A hand lands on my shoulder, making that a lie. I wrench myself away and something painful tears its way from my throat. I look up at Graham Remington and he’s not staring at me—he’s staring at the gun in my hand. And in that moment I don’t see him or the way he doesn’t resemble his father or his brother.
I see every way that he does.
I tremble, my teeth chattering, and I can’t stop making that sound, a scream that swells up deep and guttural and warlike from the darkest part of me—the part of me that’s still trapped in that nightmare of a house and always will be.
“Adina…，” he starts, hands held up in surrender.
“No,” I snarl, scrambling back. “Don’t… don’t touch me. Don’t fucking touch me!”
“Adina, please—”
“ADINA!”
That voice. It makes me drop the gun in the grass and turn, my ankle rolling painfully underneath me.
There’s a familiar BMW driving up the long driveway.
The car screeches to a stop and then, and then—
“Toni!” I cry out, and I’m crawling toward her. It takes me a second to realize she’s not alone. I don’t scream her name, but when I see her climbing out of the passenger seat, alive and whole, it feels like a miracle. Saint.
Toni fights her way out of the car too and then she’s running to me. I blink, and then Toni and Saint are kneeling in front of me, throwing their arms around me, reeling me in tight, while Graham backs away. I press my face into their neck—familiar and perfect and safe and real—and I weep.
“I’m here,” Toni promises.
She’s here, I think.
And then it hits me—I am too. I’m still here.
EPILOGUE
I WAKE UP WITH A start to the smell of bacon and coffee. As I’ve had to for the past three weeks, I have to take a moment to remind myself of where I am.
I catalog my room—the old Super 8, my white armoire, waxy photos of Toni and me. All of it is mine. Sitting up in my bed, I turn over my phone—it’s new, I never found where Leighton had tucked away mine—and look down at the lock screen. There’s a message from Mom, promising that they’ll be back soon, which answers who’s downstairs.
There are about ten text messages telling me their ETA back to the house while they run their errands. They’re still anxious about leaving me. My parents talk about pressing charges. But in my mind, there is no one really left to press charges against.
My parents talk about therapy. But I think about Leighton when I hear the word.
When I think about Leighton, I think about the Remingtons. And then when I dream, I find myself back at the Remington Estate.
The bruises have begun to go away over the past couple of weeks. The nightmares don’t. They get worse.
I tear away my blankets and slip out of bed. I trudge downstairs, rubbing at my eyes and tugging on the ends of my braids.
“Can you rebraid my hair today, Toni?” I ask, in lieu of a greeting.
“Good morning, Adina,” Toni says with a wide smile, standing by the stove top. I didn’t know she could cook. “Your parents said good morning too. They tried to wake you before they left, but you were out. They let me in.”
“Where’d they go?” I ask, eyes flitting around to the window, the front door, the back door, checking twice that each one is closed before I finally ease into a seat at the kitchen table. I look down to find a stack of mail.
“Supermarket, but I’m sure they’ll be back soon.” Toni flips the bacon with a flick of her wrist. The edges are burnt—so not much has changed while I was gone. Except me. “I can rebraid your hair after breakfast. Are you sure you don’t want to do anything different? We can pick up one of my wigs from the house. Or I can do twists? You can take them out in a few days.”
“No, not yet,” I say, sharper than I should, leaning back in my chair, staring up at the ceiling.
“Charles… Charles said to say hi,” Toni says after a deep breath. She still hesitates on her brother’s name, left over from her fury at how it took him twelve hours to decide to tell her what he had seen at the Remington Estate. She’ll forgive him eventually—I already have.
When I got settled in her house, I waited for their explanation. Saint was businesslike in her recounting—it was dark, their shots had missed, she wasn’t afraid of diving through the mud, and they must have been too terrified to tell the Remingtons she had gotten away. She had run as long and hard as she could until she’d reached the main road. From there, she had walked and walked, until she’d gotten to a gas station and an attendant had lent her his phone. Being rich pays, and from there it hadn’t been hard to find out who Charles—and by association Toni—were and where they lived.
As Saint talked and Toni tended to my wounds, Charles lingered worriedly in the doorway, asking if I was okay, then wanting to know what’d happened, why Pierce wasn’t picking up his phone, why no one was picking up the phone. Saint nearly bullied him away, until I looked up at him and said, “Hi, Charles. Thank you.” I’d sounded like myself in that moment, apparently.
“Good for him,” I say. Then I sigh. “Tell Charles I said hi.”
“The… funeral was this morning,” Toni says hesitantly, wringing her hands.
Three weeks to the day. A strangely long time.
I don’t say anything for a moment. And then: “Who went?”
“It was really private. For once, no one wants anything to do with the Remingtons. Charles said the police showed up to the estate and, like, not Lenox police. State police. And the Feds,” Toni explains. “Charles said their mom was there, though. She’s distraught.”
“You didn’t go with him?” I ask.
“Fuck those people,” Toni says coldly, and even now, after everything, it surprises me how people can switch on a dime, how underneath the fa?ade of kindliness, there’s always something lurking. “Penthesilea didn’t go either, apparently. She’s free while they investigate or whatever. Her doctor said she could’ve gone for ‘closure,’ and she laughed in his face.”
“And Hawthorne?”
Toni’s expression falls. “Still not awake. The infection was pretty bad.” She shifts uncomfortably. “Charles told me that there was a lot of media waiting outside, though. They were… asking about the Finish. And the other girls.”
The dead ones.
I hear the click of the front door unlocking, and I stand up suddenly enough that I have to fumble to catch the chair before it tumbles to the floor.
“We’re home,” Mom sings as she walks down the hall. “Hey, get this bag for me, babe. Oh, you’re awake! Good.”
Mom tries to be cheerful. She’s always attempting to be cheerful, but she’s stiff in it. There’s always a strain to her throat. It’s mostly because of what I’ve gone through, but I know that there’s also some due to her quitting her tenured job at Edgewater because of me. For me. That, I don’t feel guilty for. I don’t think she would want me to.
“I’m awake,” I say. Very carefully, I sit back down, spreading my hands wide over the kitchen table, attempting to ignore my father’s very worried stare. He never hides his worry.