The thought of being alone with Ben in his house on the hill—where he knew all escape routes, where there’d be no one around to hear me if I screamed—made the hair on my arms stand on end. Even through my coat, I could feel the goose bumps swelling on my skin.
“No,” I told him. “How could you ever even prove that?”
I shivered, the cold air wrapping around me as I stood on the curb, and I shifted my eyes toward Tommy’s trailer. I had a feeling he was watching us, his gaze like an icy hand against my cheek, but when I glanced over Ben’s shoulder at the windows, the curtains remained undisturbed.
“It’s in a letter,” Ben said. “But you’ll have to read it yourself, or you won’t believe me.”
“A letter from who?”
He paused. “From Persephone.”
My breath snagged on the back of my throat. A letter from Persephone?
After she died, I tried so hard to resurrect her voice, scouring my room for notes she’d once written me. All I managed to find, though, were my two most recent birthday cards from her—one still on my desk, where it had been propped since October, and one I’d tossed into a drawer. The font of the words inside each card was so distinctly hers, and I stared at the series of too-short paragraphs, memorizing the curves of each letter. A couple days later, when the detectives returned and asked for samples of Persephone’s handwriting, I was reluctant to hand the cards over, even though Falley and Parker had assured me they’d return them.
As Ben and I stood in front of Tommy’s trailer, I remembered that moment—“We just need our guy to examine them,” they told me, the only explanation they offered—and I found myself staring at Ben’s face, my lips slightly parted. When I’d spoken to Falley and Parker over the last week, they’d both said that evidence had emerged that led them to not press assault charges against Ben. Was it possible that this “proof” Ben wanted to show me was the evidence that neither of them had been willing to discuss with me? And if that evidence was a letter from Persephone, wouldn’t they have needed something, all those years ago, to verify its authenticity?
“Did they—” I tried. “Did the police ever do, like, a handwriting analysis of this letter you’re talking about?”
Ben cocked his head to the side. “You knew about that?”
“No, I . . .” Despite the cold, my palms felt sweaty. “The detectives—they asked me for samples of Persephone’s handwriting once. But they never said why.”
“Oh,” Ben said. “Yeah, this was why. I showed them the letter—to explain about the bruises—and they had to make sure I didn’t forge it.”
My eyes widened, my breath shaky between my lips. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll do it. I’ll go back to your house and read Persephone’s letter.”
• • •
The Emorys’ driveway was steep, flanked on either side by evergreens that stood in lines like soldiers on guard. It could have been the shade those trees provided, or the fact that the afternoon was quickly slipping toward evening, but I could have sworn that everything grew darker the higher I drove up the hill.
I followed Ben’s car past the main house, that brick monstrosity I’d never seen up close before, and I tasted something bitter on the back of my tongue. Will Emory, the man who had so thoroughly unraveled my mother, could have easily been inside there somewhere, drinking a cup of coffee or scrolling through his tablet, completely indifferent to the pain he’d caused—not only to Mom, but to all the other women whose hearts he’d unstitched throughout the years.
A couple hundred feet past the mansion, Ben veered off into a circular driveway and pulled up in front of a small cottage that looked remarkably different from the main house. The guesthouse, as he’d called it, had immaculate white siding and pale blue shutters. For a moment, the setting sun winked through the trees and glazed the house with a glow resembling candlelight.
I parked behind Ben, leaving a few feet of space between our cars in case I needed to leave quickly. When I stepped outside, my muscles stiffened against the cold. My breath flared out before me, frosting the air, and I saw that Ben was already at the front door of the cottage.
“Thank you for coming,” he said, as if I were a guest at a party he was throwing. He opened the door and crossed the threshold. “I know this was a lot to ask.”
He gestured for me to come inside, and if it weren’t for the heat I could feel from within the house, I might have paused a bit longer before following him in. As he closed the door behind me, my eyes swept across the house. There was a bedroom to our left through a set of French doors, a dining room to our right, and in front of us a hallway that led to a shiny white kitchen. Off of the kitchen there were two closed doors—a bathroom, I supposed, and maybe a closet as well—but from where I stood, I couldn’t see an exit other than the door I’d just come through.
“It’s not much,” Ben said, seeming to notice that I was studying the layout. “And actually, most of it’s a dumping ground for stuff my dad doesn’t want in the main house anymore. But I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I like it.”
I turned to him, my gaze as sharp as I could manage. “So where’s the letter?”
