WHEN MADELYN FOURNIER calls me into her room that evening, I walk across the hall with the feeling of going to an execution.
I haven’t done anything wrong, I remind myself.
And that absolutely won’t matter if Madelyn decides she wants to kick me out.
“Come in,” she says at my knock. She’s sitting on the couch, her legs crossed and a cup of coffee balanced on one knee. Her hair is up in a casual bun and she wears little makeup, but it doesn’t matter—she was born for the screen, and she’d look glamorous in a cow pasture wearing flannel.
“You wanted to talk?” I ask politely.
“Have a seat, Eden.” She gestures toward the big red chairs that sit at off angles to the couch. I have to sit crookedly to face her, and fold my hands tightly in my lap. She sets her cup of tea on the small table beside her, mouth pursed. “You’ve been spending a lot of time with Delphine.”
“Isn’t that my job?” I ask. It’s the wrong note to hit.
“Delphine’s circumstances would be difficult for anyone. And she’s a very sensitive girl to begin with,” Madelyn Fournier continues, as if she hasn’t heard me. “Sometimes she acts out. It’s important at those times not to let her do anything drastic she will later regret.”
“Ms. Fournier—”
“Madelyn, please,” she interrupts.
I straighten my shoulders. “Madelyn. Delphine asked me to cut her hair. I was only doing what she asked.”
“It’s not your place to decide that sort of thing,” she says.
Anger simmers in my chest. I struggle to keep my voice steady. “I don’t think it’s my place. But it is hers,” I say. “It’s her hair.”
“Delphine has no experience of the world. She doesn’t know what she wants,” Madelyn says.
“Have you ever asked her?” I ask, startled by my own vehemence.
Madelyn is surprised as well—I see the spark of fury in her eyes and brace myself, expecting to be thrown out immediately—but she sighs. She bends forward, covering her face with both hands, and her shoulders sag.
“I’m sorry, Eden. You’re right. You only did what she asked.” She rubs a hand over her mouth, looking off toward the corner of the room. “You can’t imagine how helpless I feel. You’re supposed to make a good life for your children. You’re supposed to protect them, and you’re supposed to help them grow up and go out into the world. But the world is deadly to her. And she’s so . . . so diminished. I can’t help her. I can’t free her. All I can do is keep her safe.”
She’s right—I can’t imagine what she’s been through. The decisions she’s had to make. But Delphine? I can imagine what it’s like for Delphine.
To be alone. To be trapped. For it to feel like time has stilled, all of existence frozen in one wretched moment with no hope of it ever changing. I found my escape. Delphine hasn’t. “Aren’t there any treatments?” I ask, leaning forward in my seat.
“To treat something, you have to understand it,” she says, gesturing helplessly. “No one can offer up an explanation. Most of the doctors who have examined her have insisted that the effect is psychosomatic. That it’s all in her head. But then how is it that even when she’s under anesthesia, her heart starts to fail if we take her away from here?”
A sharp shock goes through me. She seems to realize what she said, and her head whips toward me, her jaw tensed.
“She can’t leave,” I say. The surgery she had—she wondered why they couldn’t keep her at the hospital, even protected. They rushed her back here. “That’s why you kept her enrolled. That’s why you renovated Abigail House instead of taking her home.”
“She stops breathing. Her heart stops beating. Even a few hours away, and she starts to die,” Madelyn says. Her shoulders bow inward, making her seem uncharacteristically small. “No one believes me. Not the doctors. Not my parents or my friends. I know what people say. Some of them think I’m making it up. Some of them think I’m doing it to her.” Her voice cracks at the words. She sounds defeated as she continues. “I would do anything to protect her. But nothing I do seems to matter.”
“She told me about her brother. Her twin,” I say.
Madelyn’s breath catches. She gives me a piercing look.
“I can’t imagine how hard that was. Losing one of your babies. How scary it has to be thinking that it might happen again.”
“Yes,” she says haltingly. “Yes, the fear of losing a child is a terrible thing.” She looks like she wants to say something more, but she only looks away, touching a knuckle lightly to her lips.
I want to ask her about the Drowning Girl and about Aubrey and the Narrow and all the rest, but I hear the fragility in her voice. If I push, she’ll realize she shouldn’t be talking to me at all. “You’ve done everything you can,” I say instead. “You’ve kept her safe this long.”
