He holds very still while she cries, making his breath slow and even, as if he is trying to pet Baast without being bitten. After a while, Opal says, somewhat incoherently, “I read the letter. I’m sorry.”
Arthur doesn’t know which letter she could mean, but he says, “That’s alright,” in case there’s still a chance of being bitten.
“The one from your mother. I stole it. I tried to put it back, but then Jasper found the second half . . .”
Arthur was already still, but he feels himself calcifying. It simply isn’t possible that he would have left either half of that letter lying carelessly among his other notes, no matter how drunk or dissolute he’d been. Which means the House had taken matters into its own metaphorical hands.
Arthur briefly imagines shoving gum in all the light sockets, or perhaps breaking all the windows on the third floor, before he remembers that he won’t have time.
He clears his throat and produces a feeble “Oh.”
Opal has peeled her face off his chest. “I’m sorry. I know it was wrong.” She pauses. “It was beautiful, though.” She pauses again, seeming to pull the next words from some hard place inside herself. “It made me so damn jealous.”
“Why?”
A fresh sheen of tears turns her eyes into shards of mirror. “Because like—at least she said goodbye. At least she tried to do right by you.” But it’s not jealousy in her voice; it’s just grief.
Arthur asks, “What was she like?”
Opal exhales. “A fucking mess. A natural disaster wearing Daisy Dukes.” She smiles, and God, Arthur is going to miss that sharp twist at the corner of her mouth, that edge that never quite dulls. “I don’t know. I guess she was trying, too.”
They’re quiet for a little while after that. Arthur lies on his back and she fits herself easily into the crook of his arm, her arm resting in the dip of his sternum. He feels it rise and fall as he breathes. He pictures the two of them as children, separated by a handful of years and a couple of miles. Both of them lonely, both of them bound to a place that didn’t want them. Both of them bent beneath the weight of what their parents left behind: a baby brother, a house, a battle that never ends.
“Arthur . . . why did you stay? She said you didn’t have to.”
Her hair is silver in the dark. He wraps a curl around his finger. “Why didn’t you hand Jasper to the state and run away?”
“Maybe I will. Run, I mean.”
“No, you won’t.” Jasper had been right. “And neither will I.”
And maybe it’s this that makes them truly and terribly alike, this refusal to run, this mad urge to dig their nails into the dirt and stay. None of the other Gravelys had risked it, but Opal had.
She makes a small sound beside him, and Arthur notices that his fingers have curled into a fist, tugging her hair. Her head tilts up to his and this time she does not flinch when his lips touch hers.
This time he holds himself over her, looking into the ravenous black of her eyes. This time she slides her wrists beneath his palms and whispers: don’t let go. He doesn’t, even when she twists and cries out, even when she sets her teeth to his throat. He can feel the trembling in her, the fear of her own appetites, and wants to tell her so many things: that there’s nothing to be afraid of, that he will take care of her, that he’ll hold her and never, ever let go. But he was never a good liar. So he doesn’t say anything except her name, at the end.
This time when she falls asleep against him, it feels like trust. This time, he follows her.
Arthur dreams, and this time he isn’t sure whether they belong to him, or to the House. It’s a series of small, ordinary scenes: a pair of mugs side by side in the sink; a voice humming a song he doesn’t know, just around the corner; hair spilling across his pillow like poppy petals. A life that isn’t lonely, a house that isn’t haunted.
Arthur wakes with a sharp pain in his chest, because he knows he’ll never have any of those things.
Because the mist is rising, and he’s out of time.
TWENTY-SEVEN
I’m not dreaming; I’m remembering.
I remember the water, the terror, the glove box spilling into my lap, the riverbank, the mud beneath my nails, the cold. I remember the feeling of arms around me, but this time I remember more: a rib cage pressed against my back and a boy’s desperate voice saying “Shit, shit, I’m sorry” over and over. The glare of headlights and the sudden chill at my back when the boy left.