Total pages in book: 128
Estimated words: 120230 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 601(@200wpm)___ 481(@250wpm)___ 401(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 120230 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 601(@200wpm)___ 481(@250wpm)___ 401(@300wpm)
A long silence as she led me into a bedroom in which lay a mattress without sheets. We pulled it off to the floor and managed to get it out the door by dragging it sideways.
“I’m sorry.” Quiet words from Darcie, who was at the far end of the mattress while I’d taken the front. “I wasn’t thinking at the time. I just wanted it to go away. Like if I pretended it wasn’t happening, if I got rid of her body, then she wouldn’t be dead.”
A shaky breath. “Such a stupid, childish instinct and I hate myself for giving in to it. Because now, I can’t visit with Bea like I do with my parents, and I’m so ashamed, Luna. All the time. The shame eats at me. That’s why I was hateful to you. Each and every day, I drown in regret for what I did to my baby sister, to the girl I spent my life protecting.”
I stopped, my heart breaking. Of all the things Darcie had ever said about Bea’s death, this struck me as the most real. Darcie had become a child in her grief, hiding from the horror by putting her fingers in front of her eyes.
If true, it was something I could forgive.
My throat hurt, my eyes so gritty it felt as if they had tiny stones within.
I lowered the mattress to the floor. Darcie let go of her end at the same time. It landed on the floor with a soft thud.
“I’m sorry, too.” Crossing the distance between us, I wrapped her up in my arms.
She folded against me like a reed bending in the wind. “I’m sorry,” she said again, her breath hot against the shell of my ear. “I wish every day and every night that I’d buried her in the cemetery behind this house. With my parents. So she wouldn’t be alone.” Hot wet soaked my shoulder. “I did that, I made her alone, when Bea was never alone.”
“Grief can make us do terrible things.” I rocked her, but couldn’t make myself take the next step and tell her it was all right that Bea didn’t have a gravestone, that we didn’t need it to remember her.
The latter was true for me.
But I’d be gone one day, and so would Darcie. Who would remember Bea then?
Even as I comforted her, I couldn’t help but note that she’d said my parents rather than our parents. A simple slip of the tongue? Or an indication of the psychological war she’d begun to wage the day of Beatrice’s birth? The day on which Darcie had gone from being the apple of her parents’ eye to being eldest sister to a new baby who’d enchanted everyone.
“None of that now,” I said when she began to hyperventilate. “You have to take deep breaths, relax.” I almost said that being overwrought wasn’t good for the baby, remembered just in time that I wasn’t supposed to know about the embryo in her womb.
Ash’s DNA intermingled with hers.
If this had been a war, Darcie had won.
“Hold my hands,” I said even as the cold thought passed through my mind. “Follow my breaths.”
She did as I asked, and as I looked into her eyes—wet and ringed with red, broken blood vessels fragile rivers in the white—I felt like the worst person in the world.
* * *
—
The snow continued to fall in the hours that followed, and it nudged us into higher gear in setting up camp in the living area. Since Darcie still hadn’t found her phone, I helped her look for it while we were moving things around, figuring it had most likely fallen into an odd spot like between the arm and seat cushion of one of the sofas.
“There’s still plenty of firewood,” Ash said at one point, but he was frowning.
A short discussion later, he and Aaron decided to fetch more from the barn in case the snow turned into a blizzard, and all our attention switched to them.
“We don’t know how long we’ll be stuck here,” Aaron said to Grace as he pulled on work gloves that Kaea had picked up from the barn during that first firewood run. “Better to overprepare than under.”
“Be careful.” Grace, her expression pinched, tugged his hood tight around his face.
Like her, I wasn’t sure about the two of them walking out into the snow, but they were right in saying that at least the precipitation was currently manageable. Even a small increase in intensity and it might turn into a deadly whiteout.
“Make sure you tie a rope line to the barn.” Grace lowered her eyebrows. “I mean it. Don’t think that you can’t get disoriented. I’ve lived in snow. I know what can happen.”
“Grace is right.” Darcie passed Ash his gloves. “I think there’s a bit of rope in the laundry. We use it as a temporary drying line when we come down in better weather.”