“At what cost?” she asks. Then she shakes her head a little, as if to clear it. “I’m sorry for giving you a hard time about the hair. It’s between me and Delphine to talk about—we shouldn’t be dragging you into our mother-daughter quarrels. Just, maybe next time she asks you to pierce her belly button or something, tell me first?” She picks up her coffee and sips it, her cheerful armor sliding back into place.
“Of course,” I say. An easy promise to make, and an easier one to break. “I’m sorry, I’m supposed to be meeting my friends.”
“Oh, go on! Don’t let me keep you,” she says. Too loud and too bright. She’s regretting telling me as much as she did.
Everyone is keeping secrets.
There is something wrong with the light outside. A thin crust of gray clouds covers the sky, and the light has an odd silver haze to it that makes everyone seem like they’re moving too suddenly, unevenly.
All I want to do is curl up by myself, but I promised Veronica I would meet everyone at Westmore. She apologized. She’s trying. I should try, too.
Normally, I’m the quietest member of the group during hangouts. Even Zoya opens up when she’s around the three of us, but I prefer to listen. Veronica has always teases that I’m like a puppet-master villain in one of Zoya’s books, gathering up secrets until I usurp the throne unexpectedly in the finale.
The silence helps me keep my secrets, but more than that, I’ve always liked listening to my friends talk about their lives. Different problems than my own. Different joys.
Tonight, despite my best efforts, I can barely focus on their words, and that hideous, corrosive resentment eats away at me. They can just be here in this room; I’m here, but I’m also in the pool house, Dylan’s arm over my shoulder, and no matter how hard I focus on now, I look over my shoulder and there it is in perfect detail.
And tonight, they aren’t content to let me stay quiet. It’s infuriatingly obvious that Veronica talked to them, and all three are intent on drawing me out with questions they’ve clearly prepared and divvied up ahead of time. By the time I finally escape, I’ve been bombarded with tiny inquiries about my day and my opinions and my plans for the week.
They’re trying to be good friends, I tell myself. So am I. We’re all sucking at it.
“Want an escort?” Ruth asks when I get up to go. Technically, it’s already a few minutes past senior curfew, but as long as I’m heading in the direction I’m supposed to be, I know no one will give me trouble over it.
“To protect me from all those Atwood muggers?” I ask.
“Or damp ghosts,” Ruth suggests laughingly.
I stare at her. Then at Veronica, who blanches. Ruth’s face falls. “You told them?” I ask. I hadn’t told her to keep it to herself, but I’d assumed she understood how personal it was.
“Eden—” she says.
“What? I mean, I realize you’re spooked, but it’s not like ghosts are real,” Ruth says. “It’s just a fun story, right?” She looks between us.
Zoya shrinks against the couch cushions, eyes on her lap.
“Let us walk you back,” Veronica says.
I shake my head angrily. “I’ll take my chances.”
No one follows me as I stomp out of Westmore. The campus is blessedly quiet this time of night. Dark and empty. Sunset gets earlier quickly this far north, and twilight has given way thoroughly to true night. The old-fashioned streetlamps dotted around campus are enough to see where you’re going, but it’s a far cry from the constant illumination of the city.
I pass another senior hustling to his dorm as I leave Westmore, but as I get closer to Abigail House, it’s like the rest of the campus ceases to exist. As if I’m the only living soul outside. I pick up the pace, regretting my decision to stay out after dark.
The rain is no more than a single drop. A cold point of impact against the back of my hand. And then another, catching me right at the curve between my shoulder and my neck.
I’ve walked through rain and darkness countless times before, and nothing has happened to me. As long as I towel off thoroughly inside, everything will be fine.
A footstep scrapes behind me, trampled leaves crackling underfoot.
Just my imagination.
I don’t look back. If I look back, it might be real. I walk briskly, refusing to run. The rain keeps up, so light I wouldn’t notice it under normal circumstances.
The footsteps continue. One steady step. One that scrapes along the ground.
Then another sound. Liquid. Gurgling. Guh, guh, guh.
I walk faster. It doesn’t matter. The steps are always right behind me.
