I stayed awake. I fixed every moment in my memory as best I could. I wouldn’t forget again. I might die, but if I lived, I would remember this.
Ethan was there when they hauled me out, strapped to a backboard. He tried to talk to me but the words were all slushy. I wanted to tell him I forgave him for lying, but the EMTs got testy when I tried to talk and then they were putting me in a helicopter.
“You’ve really got to stop doing this,” one of the EMTs joked, yelling over the sound of the blades.
“Last time, I promise,” I mumbled, and he shushed me again.
And then, despite my best efforts, I faded.
Consciousness seeped back slowly, punctuated by the soft beeping of a monitor. With my eyes closed and my body cocooned in the half oblivion of morphine, I might have been eleven years old again. Except this time, my dad was there when I woke up.
“Hey, kid,” he said when he saw me open my eyes.
“Hey,” I replied weakly. It came out like a shoe scraping over asphalt. “I’m not dead.”
“Go figure,” he said.
I looked down at my right hand. Even with the thick bandages, the shape of it was obviously wrong, the last two fingers gone almost entirely, the middle finger ending at the second knuckle. “Thought I still had that one,” I said, irrationally irritated at its absence.
“The surgeon wanted a souvenir,” Dad said. I gave him a blank look, unable to process the humor. He cleared his throat. “It was damaged. They had to amputate.”
I hadn’t even noticed. “What about the rest of me?”
“I hope you didn’t have an emotional attachment to your spleen. And a sizable piece of intestine. You’re basically a soup of antibiotics and narcotics with a few chunks of meat to provide texture, but you’ll live.”
“That’s good,” I managed. I tried to wet my cracked lips, but my mouth was just as dried out. “What happened?”
“You don’t remember?”
“I mean after. Did they—is Cody—”
“He’s been arrested,” Dad said. “Even these chuckleheads have managed to put two and two together. Plus you kept saying ‘Cody Benham shot me’ over and over again.”
“That part I don’t remember,” I confessed.
“Yeah, you were pretty loopy,” Dad said. He leaned forward and patted my good hand. “Anyway. Glad you’re not dead. You, ah. Should really stop getting hurt.”
“Wasn’t planning on it,” I said. My eyelids were getting heavy.
“Naomi, I—”
I drifted. I dreamed of a gleaming snake slithering down my throat and a black-eyed woman biting down on my fingers, dull teeth grinding their way through my flesh.
I woke alone.
I had plenty of visitors. Bishop, Sawant, other cops. Dad. Even Marcus and Kimiko.
Ethan never came. I wasn’t sure if that was a disappointment or a relief.
There were loose ends to wrap up. I told my story countless times, and after the hundredth repetition or so I finally got some information in return. Marcus Barnes, as it turned out, had indeed been worried about my mental state when I left the house. Worried enough that he called around trying to find out where I was and make sure I wasn’t going to hurt myself. Bishop and Ethan were already on their way to the woods when I made the call—and a good thing, since Cody probably would have found me first, otherwise.
Cass hadn’t been lying about Cody threatening her, as it turned out. After years of her blackmail, he’d started recording their phone conversations. Including the one the day that Liv died, when she told him that he needed to come back to Chester and “deal with the situation.” Maybe she’d convinced herself there was another way it could end; maybe she’d known exactly what she was setting in motion. Either way, the result was the same. My two best friends were dead.
As news spread, other stories emerged. People she’d blackmailed came forward—or were forced to, as her life was turned inside out and evidence uncovered. Others, presumably, kept their silence and hoped their sins wouldn’t be unearthed along with hers. The Greens got a lawyer and didn’t speak to anyone. They had a small, private funeral for Cass. As strange as it was, I wished I could be there. I hadn’t gotten to say goodbye—to Cass, or to the person I’d thought she was. I couldn’t stop thinking about Amanda. She was living with her grandparents now. I’d taken her mother from her.
But then I remembered the timid way she watched the world and wondered what it had been like, to have a mother like Cassidy Green.
The day before I left the hospital, Bishop came by one more time to speak to me. They’d released Jessi Walker’s remains to her sister.
Persephone had made it out of the forest at last.
I was in the hospital for three weeks before I was well enough to be discharged, and by that time the life I’d had was gone for good.
Between the hospital bills and the fact that I couldn’t work, my savings dried up in the blink of an eye. This time around, no one was sending Get Well cards packed with cash. I couldn’t go back to weddings. I was the wrong kind of almost famous now.
So I did what Mitch had always told me to. I turned my pain into art, and I sold it. 17 opened at a gallery in Seattle the same week Cody took a plea deal, sparing me another trial. The synchronicity led to a flurry media interest, and before the show even opened I’d sold half the prints for more money than I’d ever thought possible.
Seventeen photographs, one for every scar, the broken pieces of me against the backdrop of the forest, the cracked asphalt behind the gas station, the rusted junkers in my father’s yard. Each one was like cutting myself open all over again. Each time, I healed a little cleaner.
I sent Mitch an invitation, a message scrawled on the corner. Dear Mitch: You were right, it turns out. So fuck you.
He showed up with a girl who cried when she talked to me. They were perfect together.
