Page 276 of These Tears

She pushes herself up to sit with her legs crossed and throws another leftover piece of bread into her mouth. I wonder whether she’s laying the casualness on thick to keep herself from going nuclear on me.

Giving the bite a chew or two as her eyes meet Menace, who collapses at her feet, she then produces an empty plastic bowl and pours some ice water for both dogs.

All the while, I’m struggling to summarise the last few months into something that doesn’t resemble a horror story.

‘You don’t have to tell me the details,’ suddenly she says, ‘but I don’t think it was fraudulent.’

With my breath splitting my lungs, I let her finish pouring.

‘Even if it started off as fraudulent, it does not mean everything after it was too.’

She offers Menace one scratch behind the ear as he dips his nose into the bowl.

‘Jakob used to leave a room before anyone had a chance to ask him to stay. Now he sits through dinner because you are still at the table. He sleeps. He laughs when he forgets himself. And when the noise in his head grows too loud, he looks for you.’

Her fingers close around the empty bowl and she pours more water. ‘Whatever happened between you, those things are not pretend.’

The water bottle turns once in her hand. Then again. She picks at the edge of the label before speaking. ‘We all tried, you know. To find ways to make life here easier for him. Hoping it might make him come home for good.’

A shared silence passes between us. I know the full story of his childhood now, and though it fills in the blanks, it still doesn’t make it any easier to understand him.

‘I always wondered…’ she starts, shaking her head, ‘just because there were always small things that kept surfacing…’

When she doesn’t finish, I prompt, ‘What?’

‘There was something I learnt by accident. Something Melody did.’ Her fingers tighten around the water bottle, but I feel the sensation around my throat. ‘Her husband was rarely home – too busy with—who cares what he was up to, anyway.’ She waves away and repositions her folded legs before correcting her ponytail. ‘Melody knew that a baby with Crane blood would secure her place in the family, so she decided Jakob would give her one instead.’

My toes turn cold.

‘She accused him of raping her because he refused. Told him she would make the accusation disappear if he did what she wanted.’

The last piece settles with a sickened breath dragged from both of us.

‘Does everyone know?’ I ask.

She shakes her head and tilts back against the blanket, her elbow quietly thudding against its softness. ‘No. I found out when I was digging through the old case material. Enough of it to know exactly what she was threatening him with. Didn’t feel right to tell the others.’

‘You read the case material?’ I frown.

She’s already waving me off. ‘I thought I could represent him but there were bureaucratic complications.’

Brute stands and starts circling my feet. I still when he collapses beside them with a heavy grunt.

Bypassing the thing I always wanted to be true, I ask, ‘Do they know about us?’

The answer rebounds on its own: no one was here during the blizzard. No one was at the airport, nor in the woods when I tried to escape. They’ve all seen only a fraction of us that breaks the surface. So no, they can’t possibly know everything.

‘I think everyone theorises.’

‘You all just accepted me,’ I say, trying to keep the blame out of everything and failing. ‘Even after the Hunt.’

Inga’s expression closes. ‘The Hunt was a bad idea. Mamma warned us against it, and I pushed anyway.’ She points a soundless question at a crust of bread in front of me as if conceding a legal argument.

I hand it to her.

‘We thought we were honouring you. Making you part of the family. We were so accustomed to our own story that we forgot you had not grown up with our ways – and that you hadn’t agreed to any of it. I’m sorry. It was wrong. It probably looked like murder to you.’

‘With masks.’