I need to get in. Get dry. Don’t let it in.
If I keep the water out, I’ll be safe. She can’t follow.
I’m at the door. My hands are shaking. I can’t remember the code. The footsteps are coming up behind me and so is the drip of water, too steady to be the sporadic rain.
Behind me. Right behind me. I punch in the code, the light blinks green, I turn the handle. And I stop.
If I go in, I will be safe.
And I might never answer the questions that have been haunting me. That frightens me far more than any ghost.
It is silent. No more footsteps. No more choking.
I have to know. I have to see.
I turn slowly, my heart beating so fast I think my sternum will crack.
The Drowning Girl stands before me, just out of arm’s reach. Her hair hangs dark and wet and ragged around her shoulders. Her skin is mottled with bruises. I have imagined her all this time in a white dress, plucked out of a dozen horror movies, but she’s wearing jeans and a blue tank top, one strap torn, the bra beneath black and lacy. Water flows over her lips. A blood vessel in the white of one eye has burst, leaving a splotch of crimson floating beside her iris, and behind her, blood flows into the air as if into water, dissipating in the dark.
In the darkness of my room, I couldn’t see her face. But now, as my body floods with terror, I see the sharp jaw, the wide mouth, the dark intensity of her eyes.
This is not Grace Carpenter.
“Guh—guh—” she says, each syllable coughing up filthy water from her lungs. One battered hand reaches for me, the fingers crooked and broken. I should be terrified—and I am—but there is no threat in that reaching hand, only a desperate plea, and I hold my ground.
She staggers toward me a step. Everything in me screams to run, but I hold still. Her broken fingers brush against my cheek, leaving cold trails of water across my skin. There’s a sudden pop at the back of my head, like a firecracker going off, and a burst of pain at my lip. As I cry out, she draws in a gurgling, gasping breath. She blinks, and the milky lacerations across her sclera clear, her pupils suddenly focusing.
“Grace,” she chokes out. And then she seems to lose her balance and fall against me—
And I catch her. Hold her up. Her skin is cold but solid beneath my hands. Her bones move oddly. Broken. But she has substance— a strange substance that seems half a dream.
Her hand flattens against my chest. Over my swift-beating heart. She looks up at me. Her breath still gurgles in her throat, but when she speaks, I understand the words. “Grace? Where have you been?” she asks.
I look at her in baffled horror. “I’m not Grace. I’m not her,” I say, but she doesn’t seem to understand. Her hand steals up behind my neck, and her eyes search mine frantically.
“You weren’t there. I couldn’t find you,” she babbles.
“I’m not Grace,” I say desperately. “My name is Eden White.”
“Not Grace,” she says, and then she wails. She falls back, clutching at her hair, and her whole outline shudders—images superimposed over each other. Drowning, screaming, staring at me with empty eyes.
“Where is Grace?” she yells, lunging toward me. I fall back against the door with a shriek of my own, but there’s nowhere to run. She’s right in front of me, and the rush of water roars around us. “You can’t keep her away from me. I won’t let you.”
Her hand closes around my arm. Pain shoots through it, sudden and brutal, and at last I scream.
“I don’t know where she is! I didn’t do anything!” I cry out, the agony like a knife through my arm. “I’m not who you think I am. Please. I’m just a girl—I’m just Eden—please—” Nonsense tumbles from my mouth, pleas and prayers, and I brace myself for her fury.
But she only lets out a sob. Her grip releases, and her hand, shaking, fluttery, goes to my cheek. She shakes her head rapidly. “I’m sorry. It’s so hard to think—it’s so hard down here in the dark—in the deep—the dark crushes you down and it doesn’t want to let you go. I’ve been down there so long and I can’t—I can’t—” She moans, her eyes rolling back. Then she snaps back to focus on me. “Please. I need to find her. Tell me you’ll help me, please.”
“I’ll help you,” I whisper.
She lets out a cry of relief. Her outline wavers.
“Wait,” I say. “What’s your name? Who are you?”
For an instant, her eyes meet mine, her outline steadying. “Maeve. My name is Maeve,” she says.
And then she is gone.
I stand alone in the dark, and there is no sign that she was ever there except for the cold water trickling down my face.