I took my clothes off and got in the bath. I looked down at my body. So much of it didn’t seem to belong to me anymore. My arms, my stomach, my chest—in some perverse way they belonged more to Anthony than to me. But why? I ran my hands over my skin. Why would I think such a thing? Did Emily believe she belonged to Anthony? I let my chin slide under the water, let the water cover my lips.

Strange how things come into and out of your possession in this life. People belong to you, and then they don’t. Places, homes even, belong to you and then they don’t. Memories, too. You might have no memory of birds and trains, and then suddenly birds and trains are everywhere, wrapped up entirely in some false memory of falling in love.

I stood up and the water shed off my body in rivulets, then solitary drips. The only thing I could think of that might be mine entirely was Tuck, sitting on the bed on the other side of the locked door. I wanted to go to Tuck and tell him he belonged to me now, or ask him if he did, or find out in some other more permanent way.

I wrapped the towel around me and went into the room. I sat beside him on the bed. I took his hand. He touched my wet hair.

“Let’s just go,” I said. “Please? We can sleep in the car. I’ll take the first ferry over tomorrow.”

He nodded.

I got dressed.

He handed me the sleeping pill, and I swallowed it, and we took our bags and left the hotel.

I climbed into the passenger’s seat. But even though my eyes were closed I still saw her: Emily. And sometimes all at once she ceased to be Emily and was instead, terribly and completely and inevitably, Lucas; he was lying somewhere after a great fall, his body arranged in strange and unnatural angles, still as death. I was scared, for myself and for Lucas, now that I had an idea of what Cole was capable of—how easily he could hurt the people he claimed to love.

Chapter 29

29

I took the first ferry of the morning, leaving Tuck in Carson Cove, and walked home alone. Then I stood outside my house, afraid to walk inside. The car was parked in the garage again. I imagined the inside of the house as I’d always known it, the furniture, dishes, wallpaper. Lucas would be tying flies at his old desk in the corner of the living room. I would be there, too, reading on the couch, feet tucked under an afghan. Only, now I knew it was Cole on the couch, and I was nowhere in the picture. A great swell of grief came rolling through my chest. How easily, how completely, I could be replaced.