Page 91 of In the Dark of the Past

I made a different choice. Sort of. I knew I likely wouldn’t live long one way or another, but I hid everything I’d gathered. Pieces in different places so that no single location could expose all of it. And I kept as quiet as I could for as long as I could.

But I kept asking questions. I couldn’t stop. It’s not how I’m made. You know that better than anyone.

Stonybrooke wasn’t a hospital. It was where they put the people who kept asking.

The room had gone very still.

I wasn’t crying. I noted that, the way I noted clinical details—without judgment, just observation. I wasn’t crying. My body had gone into the particular state it went into when something was too large to process in real time, and so it simply held it instead, the way you cup water in your hands and try to make it to somewhere you can set it down.

I read the rest of the page.

And then I stopped.

Not because I ran out of letter—there were two more pages, front and back. But because I’d reached the limit of what I could hold alone.

I sat on the floor of my mother’s bedroom in the house I’d grown up in, with her letter in my hands, the cedar box open beside me, and its contents on the floor, and I thought about my father. The way he’d stood in this house. The way he’d made coffee on Sunday mornings and read the paper at the kitchen table and helped me with my homework without ever making me feel like the help was condescension.

He hadn’t done it.

Not any of it.

He’d been a good man, and they’d needed him to be something else, so they built that something else and put his name on it. And while he’d been here carrying that, while he’d been in this town believing himself disgraced and abandoned, watching everything he’d built get taken apart, my mother had been in Stonybrooke carrying the truth of it. Silenced. Contained. Doing the one thing still in her power, which was to make sure the proof survived her.

She had written this letter thinking he might still be alive when I found it. Knowing she might outlast him, or he might outlast her, or neither of them might be here at all. She had written it to cover every version of after, because she couldn’t know which one would come.

He had died not knowing. That was the part I would carry the longest.

I looked down at the envelope in my lap.

The outside. Her handwriting.

RIVER — FOR WHEN THE TRUTH MATTERS MORE THAN YOUR FEAR.

She’d known I’d be afraid. She’d known, and she’d written around it.

I carefully folded the letter along its original creases and tucked it back inside the envelope, putting the small slip inside with it. Then I set the envelope on the nightstand next to her reading glasses—next to the book she’d been reading when she went away—and sat on the edge of the bed, looking at the curtains.

Blue with white flowers. The fabric I’d picked.

“No point in buying fabric you love and leaving it folded in a drawer.”

My phone was in my jacket pocket, and Finn’s number was in it. I sat with the curtains for another minute. Then I took it out.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Finn

She called me from her parents’ house.

Five words. I found something. Please come.

No explanation, no context, but the quality of the silence on the line after she said it told me more than the words did, so I didn’t ask questions. I told Atlas where I was going, got in the cruiser, and drove.

The house looked the same as it always had. I’d been inside many times. The last time when I was twenty-six and doing a job I believed in until last week when the Watchers had left their mark on the floor.

I knocked, and she opened the door.

Her eyes were dry. That was the first thing I noticed. She’d been crying at some point—there was a particular stillness in her face that came after—but she wasn’t crying now. She was past it, somewhere on the other side of it, in the geography that comes after grief has burned through and left whatever is underneath.