of plywood and hammering away, board by board, to cover up the storm I had become. If they knew my name, they would immediately think of Marlow Fin. And then the inevitable secondary realization that I was the wife of that guy she was with—the one who got crushed on the road by a delivery truck. I could see it in their eyes every time, a bullet striking me in the open wound that would never close.
Oh, you’re the wife of that poor dead guy. The sister of that beautiful woman.
I wanted to shout back at them. Yes! Yes, to everything you are wondering! Now can you please leave me alone? Can you please look at me with anything but a blinding curiosity and pity wrapped up in smugness?
But the worst part . . . the worst part of it all was that it reminded me of who I was.
I began to think I would never be able to escape it.
A month later, I found myself walking aimlessly before the sun came up until I stopped in front of a bakery. The glass windows were incredibly clear, the store lights bright beacons. The workers inside looked happy organizing loaves of freshly baked bread into baskets, scones lined in a row, and croissants layered over each other. I pressed my hands against the glass like a child looking in, and nearly knocked on it to get their attention. This space . . . this . . . I could do this.
I could be quiet and work among them. They wouldn’t even notice me. I could pretend nothing existed outside those walls.
I got hired for overnights, when the rest of the world was asleep. Where I could be left alone with nothing but bags of flour and yeast. The strong, sweet, and fermented smells both charmed and annoyed me. The dough mixer churned as I mechanically measured, poured. Repeated. Flour would settle in my hair, and I would go home as the sun was rising, shaking it out and feeling tired enough to sleep the rest of the day away. When everyone else was up and ready to be loved and hurt and carry on—I would be gone, cocooned away from it all.
At home, I kept the television off. My phone I only turned on for the occasional calls from the four people who I still let in. Mom, Dad, Ada, and Oliver. But my contact with even them thinned out, a horizon that would disappear when night finally fell—existing, but not for anyone to see.
There were two times I saw any sign of Marlow. Once, as I pumped gas and the screen at the station played an ad for an expensive French perfume. She was in it, a cream chiffon fabric draped around her naked body, close-ups of her fingers tracing her lips. The second, a stack of magazines dropped outside a storefront on my way home from the bakery. The cover featured her profile. She looked herself again by all standards. I wondered if she had gotten sober once more. If she was living the life she always wanted.
I put the farmhouse up for sale in the spring. There was a potential buyer within a week.
“It’s a low offer but—” the real estate agent started to say.
“I’ll accept it.”
“Do you want to possibly see—”
“No. I’ll accept it,” I said firmly.
I was ready to leave the house behind.