I wondered if Ethan would show, but he didn’t. I’d searched for his name sometimes, but he seemed to have vanished again, and I didn’t look too hard. After the gallery show I stood in front of the bathroom mirror, stripped down to my skin, and splayed my mutilated fingers under the whorl of scar tissue the bullet had left on my stomach on its way out of my body.
Eighteen, I thought. Nineteen.
But the numbers were a lie, like everything else. The cracks on my skin were too many to count.
Ten months after the second time I almost died, we were cleaning the house again. It was a lurching process, steps forward followed by frantic backsliding, but Dad was still trying.
The sun beat down, a rare day without a cloud in the sky. I tossed the trash bag I was carrying onto the pile by the front steps and peeled off my gloves. Dad was already outside, hands on hips, squinting at the old Chevy.
“I think I could get this running again,” he said as I made my way over.
“But you won’t,” I told him.
“But I won’t,” he agreed. He sighed and scrubbed at his patchy scalp. “You think we could burn it all down and start over?”
“We could do that,” I replied amiably. It was only about the thirtieth time we’d had this conversation and that he’d suggested that particular remedy. “But then you’d always wonder what you’d left buried.”
“You really think there’s anything worth saving?”
“You asking about the house, or about you?” I asked.
He snorted. “I get enough of that crap from my shrink, I don’t need it from you, too.”
Wheels crunched on gravel. I shaded my eyes with my hand. We didn’t have much in the way of visitors these days, and I didn’t recognize the car. “Expecting someone?” I asked.
“Hell, no,” Dad said.
The car parked. The door opened, and Ethan stepped out, wearing a black T-shirt and jeans.
“Should I get the shotgun?” Dad asked.
“Dad.” I gave him a look. “Maybe the baseball bat. Just in case.”
He chuckled. Ethan hadn’t moved, standing by the car with one hand on the door. I approached slowly, arms crossed.
“Hey,” he said. He’d lost weight since I last saw him, the hollows of his cheeks deeper. He was holding a little stuffed hedgehog, which he held out to me. “I got you this,” he said, not meeting my eyes. “When you were in the hospital, at the gift shop, but then I never … Anyway, it made me think of you.”
I stepped forward, just close enough to snag it with the tips of my fingers. The hedgehog was clutching a heart between its paws that said “Get Well Soon.” “It made you think of me,” I said. “Because I’m prickly?”
“No, see, I have a subtle and insightful metaphor that proves I know you deeply,” he said, rubbing the back of his head.
I raised an eyebrow. “It’s because I’m prickly.”
“It’s because you’re prickly,” he confirmed, wincing.
“You didn’t come. At the hospital. Or after,” I said. “You didn’t call. I never heard from you at all.”
“I wasn’t sure you wanted to,” he said. “The way we left things…”
“I don’t know if I would have wanted to see you, either,” I said. The question hung in the air between us—was it different now?
I didn’t know the answer to that, either. When I’d thought I was dying, I’d wanted to forgive him. Now I wasn’t sure. Anger and relief and affection and betrayal fought tooth and claw for dominance.
I shook my head. “I want it to be easy to forgive you. But it isn’t.”
“It shouldn’t be,” he said. “Things like this should never be easy. That’s how you know it’s real, if you manage it.”
I held the hedgehog in both hands, wiggling its paws idly. “Cody was my hero,” I said. “He saved me. And he turned on me. How am I supposed to trust anyone ever again?”
“That’s the thing about trust, isn’t it?” Ethan said. “You gather all the evidence you can, use your brain, weigh character and past actions. But the final inch of it—that’s faith. Trust means believing in someone. It’s not just a conclusion. It’s a choice.”
“That’s a pretty way of putting it. You know, you should be a writer or something,” I said. “Maybe start a podcast.”
He gave a dry chuckle, though it hadn’t been particularly funny. “I’m working on one, actually,” he said.
“Serial killers of the Pacific Northwest?”
He shook his head. “This one’s more personal. It’s about my father, but it’s more about me. It’s about the crimes my father committed, and the ones he didn’t, and what it means to me. I have most of it written already. There’s a big piece of it missing, though.”
“What piece is that?”
“Yours. That day changed our lives. My father might not have attacked you, but from that point on we were connected, you and I. I can’t tell the story of what didn’t happen without the story of what did. And that belongs to you. I need your help if I’m going to do this right.”
“Ethan…” I folded my arms over the hedgehog. The sun hit my eyes, giving me an excuse to look at the ground. “We only knew each other for a few days. And that whole time you were lying about who you were.”
“You’re right. You don’t actually know me, and I don’t know you. I’m not asking to be your boyfriend, Naomi. I’m not even asking to be your friend.”
“Then what do you want?” I asked.
“A trade,” he said. “A question for a question. Just the way we started. But this time, we’ll both tell the truth.”
I looked off down the road. The way it curved, you couldn’t see far before the trees swallowed everything up. Anything could be around that corner, and I could never decide if that felt like a threat or a promise.
Trust was a choice, he said. A matter of belief.
I looked back at him.
“Naomi?” he prompted.
“Ask me a question.”