I STAGGER INSIDE shaking. Peel off my clothes. Turn on the shower full blast. I let the water sluice over me—clean, filtered, distilled. Stripped of anything that might hurt me.
My skin is stippled with bruises. The marks of fingers on my arm, bruises on my knees, on my shoulder. Familiar shapes long faded, now returned like stains on my skin. My fingertips prod at my spine and find the tender spot that has now healed twice over.
It was Maeve. Somehow her presence brought the bruises back. Made my arm light up with fire. But I don’t think she meant to hurt me. Her touch was desperate, panicked even, but not angry.
Who is she? Her name wasn’t mentioned in any of the articles.
The Drowning Girl went to meet her lover. Her family didn’t approve for some reason, take your pick. He was poor, he was the wrong race, he came from the wrong family.
He wasn’t a he at all, maybe.
They went to meet that night. Maeve and Grace. Then what? Maeve drowned. And Grace? Where is she?
I pull on my clothes with shaking hands and hurry to my room. I don’t see Madelyn Fournier’s bright red car in the lot, and there are no cameras downstairs. I’m not being watched here, at least.
Fear and wonder and confusion jangle through me. That was real. She was real, and she was a ghost, and all of this is real.
Impossible and real.
My mouth is full of the taste of dirt and river water. I grab a cup and fill it at the sink, swishing the water around. I spit, rinse, spit again—and something clatters into the sink.
My tooth. Ripped up by the root.
I stand there staring at it. My cheek stings. I touch my fingertips to it—there will be a bright red mark there, I remember. A hand pressing down. But that will fade. My lip is sore but not split. My arm is easy to hide.
I pick my tooth up from the sink. My tongue probes at the sore, bloody gap where it was.
I throw it in the trash.
I dream that night of the Narrow.
I stand at the edge beneath a cloud-covered sky. My throat feels raw, as if I’ve been shouting—or sobbing. A branch snaps behind me. I turn. A figure stands in the shadow of the trees, indistinct.
“You can’t keep her from me,” I say. “I love her, and she loves me.”
The dream slews sideways, time crumpling, and I’m under the water, dragged down, battered against the cruel rocks as I try to call out her name—
Grace, Grace, Grace.
But I’m alone.
I sit up, panting. It’s morning. I’m in my bed, warm and dry. No current to drag me down. No ghost watching me from the corner. All at once, everything that happened last night feels like a dream as well, and I find myself trying to believe that I’ve somehow dreamed my encounter with Maeve, then kept dreaming, and the world is still arranged the way I believed it was.
But my tongue finds the gap in my teeth, still sore, still tasting coppery. No. It wasn’t a dream.
Delphine is talking to her mother upstairs; I can hear their voices faintly. I dress slowly, tame my tangled hair into order, and wait. Eventually, Madelyn Fournier’s footsteps come down the stairs. A few minutes after that, she emerges from her room and head out of the house. Only then do I make my way upstairs.
Delphine steps out of her room with her new sharp bob and, to my surprise, a slash of bright red lipstick, with expertly applied eyeliner to go with it. Her uniform shirt is unbuttoned enough that I can see the black edge of her bra. She looks—
“Amazing,” I say.
She gives me an amused look. “You’ve been reduced to adjectives by the sight of me?” she asks.
“You look amazing,” I amend.
She shrugs one shoulder. “Thanks to my mom. I’ve never really put on makeup before, so I asked if she would show me. Less than a day after screaming at me for cutting my hair. I don’t know what you said to her, but thank you.”
“I didn’t really say anything. I think she realized what she was doing all on her own,” I reply.
“She thinks that if I stay the same, I’ll stay safe. But the only people who never change are the dead ones,” Delphine says.
Something prickles at me. “That sounds familiar.”
“It should. It’s one of your lines,” Delphine says. “From Grave Belles?”
Now I remember: Lenore’s father, the gravekeeper, says something like that to her in the opening pages, before Lenore hears the ringing bell that changes everything.
“What happens, anyway? After Lenore finds Isabelle?” Delphine asks. “It was a really interesting story. I was sorry you stopped uploading it.”
“I could show you,” I say, almost eagerly.
“Then you did keep working on it?”
“Yeah. There’s a lot, actually. Belle’s brother goes on trial, and she starts living in the family house again, secretly, and he thinks he’s being haunted—” I stop, the subject suddenly a bit too close to home. But Delphine looks intrigued.
“I’d love to read it. If I could.”
“Of course,” I say. Of course—as if it’s no big deal. As if I have ever let anyone see it before. It’s always belonged to me and me alone. Not as ambitious or polished as Zoya’s writing, not as technically proficient as Veronica’s artwork, but mine. But I want Delphine to see it. To know that part of me.
“Thank you,” she says. I can tell from those two words that she understands what it means to me, and what it means that I agreed.
Then I remember why I rushed up here. My throat gets tight. “Something happened,” I say.
Her eyes flick to the side. She doesn’t turn her head, but I know she’s thinking of the cameras. “Come to my room,” she suggests.
It is never any less intimate, stepping into her private space. The bed is made neatly. A modest collection of makeup has been added to the vanity, along with a bag from the expensive boutique two towns over. Madelyn must have made a trip to assuage her parental guilt with gifts.
