We Fell Apart: A We Were Liars Novel(29)

“I’m sorry. I don’t know the answers to any of those questions.”

“What’s he like, then? Like, what music does he listen to? Or what are his favorite foods? Or could I—could I see his sketchbook?” The words pour out. “Meer said he always keeps his hands moving. I’m like that, too. I don’t really draw, but I make video game maps and sketch out weapon ideas and stuff. I’d like to see what Kingsley does. Like, maybe there’s something that’s the same, between us? Something about how our minds work that I inherited from him?”

“I can’t show you his private notebooks, Matilda.”

I feel myself flush. “Would it be okay to see his studio, then?”

“There are projects in my own studio that are pressing today, so I’m going to go to work now. But I’ll think about it.” She steps into the pantry and comes back with a syringe. She pulls up the edge of my T-shirt sleeve. “This is an antibiotic. Your hands are very inflamed and it will help you heal.”

The needle is in my arm before I even fully understand what she’s doing to me.





28


In my dream, I am asleep in the Iron Room. I know I am asleep, because one tenth of me is conscious. The world outside my window is black. That’s confusing, because I know I left the Oyster Office at two in the afternoon.

I can’t wake up any further. I am under a blanket of ice in a frozen sea.

I am still wearing my UC Irvine sweatshirt. The high neck feels tight around my throat.

Kingsley stands over me. He is home from his trip. My long-lost father.

His hair is threaded with gray. So is his beard. He looks much older than in the few photographs I have seen of him. He is tall—well over six feet, genes I didn’t inherit. He wears an old black T-shirt, stretched out at the neck, covered with spatters of paint.

“I knew a girl like you,” he whispers. “Isadora. Persephone.”

I want to say that I am her daughter, but in my dream, I can’t wake up enough to speak.

“She had my baby,” he says. “But I left her before it even happened. I took a different path. It was so long ago.”

I want to say that I am that baby. I try to reach my hand to him.

I cannot.

“Melinoe,” he says. Meh-lih-no-eh.

I don’t know what that means.

“Melinoe,” he repeats.

I reach for him but my arms will not move.





29


Kingsley was supposed to be home by now.

But he is not.

I’ve been here four days, and he still isn’t home.

I have looked in the fridge, the freezer, and the pantry. I’ve stared at the spines of all the books in the living room.

I have wandered into the lower part of Parchment Tower, finding empty guest rooms and a carpeted music area supplied with various string instruments and bongos.

I have examined each painting on the walls, including Kingsley’s Cliffside Gothic and Odysseus Flees. I’ve stared at the mobile in the living room and at the tentacled glass chandelier.

And while I have a sense of my father’s taste—organic shapes contrasted with empty space, natural materials and surprising bursts of color, a love for old painters like Vermeer and Caravaggio more than modern artists—I don’t know who Kingsley really is, at all. The only thing I’ve found that changed my idea of him is a note. I discovered it tucked into a junk drawer in the kitchen, forgotten among rubber bands and matchbooks, though it doesn’t seem old. In handwriting that isn’t June’s or Meer’s, it reads:

    Oh, Peter Pevensie of Narnia,

I have heard your news. I think of you all the time.

Eustace Scrubb





* * *



—

I know the Narnia series he’s referencing. I read them when I was eight. Peter and Eustace are characters in the books.

But who is he writing to?

Meer tells me Kingsley read the series out loud to him, but the note isn’t to him.

“He didn’t call you Peter, and he was Eustace?” I ask.

“No. And why would he pick Eustace? Eustace is like, the most loserish character.”

The two of us are in the ocean together. Sunny morning. Tatum is at work driving the taxi van, but Brock is stretched on the sand, a book on top of his face. June disappeared after breakfast the way I’ve learned she usually does, bringing a tray of sandwiches and powder packets up to her workshop in Bone Tower.

“What do you think is keeping him from coming home?” I ask.

“Nothing,” says Meer. “Anything. Something unexpected that caught his attention. Please, Matilda. Don’t take it personally. He’s just very relaxed about time and plans.”

“Do you think that’s why he didn’t offer me a plane ticket?”

Meer dives under a big wave, then pops up to reply. “Did you expect him to send one?”

“It’s just—he’s a famous artist who lives in a castle and I’m a kid with a job at a coffee shop. The flights cost a thousand dollars.”

“I had no idea,” says Meer, letting his feet float to the surface. “That’s a ton of money.”

“I got help from my mom’s ex-boyfriend. It was okay in the end. I just—I wondered why Kingsley didn’t offer.”