“Right,” he said. “In here.”
He opened one of the paneled glass doors to our left and stepped into his bedroom, flicking on the light switch as he moved toward a dresser in the corner. I followed him in but stayed near the doorway, my eyes creeping over his navy comforter, the silver laptop on his nightstand, the retainer box propped against an alarm clock. In front of the window overlooking the driveway, there was a cluttered desk holding up stacks of textbooks, and the back of its chair was draped with clothes.
“Sorry about the mess,” Ben said as he bent down to open the bottom dresser drawer. “This is actually supposed to be the living room, you know. But I like the French doors.” He chuckled. “My dad says I’m compromising the integrity of the guesthouse—his exact words, by the way—because I don’t have a real living room and I’m just using the back bedroom for storage.”
He pulled a shoebox out of the drawer, and as he straightened back up, he held it as if its contents were fragile. “I don’t know why I felt the need to tell you that,” he said, looking at me. “I think I’m just nervous.”
“Why?” I asked, crossing my arms as I watched him sit down on the edge of the bed. He removed the lid from the box, and I could see that there were folded pieces of paper inside.
“Because . . .” he started, his voice sounding farther away than just the few feet of space between us. “It’s been a long time since I’ve looked at any of her letters. We, um, we couldn’t call each other back then, because your mom didn’t—well, you know.”
He dug through the contents of the box until he found what he was looking for, a crisply folded sheet of paper that seemed a brighter white than the rest.
“We wrote each other these letters so we could have them when we were apart,” he continued. “And this one in particular . . .” He held it up to show me, waving it in the air before unfolding it. “This is the one I gave to the police. It’s not even the original—they still have that, I think—but they let me keep a copy after they confirmed it was real.”
The paper was splayed open in his hands now. I could see Persephone’s handwriting, and it took everything I had to blink away the sudden stinging in my eyes. Ben stared at the letter, his eyes flicking back and forth across the page.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Sorry, I’m just reading it.” He turned the paper over, and after a few more seconds, he straightened his back and looked at me. “Maybe this was a bad idea.”
“Why?” I snapped, taking a step forward. “Doesn’t paint you as innocently as you remembered?” I reached for the letter, but he leaned back and held it flat against his chest.
“No,” he said. “That’s not it.”
Again, I tried to grab it, but he stopped me, curling his fingers around my wrist—not tightly, not aggressively, but the insistence in his touch froze me just the same.
“Sylvie, stop. Just wait.”
I jerked my hand out of his grasp and crossed my arms again. He turned the paper over. I waited for what felt like a minute, but just as I leaned forward, ready to try once more to pluck it from his hands, Ben straightened his arm and held out the letter.
“Here,” he said. “Just—remember how young she was when she wrote this, okay? She was only a teenager, and I’m sure you remember how teenagers can be.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, snatching the letter.
The second I saw her words and her writing up close, I was transfixed, a white noise humming in my ears.
Ben, Persephone wrote, and I could hear his name almost as clearly as nights when she whispered it into the darkness of our room.
Ben,
I’m writing this in fifth period because Mrs. Keller is clueless and I’m never gonna get stoichiometry. I wish I were with you right now. I know I’m seeing you tonight, but that feels like years away.
I’ve been thinking about what you said the other night, and I want you to know that I love you for worrying about me, but you don’t have to. I love our routine. I wouldn’t ask you to keep going or to hold me harder if I didn’t. I love that I can still see your fingers on my skin when I get home, and I love how much it helps me. Because it does. It really does. Sometimes I feel like I’m going to explode with all the anger and pain that’s thrashing around inside me, but then I have your hands.
Some girls cut, you know. I’ve seen the scars on their thighs when we change for gym, and I’ve been to enough health classes to get the reasons why they do it. I know it’s kind of the same as what we do, but at least the bruises are temporary. Those ugly scars will be on those girls for life.
Anyway, it’s like this: in the moment, I can concentrate on the physical pain of you holding me, and somehow, that allows me to forget the real pain, the deeper one. Then, later, I have your fingerprints on my skin. Even after I cover them up, I know that they’re there as a reminder of your love. They let me know that I’m actually not unloved, even though I am unloved by the person who’s supposed to love me most.
She was at it again this morning. We were eating breakfast and I tried to tell her about the B+ on my English paper (thanks again for helping!), but she just ran her hands through my sister’s hair and said, “That’s nothing. Sylvie got a perfect score on her science test.” She was looking at my sister like she couldn’t believe her luck that she was the mother of the most perfect human being on earth and I swear I had to stop eating, it was that disgusting.