Delphine sits on the edge of the bed, but I stay standing. I have too much energy burning through me, and I pace as I tell her what happened. She listens with rapt attention, and when I reach the end, I search her face for any sign that she doesn’t believe me—but there’s none.
“Then the story is true, in a way. The Drowning Girl went to meet her lover, and the Narrow claimed her instead. We were wrong about who the ghost was, though. And it doesn’t answer the question of what happened to Grace,” Delphine says, sounding far away. She fiddles with the delicate pearl pendant around her neck. When she lets it go, it rests right at the cleft between her breasts. I realize where I’m looking and glance away quickly, a touch of heat in my cheeks.
“She wants to find Grace, that’s all,” I say. “She isn’t malicious.”
“But why is she coming here? And what does it have to do with me?” Delphine asks.
“Maybe it doesn’t,” I say. “Grace lived in Abigail House. Maybe that’s why Maeve is coming here.”
“But that doesn’t explain what’s happening to me. It can’t be a coincidence,” Delphine says. She reaches for me. She catches my hand and pulls me wordlessly down to sit beside her. She doesn’t relinquish my hand but strokes her thumb across the back of it. Her head leans toward mine, her hair hanging forward to obscure half her face. From this position, I can see quite a bit of what her half-buttoned shirt reveals, and my memory supplies the rest. I picture her again, undressing—picture what might have happened if I put my hands on those hips, if I kissed that perfect neck.
I laugh, a low sound that scratches the back of my throat. Delphine’s brow furrows with confusion. “What’s so funny?” she asks.
“Not funny. Not really,” I say. “It’s just—with everything happening, ghosts and missing girls and all the rest, all I can think about right now is kissing you.”
I promised, after all, to tell the truth.
She straightens up, her hand pulling free of mine. Her lips part in silent surprise. A lurch of panic goes through me. Why did I say that? She doesn’t feel the same—I made her uncomfortable—I ruined whatever there was between us—
“You want to kiss me?” she asks. Her voice is small. Delicate. I pull back, giving her space.
“I’m sorry. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.” Guilt and embarrassment are acidic in my veins. She doesn’t need this—the one person she gets to spend time with checking her out. There are few more awkward things than realizing a friend has the hots for you and it isn’t reciprocated. How much worse is it when it’s your only friend?
“It doesn’t make me uncomfortable,” she says. My relief is sluggish compared to my panic. “It’s just . . . unexpected. Why?”
“Why?” I echo, and almost laugh again, but I think it wouldn’t be exactly welcome. “You’re smart and different and intense—intense in a good way, I mean. And you’re beautiful, Del. Especially with that hair. You never looked like you before, and now you do.”
“And that’s a good thing? Looking like me?” she asks. Anyone else would have sounded like they were fishing for a compliment, but her look is one of careful focus. Trying to make sense of something she doesn’t understand.
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
“I’m pretty strange, if you hadn’t noticed,” she says.
“You’re . . . unexpected,” I say, searching for the right word. “It’s like . . . everyone learns the rhythm of things. Like learning how to walk. Once you learn how to do it you don’t have to think about it anymore. So you can walk without paying attention. And it’s the same way with talking to people. Most people go through the motions for most of the day. But you do everything deliberately. You think about it. It makes me feel like I know you, the real you. Even when you’re lying.”
“I don’t lie to you,” she says. It feels like a kind of confession itself.
“You never promised to tell me the truth.”
Her look is still intent, still one of deep focus and attention. She doesn’t let a single moment slide by lightly. She lives every one of them. “I mean, I never decided not to lie to you. It just happened. I wanted you to know who I was. More than anything, that’s what I wanted. And so every time I thought about lying, I didn’t, because then you’d know some other version of me. A fake version.”
“There’s nothing but fake versions of me,” I say. I look away. “I lie to everyone.”
“Except me,” she says.
“Except you,” I acknowledge.
“Then this is our truth,” she says. She reaches up, trails her fingertips along my jaw. Like everything she does, it’s slow, deliberate. So that there’s no chance at all to imagine it’s anything but intentional. That it means anything other than what it does. “I think I would like that.”
“Like what?” I ask. Not because I don’t know, but because I need to be sure.
“You, kissing me,” she replies.
I would. I would kiss her right now and run my hand through her hair and be surprised at how short it is. I would taste her lips and know that I am getting that bright red lipstick on mine and not care. I would breathe in the soft scent of her and feel her hands on my neck, my waist, my cheek—
But the door at the bottom of the stairs opens.
“My mother,” she says with a grimace. “We were going to spend the morning together after she got breakfast.” Her hand escapes mine and she stands, smoothing her uniform skirt, not looking at me.
I sit there with my heart beating fast and my mouth dry and wish I hadn’t wasted those extra ten seconds. “I should probably get to class anyway,” I say. Clear my throat. Stand. “I’ll see you later, Delphine.”
“Del,” she says. “You called me Del earlier. I like it. I think I’d like it if you called me that.”
“Del,” I repeat.
She darts toward me. Her kiss catches the corner of my mouth—not a proper kiss, just a farewell between friends, but it’s enough. For now, it’s enough.
“I’ll see you soon,” she says. It sounds like a promise.
“See you soon, Del.”