I twisted out from under Ethan as soon as it was done. We hadn’t used a condom, and I swore quietly as I cleaned myself off and yanked my underwear back on.
“Naomi,” Ethan said. I hated the sound of my name in his mouth. The way he said it so tenderly, like he was afraid that if he pressed it would split like overripe fruit.
I turned back to him. He sat on the edge of the bed, those earnest eyes searching mine. “Get out,” I told him.
“I thought—”
“I want you to leave, Ethan.” He’d lied to me. Lied and manipulated and made me trust him. Made me feel for him. I was done. I knew the map of my scars again, the ones you could see and the ones under the surface, and now I was finished.
I watched him get dressed. He avoided my eyes. He stopped one more time in the doorway and looked like he might say something, but he thought better of it. I listened to his footsteps until they reached the front door. Listened to his engine start up and the tires crunch away down the gravel drive.
My body echoed with the ghost of his touch. I had lost nothing, I told myself. A man I’d known for a few days, who turned out not to even really exist.
The mirrored back of the closet doors threw a hash-marked reflection back at me. Some of the scars had blurred and faded. Others remained as ridges and knots. I ran my fingers over them in a roaming inventory. Ribs—two. Chest—three. Stomach—six. Arms—four. Face—one. I turned to see the single knot of scar tissue on my back, below my left shoulder blade.
It took a long time to stab someone seventeen times. You had to be focused. Or you had to be in such a manic rage that the seconds blurred.
I tried to picture it. Jim seeing me crawl up out of that hole, realizing what it meant. Coming up behind me.
Jim Green was a lifelong Chester native. He did the things men of Chester were supposed to do. He drank hard, worked an honest job, hated liberals, went hunting on the weekends. Jim Green knew how to take a knife to a still-kicking deer and stop its struggling.
I imagined his hand in my hair. Saw the knife swiped once across my throat. Or driven in through my spine. Quick, clean, and finished.
These were not the scars of an execution. This was rage. The person who did this to me wanted me to suffer. Oscar, then.
He would have wanted you to see him. The thought came unbidden, but once it arrived I couldn’t shake it. Oscar would have wanted me to know it was him and be afraid. To wrap his hands around my throat and feel the fragile crumpling of bones.
I told myself I was being ridiculous. He wouldn’t have cared whether he killed me with a knife or by strangling me. He’d just wanted to obliterate me.
I pulled my dress on. Tires on gravel signaled another arrival, but by the time I shoved my feet into my shoes to see who it was, Dad was calling.
“You still here?”
I stepped out into the hall. He gave my disheveled appearance a good looking-over. “Passed that Ethan Schreiber fellow on the way up the drive,” he said.
“He won’t be coming back,” I replied.
“Huh,” was all he said. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a folded piece of paper. “Stopped by the bank while I was waiting on the food. Thought I’d get you those records. From the trust.”
I walked forward leadenly and took it from him. It was a statement from when the trust was set up, and there it was—a thirty-thousand-dollar lump sum. “I thought you said the money was from Jim Green,” I said.
“Sure, because it was. He offered, I said yes, the money arrived. Simple.”
“This payment isn’t from Jim. It’s from Green Mountain Solutions,” I said.
“I guess he did it through some company. That’s one of his, isn’t it?”
“Wrong kind of Green. Green Mountain Services is the name of the Barneses’ old consulting company,” I said. I stared at the words like they might rearrange themselves into something that made more sense. Marcus Barnes had paid us off, but Jim Green had claimed credit? How did that make any sense? If either one of them had done it, they wouldn’t be covering for the other. They hated each other. Famously. “You didn’t know?”
“I wasn’t exactly detail-oriented at the time,” he said, shuffling his feet.
Marcus Barnes. It didn’t make any sense. My mind reeled. Could it have been Marcus in the woods? But what possible reason would he have to attack me? None of it made any sense, and I couldn’t remember. I must have seen something. I must have heard something, sensed something—but it was all lost in the fog.
Or maybe I just hadn’t tried hard enough, too afraid to go back to that place. Too afraid to remember.
“Where are you off to?” my father asked. I was already past him, already on my way out the door.
“I have to go,” I said.
“I got that part,” he grumbled, but I didn’t indulge him. If I stopped, if I faltered, I would fall apart.
I had to go back to the start.
* * *
Light lay like fragile lace across the trees, afternoon tumbling into evening. I didn’t follow the trail this time. I walked off the path and straight in among the trees in my funeral dress. I was past sense. Past logic. I wanted a magical incantation that would sort the world into its proper order. I did not want to reach the end of the road I was traveling and find what was waiting there. I wanted to go back. Back before I’d seen that piece of paper, back before I knew Ethan had lied, back before the blade made constellations of scars on my skin.
So let me go back to the beginning. Let me stand in the woods where I’d bled, where I’d almost died, and let me unweave everything that had followed.
Start again.
This time, I walked as if I knew exactly where I was going. Past the hidden places where we’d tucked our treasures, past the props and backdrops of our dramas. Our voices echoed through the trees, and my own ghost walked beside me. I stumbled in my sensible heels, the wet of the woods seeping in and leaving my feet numb, but I never slowed.
Here. This had been the spot, more or less. I’d been sitting on that rock, eating my lunch. We’d had some little argument again, Cass needling me with insults guaranteed to make me run or make me fight. This time I’d chosen to run. I’d sat alone, stewing on my anger and eating my peanut butter sandwich, and then—
But the memories shredded into the same confusion as ever. Stahl’s face falsely imprinted over reality. Ragged gaps where pain had obliterated all else. The babble of voices—Cass’s and Liv’s, the voices of rescuers, weaving in and out of each other impossibly, without any sense of time line.
I strode blindly away from the clearing, chasing my ghost backward through memory. The slip of a girl in her oversized sweatshirt, marching angrily through the woods. Clambering out from under the boulder.
They’d been here. I lay on my stomach and wriggled through the gap, and then I turned back, peering out at the woods. You could just see the rock where I’d sat. Where the attack had started. They would have been able to see it—see all of it. Oscar or Big Jim or Marcus Barnes, whoever it had been.
I turned away and wrapped my arms around my knees. The sun slanted down on Persephone’s bones. Jessi’s bones, I reminded myself. She was never Persephone. She was never anything but a corpse. She couldn’t protect us, couldn’t heal the wounds of the world the way Cass claimed she could. The way we tried so hard to believe that she would, if only we did what she asked of us.