I know I should just accept that this is how she is, but it really hurt me that she said that. You saw how much work I put into that paper. I actually read the book this time! But she told me “that’s nothing.” I mean, who says that to their daughter?? And my stupid sister just sat there smiling at my mom like that’s a totally normal thing to say. I get that she’s just a kid, but it makes me so mad how she just goes along with every cruel thing my mother says to me and she always defends her. It’s such a betrayal. I bet if I brought it up to her tonight, Sylvie would say, “She didn’t mean it like that.” But how else could she have meant it??
Anyway, I’m rambling. My point is this: all that stuff with my shitty mother and my little sister, it all just . . . dissipates (damn straight that’s an SAT word!) whenever your arms are around me and you’re pressing my skin to the bone. Plus, it helps you too with everything you’re going through, that’s what you’ve said. And I want to help you. I want to be there for you the same way you’re there for me.
I have to go now. The bell’s gonna ring soon. I can’t wait to see you tonight. (But I guess by the time you read this, I’ll have already seen you! Lucky me!)
Loving you endlessly,
Persephone
I stared at the curves of her name, the way the end of the e looped back up and around to cross over the h. It was my sister’s signature, distinct as a fingerprint, and it was scrawled on a letter that had called me her betrayer.
But what, exactly, was the betrayal? My love for my mother? My determination, as a young girl, to see only the best in her? If that was it, then what had she thought of the locked window? What was the word for something stronger than betrayal?
And had she been that bad, our mother? I didn’t remember the moment she mentioned in the letter, but I trusted it was true. The flippancy in saying “That’s nothing” to a daughter offering her something—a chance to connect over an accomplishment that should be celebrated together—felt like the mother I knew now. Was it possible, then, that she’d always been so harsh and dismissive, and I simply hadn’t seen it?
Sometimes, Persephone would say to me, it’s like you and I have two different mothers. But we didn’t. We had one mother, one woman who had birthed us both. Maybe it was just the two of us who’d been different—one who saw her clearly, and one who saw her impossibly, as a garden constantly in bloom.
She didn’t mean it like that. Those were the words that Persephone had imagined I’d say, and they rang true to me, too. I was always thinking of Persephone as having a darkness inside her that kept her from absorbing Mom’s light. How ferociously she’d swiped her hand across the constellation I’d made of her, how thunderously her words could roar across our house as she and Mom shouted at each other. But what if it had always been Mom’s darkness, to begin with, that had slid like a cloud over Persephone, denying her a view of the sun and other stars, blacking out what she should have always been surest of—that she was worthy, that she was loved?
And when I said those things—She didn’t mean it like that and a thousand other excuses—did she see that as me taking sides? When she tried to open the window that final night and found it wouldn’t budge, did it confirm for her a suspicion that I, too, didn’t love her? When she marched back to Ben’s car, was she not just furious with me, as I’d always thought, but also deeply wounded?
It all just dissipated, she’d written—all that pain and rejection, from Mom, from me—when Ben’s arms were around her, when he pressed her skin to bone. I shook my head, standing in the room of the man who’d held her and hurt her, and I tried to will away the dizziness that was whirling right through me.
“Are you okay?” I heard Ben ask.
When I blinked my eyes away from the letter, I saw that he was still sitting on the edge of his bed, his face as blank as a clean sheet of paper.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
Ben closed his eyes and nodded. “I know,” he said. “That’s why I was having second thoughts about showing it to you. It wasn’t your fault, though. You know that, right?”
I had a breath of hesitation, and then I squinted until my eyes were slits that I could barely see him through. “What wasn’t my fault?”
“The whole situation,” he said. “The bruises and all that.”
“Obviously it wasn’t my fault,” I snapped. “It was your fault.”
Ben cocked his head to the side, his brow furrowing. “I know, but I just mean—did you read the whole thing?” he asked. “The part where she—”
“Are you being serious?” I cut him off. “Let me get this straight. She had the impulse to self-harm, but instead of actually doing it herself, she wanted you to do it—and you did—and that’s supposed to prove that you’re innocent? That’s supposed to make it all okay? What happened exactly? Did she say, ‘I’m thinking of cutting,’ and then you said, ‘Wait, let me just give you all these bruises instead’?”
