Margot put her head down, burying her face into her knees and hiding beneath her hair. The headache was still only lapping at the edges of her mind, but it was growing worse with each minute.
She wondered how long she could hold out against it. Painkillers could only prevent so much. Would she wait until she wept from the pain? Until she couldn’t stand, couldn’t speak?
Would she, like the unnamed employees, hold out until it claimed everything there was to take from her?
It throbbed again, slightly harder. Not enough to really hurt, but a warning.
“I don’t want to do this,” she managed.
She wasn’t sure if Kant could hear her words across the road, but he replied, regardless, “I’ll help you.”
She didn’t answer but sat for a long while, letting the new knowledge move through her in increments. How the darker side of the estate had fascinated her as a child. Her parents putting together the puppet show video tape to teach her to stay off the land at night. How not even a chest covered in scars had been enough to deter her.
“For most of my life, I thought my parents sent me away because they didn’t want me,” she said at last.
“Your parents cared for you deeply.” Kant’s voice was so soft she could barely make out the words. “And they missed you more than I think even they imaged they could.”
She pressed the back of her hand to her eyes, wiping tears away before they could fall. The pain her parents had gone through—all the grief and loneliness they’d endured—had been for nothing. She’d ended up back at Gallows Hill after all. And the hill had still marked her.
No. Maybe it wasn’t for nothing.
She’d had a life. Friends. An apartment to call her own, a job. Freedom to visit museums and the beach and the theater.
Her parents had given her a gift and she hadn’t even recognized it: the gift of a normal life. Of freedom. At least for a few years.
Maybe I’m the reason the curse has been more dangerous lately. Maybe it knew it was missing one of its family. Maybe my parents lost their lives because I wasn’t here.
That was a bitter, uncomfortable thought. Margot lifted her head, breathing too fast.
Kant gave her all the time she needed: he, resting against the fence, calm and patient, Margot hunched over in the long grass by the side of the road, weighing up her options as the headache gradually spread across the top of her head and into her eyes.
“Okay,” she said at last, and the word felt like it was killing something inside of her. “Let’s go back.”