Chapter 13

She walked for twenty minutes without direction.

Eventually she found herself in the park near the river — she had been here before, she realized. Many times. She knew the gravel path and the plane trees and the iron bench by the water. She had been brought here, early in her recovery, because Julian said the fresh air helped.

She sat on the bench and breathed.

The old oak at the far end of the path had something familiar about it — not the specific tree, maybe, but the scale of it, the way it spread. And the swing set beyond, rust-touched, slightly crooked. Something about those details produced a feeling she couldn't name, a sense of double vision, as if she were seeing two places at once.

She was sitting with her eyes closed, trying to let the sensation pass, when something pressed over her mouth and nose from behind.

She tried to fight. She was very good at fighting, apparently — her body moved with a competence her conscious mind hadn't supplied — but the cloth was already there, and the compound was fast, and there was a gap, and then there was nothing.

She came back to consciousness in a room that smelled of damp wood and something chemical. Moonlight came through a gap in the shutters. Her wrists were bound.

The woman sitting across from her was unrecognizable at first — thin beyond thinness, hair unwashed, wearing clothes that had once been expensive and now hung on her like a costume. But when she moved into the strip of moonlight, something clicked.

The face was familiar in the way things were familiar now: from below the surface, from somewhere she couldn't quite reach.

"You finally woke up," the woman said. Her voice was flat and strange, the affect slightly off — somewhere between calm and not. "I've been waiting."

Lily didn't speak.

"He took everything from me," the woman continued, as if she were reciting from memory. "After you — after you were gone, he blamed me. He punished me. He took my son." Her hands were working at the hem of her sleeve. "But if I have you — he'll give Thomas back. He'll give me Thomas back."

She picked up a phone and dialled.

"I have her," she said, when it connected. "She's alive. If you want her, bring me my son."

He came in ten minutes. Lily heard the car, then footsteps on the gravel outside, then his voice at the door: "Celeste. I brought the child. Open the door."

Celeste used the blade she'd been holding as leverage to push Lily toward the door, which Lily allowed, because she was watching the way Celeste was holding the knife and calculating angles.

The door swung open.

She looked at Damian. He was holding the infant — bundled, small, making the particular sounds of a baby annoyed at being transported at night — and his eyes went immediately to her face with an expression of relief so raw it was almost painful to look at.

She looked at him and felt it — the pressure in her skull, different now, like something that had been held underwater for a very long time breaking the surface.

The room shifted. Images came fast: a hospital corridor. A room with monitored light. A cliff with wind and the smell of gunpowder. Her son's face.

She made a sound she hadn't intended. Her hands went to her head. The pressure crested—

Celeste felt her stiffen and reacted; Lily felt the shift in her grip, the micro-second of attention moving to the infant. She heard Damian move. She heard Celeste's voice go high and strange, something about both of us dying, we're all dying together— and she heard the knife and she stopped calculating.

Her body did what it did.

She put herself between the blade and the child. That was all. She was not sure it was a decision, exactly. Some things were just done before the decision was made.

The pain was very sharp. The room went white.

She heard two voices call her name — both at once, from different directions — and then the white got larger and everything else receded.

She woke in a hospital room with light coming through a window that was too bright. She closed her eyes again. Two sets of footsteps. One chair scraping, close.

She tried "Julian" first.

She heard his breath catch. "You remember?"

She opened her eyes. Both men were there — Julian on her left, Damian on her right, and both of them had the same terrible quality of held-back feeling that made her want to look somewhere else.

"I remember," she said. "All of it." She looked at Julian. "Thank you. For everything you did. For finding me. For the year. All of it." She meant it, and she let herself mean it completely.

He looked at her and nodded. He didn't try to say anything.

Then she turned to Damian.

"We need to finish something," she said.

He went still.

"Our divorce."

The word produced a physical response she could see — something that went through him, a tightening and then an effort to control it. "Lily—"

"We were never formally divorced. The papers were never filed." She kept her voice neutral and her face clear. "I'd like them filed."