Maybe I dreamed what happened last night. Maybe it was all some horrible nightmare. Maybe—
“There you are,” Ellis says, standing over me. “I was looking for you. You wanted to show me that book, right?”
She’s already dressed, in a jacket with elbow patches, like some absentminded professor. Still in the couch, in my wrinkled yesterday’s clothes, I feel like a child caught out-of-bounds.
“Right.” All the terror of last night seeps up like groundwater—diluted now but still nauseating, still potent. I shove the duvet aside and bundle it and the pillow under my arm, carrying them up with me to the third floor.
Ellis trails behind like a tall shadow. I find myself glancing back, as if to make sure my Eurydice still follows.
“I still can’t explain it,” I tell her as we turn onto the landing. “I don’t know how it got back here. And we both…we’ve been here. We did leave it there, right? I’m not imagining things?”
“We’ll figure it out,” Ellis says, firm and confident, as usual. More confident, I note, than she’d sounded last night.
I push open my bedroom door and step inside, and the duvet falls from my arms.
The book is gone.
The circle of dandelion petals is still there, a ward against evil spirits, but the book itself has vanished. The only thing left is the hellebore, fallen in the middle of my ward like an ill omen.
“It was right here. It was right—”
I’m breathless, light-headed. It’s a feeling like being eviscerated.
Ellis moves into the room behind me, cutting past the bundled-up blanket to gaze down at the herbs littering my floor. She doesn’t say anything, but she doesn’t have to. The thin line of her mouth says enough.
I round on her, heat rising in my cheeks. “I swear it was here. Last night, it was on my shelf. And here—I dropped it right here. You believe me, don’t you?”
Ellis’s eyes flick sidelong to catch mine.
“It was here!”
“I believe you,” Ellis says, too slowly.
I shake my head, catch a lock of my hair, and start twisting it around my knuckles, tugging until it hurts. “Someone must have taken it,” I say. “Someone came up here, someone…”
“Who?” Ellis asks. She’s infuriatingly calm. “Who would have come into your room and stolen this book? What would anyone want with it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t—”
I shove past her, banging the door open and darting down the hall toward the stairs. Ellis is on my heels almost immediately, calling my name; I ignore her and clatter down the steps, spinning around the bottom landing fast enough the banister rattles under my grip.
I burst into the kitchen. Leonie is by the stove, an omelet sizzling in a skillet, Kajal cutting up a fresh bell pepper at the island. “Did you take it?” I demand.
Kajal puts down her knife. “Take what?”
“The book. There was a book in my room. Someone took it.”
I sense Ellis slipping into the kitchen behind me.
Kajal and Leonie glance at each other.
“I don’t think any of us would have gone into your room without your permission,” Leonie says, with a gentleness that is both surprising and irritating. It’s the same tone the nurses took with me at the facility: cautious, soft, like anything else would fracture me. Like I might get violent if they spoke too loudly.
All at once I’m aware of how this scene would look to an observer: Myself, wild-haired and hysterical at eight in the morning, demanding that someone confess to theft. Ellis, behind me, grim.
They think I’m insane. They all do.
“I’m sorry,” I gasp out, too late. “I’m sorry. I don’t…I barely slept. I…”
“It’s okay,” Leonie says, in that same too-calm tone.
I clench my teeth so hard my jaw hurts.
“Maybe a nice cup of coffee,” Ellis suggests at last, and she touches my elbow as she moves past me to the cabinet.
I stand there and stare at her back as she takes down the pour-over cups and filters, opens the ceramic box of fresh beans, and pours a tablespoonful into the grinder.
Leonie offers a hesitant smile across the island. “Do you want an omelet? We have plenty of eggs.”
I can’t speak. I’m afraid if I do, I’ll start crying and I won’t stop. So I shake my head, feeling my face crumple a beat before I escape the kitchen—back upstairs, back to my damn room with the dandelion on the floor and the scent of Alex’s perfume long since dissipated. I pace from the window to the dresser and back once, two times. It’s cold, it’s so cold.