The door opened before I could decide one way or the other, and Dad looked at me with his usual blend of scorn and amusement, like it was a big joke I’d wound up back on his porch. Which I guess it was.
“You look like shit,” he informed me. “What are you doing crying in a fancy dress?”
“It was Liv’s funeral today,” I said.
“That’s Tuesday.”
“It is Tuesday. Can I come in?”
“Not like I can stop you,” he said, and walked back inside, leaving the door hanging open. I stepped in. Couldn’t bring myself to close the door and shut off my escape route.
“You need something?” he asked.
“No. I just— There’s nowhere else to go,” I said. My throat felt scratchy, and my eyes were puffy, though I hadn’t actually cried.
“That’s obvious enough, since there’s no way you’d come here otherwise,” he said, grumbling, but then he stopped and narrowed his eyes at me. “What the hell happened to you?”
I pressed my lips together and shook my head.
“Are those bruises? Did that pretty boy hurt you?” he asked, and I barked a laugh that turned into a strangled sob.
“I don’t even know where to start with that,” I said. My grip tightened on the box. “I need to look through some of my old things.”
“Go ahead,” he said, gesturing toward the back hall. “It’s just how you left it.”
I suppressed my disbelieving snort. I picked my way past the guest bedroom and discovered it was completely full, stacked five feet high in the back. He’d just been chucking things in for years, not bothering to leave a path, and even the doorway was blocked with a broken bookshelf canted on its side. I crushed a bright pink Easter basket underfoot and kept moving, dreading what I would find in my bedroom.
To my shock, it was almost as pristine as he’d implied. The bed itself had some random detritus stacked on it, but a closer inspection proved most of it was mine. Stuff I’d thrown out the last time I was here. He must have just brought it right back in the house. Old clothes, books, even stuffed animals from when I was a kid.
Everything was still here, untouched. Which meant—
I walked to the closet. It was packed. It took me a few minutes of pulling things out to get at the loose floorboard in the back of the closet. The shoebox, dust-coated and battered, was still inside.
Right at the top was a small cloth bag. I loosened the drawstring and turned it out onto my palm. The white knucklebone was cold against my skin. My good-luck charm. My talisman. My curse.
I’d left it here, like leaving it would mean she wouldn’t haunt me.
I set it on the carpet and took out the others. Liv’s bone in its earring case, tucked in my pocket. Cass’s, in the bag at the bottom of the box. I laid them carefully next to each other. Hecate, Artemis, Athena. The prayer, the flowers, the burial, the water. The blood and the fire. Six rituals, when there should have been seven. We’d never reached the end.
I turned to the box again. What else had been important enough to hide? A geode, a feather, a few photographs: of Liv, of Cass. An overwrought self-portrait, eleven-year-old me looking off to the side, her face unmarked by the tragedy that she had no idea was about to strike. And—God. A photo of Persephone herself. The bones, with lilies in the eye sockets and our trinkets arrayed around her. The photographic twin to the drawings in Liv’s sketchbook.
“You seem like you could use a drink,” my dad said. I jumped, scrambling around. My back hit the wall before I could claw back a semblance of conscious control. He laughed. “You’re such a jumpy little thing.”
“Fuck,” I said, rubbing the back of my head. Like I needed another head injury. “You know you’re not supposed to sneak up on me like that.”
“Didn’t think I was.” He stepped into the room and held out a beer. I leaned forward to take it, then settled back against the wall again. It tasted like stale cereal steeped in water, but it was cold. I drank deeply.
“You’re not having one?” I asked.
He hooked his thumbs in his belt loops. “Thought maybe I should cut back.”
“Yeah, right. Wait, you’re serious?”
He shrugged. “About time, don’t you think?”
“Past time.” I didn’t for an instant believe it was going to stick, but as far as I knew it was the first time he’d even bothered with the pretense of trying. “You know you can’t go cold turkey. The amount you drink, it could kill you.”
“I said cut back, not stop,” he said defensively. But he rubbed the back of his neck and looked away. “I know. I’ll be careful. I’ve done it before.”
“When?”
“When you got hurt,” he said. “I was drunk as a skunk while my girl was bleeding out. Couldn’t even be at the hospital while you were in surgery. So I quit. For a while. Didn’t last. But I did it.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“You were a bit distracted by all the holes in you,” he said with a wry smile.
I gave a low, broken laugh. “Turns out there’s a lot of things I don’t remember from back then,” I said.
“That right?” he asked. There was an uncomfortable note to his voice.
“Dad, were you there when the police talked to me? When I identified Stahl?” I asked.
“Of course,” he said.
“What was it like? What did I say?” I asked.
“They showed you some pictures. They asked you if you saw the man who attacked you, and you pointed him out. Simple enough.”
“But did they seem like they were pressuring me?” I asked. “Influencing me at all?”
He sighed. “Shit, Naomi. You were so drugged up that if they showed you a picture of a man in a red suit you would have said Santa Claus stabbed you.”
“Dad. Please. Tell me what happened.”
“They did it clean,” he said. “Had a bunch of photos and showed them to you one by one. You picked him out right away and started crying.”
“You’re sure?”
“Why would I lie about that?” he asked, but he didn’t quite look at me. “Thing is, though. When you woke up, I asked you if you remembered anything, and you didn’t. You remembered getting hurt, but that was it. Then right before the detectives came to talk to you, I went down to get some food. When I came back, Chief Miller and Jim Green were coming out of your room. After, you were acting scared, and you kept promising you’d remember and do it right.”
“They coached me,” I said. Or threatened me. I thought of the sense of doom that had hung over me, the conviction that something truly horrible would happen if I ever faltered. I’d never been able to pinpoint exactly who had said the words that convinced me that horrible things awaited if I messed up. I couldn’t imagine what kind of pressure had been on Liv and Cass—the ones who actually knew enough to be a danger.
“That doesn’t mean you were wrong,” he said. “Besides, it’s not like it matters now.”
“Of course it matters,” I said. “Stahl didn’t attack me. That means someone else did. You’re sure it was Jim Green in there with Miller?” I wasn’t sure whether that made Jim the more likely suspect. He’d done plenty of covering up for Oscar—I doubted attacking me would be enough to break that loyalty.