“No,” Ben protested. “No, it wasn’t like that. It was an accident, at first.”
“An accident,” I repeated. “You just accidentally held on to her so hard that she bruised?”
“Well . . .” He flipped over his palms so they faced the ceiling and he stared into them. “Kind of,” he said. Then, rushing into the next sentence, he looked at me and added, “But it was complicated.”
“I’m sure,” I said, crossing my arms.
“No, really, it was. I don’t know where to start to try to explain it.”
“The beginning usually works.”
“Yeah, but the beginning,” he said. “I don’t even know where that is.” He shook his head. “Listen. Long story short, I was really messed up at the time. I was—”
“Drunk?” I demanded. “On drugs?”
“No,” he said. “Not that kind of messed up. I was emotionally messed up, I guess. Things had been happening, and I was crying one night. And not just crying, but, like, all-out uncontrollably sobbing. And Persephone was trying to comfort me. She pulled me into her arms and I held on to her, and I was gripping her so hard, just bawling into her neck, and . . . I didn’t even know about the bruises until I saw them on her the next day. I apologized a million times, I felt so terrible, but she said no, she liked it. She said she wanted to do it again. She said we could help each other.”
He looked at me, his eyes locking me into their magnetic darkness. “I was in so much pain,” he said, “that I actually agreed to it. And then it just became this ritual. Every time we saw each other, we’d—I don’t know—share our pain, I guess.”
My throat contracted, my breath quickening. The shame in his eyes was so palpable I had to turn my gaze away. I even wondered how my own eyes looked, the word betrayal staring unblinkingly up at me from the letter still clutched in my hand.
“I just,” he continued. “I loved the way it felt, you know? Holding on to something so tightly that you know it can’t leave you. I don’t know if you’ve ever felt that kind of desperation to keep something you love before, to make sure it will always stay with you, but it’s a powerful feeling, and it made it easier for me to convince myself that we really were just helping each other.”
He cleared his throat, and when I glanced back at him, he was looking just past me, his eyes focused on the gathering darkness outside the window.
“I know now,” he said, “that it was fucked up. I’ve known that for a long time. What we did back then, it was unhealthy. It was wrong. Even if we both thought we wanted it, thought it was healing us, it was actually damaging. But I didn’t get that then. I couldn’t see beyond my grief. I was just so grateful.”
His fingers trembled, the tips of them flickering like flames.
“I mean, here was a girl I loved,” he continued, “who was willing to bear my pain.” He scratched his cheek with his shaking fingers. “She shouldn’t have had to, though, no matter what she said. I know that. I know that.”
Then he met my eyes again with a look so pained and penetrating it felt like a hand reaching between my ribs and grabbing onto my heart. “I know that, Sylvie. I know it now and I’ve known it for a while, but by the time I did it was too late. I—God, I fucking . . .”
He stood up and walked toward the French doors, placing his hand on one of them before glancing back at me. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I need to—” His gaze darted around the room. “I’ll be right back.”
He disappeared down the hallway, and in a few moments, I heard a door open and close. Then there was only silence.
I looked at the letter, the words blurred together, and I let the confusion wash over me, disorienting as waves that crash and pull against a body at sea. Listening to Ben, watching the weight of memory drag him down, my anger toward him had quickly melted into—something else, though I had no idea what to call it. Pity? That didn’t seem right. Understanding? No, that wasn’t it either; there was still so much I didn’t understand. But that look in his eyes when he’d spoken of his pain, his regret—I knew it, I recognized it, I’d seen it countless times in mirrors, in pictures, in self-portraits I was assigned in college.
“Your eyes seem so sad here,” my professor once said, evaluating my work. Then I’d looked at the painting and found what I’d just seen in Ben—the ache in him throbbing, as if the air he was breathing was something he didn’t believe he deserved.
And then, standing alone in his bedroom, not even sure if he was coming back, I knew what I was feeling, what had swooped in so suddenly to replace my anger.
It was belief. Simple, unguarded, lightweight belief.
He had loved her and he had bruised her. He had stained her skin with his pain, and she had let him—encouraged him, even. He had believed her when she said he was helping her, that Persephone could exchange her own pain for another, and when he finally stopped believing it, it was too late. There was nobody to hear his apologies, nobody to forgive him, nobody to bear his grief or love.
So strange to even think it, but I believed him. I did. I did. I believed that you could love someone so much, and still, you could hurt them. I believed that a heart could pound with pain and love at exactly the same time.