THE DAY DELPHINE and her mother leave Atwood, the sun is shining in a perfectly blue sky. A black car idles in front of Abigail House as Madelyn Fournier supervises the driver moving suitcase after suitcase into the trunk. I stand a distance away, arms around myself to guard against the bitter wind.
Madelyn catches sight of me. Her face goes still, and she quickly looks away. She and I haven’t spoken since that night—since she and Oster came running down to the Narrow, having discovered our absence. I didn’t have the chance to talk to Delphine before Madelyn whisked her away. I haven’t been allowed to see her, but Oster assures me she is well. She shows no signs of her previous affliction.
I was carted off to the hospital to be bandaged up and x-rayed. No broken bones this time. Just bruises that turned half my body exciting shades of purple and some aspiration of the water that left me with a wracking cough for days afterward.
Delphine comes down the steps wearing jeans and a bright red sweater, something tucked under one arm. Her hair is pulled back with a black headband, her makeup spare but girlish. She looks well. But she doesn’t look like Del.
She’s already spotted me. She must have seen me from the window upstairs. She says a few quick words to her mother, then walks in my direction. I stiffen as she approaches, heart hammering.
I’ve wanted to go see her a hundred times, but Oster told me Madelyn wanted some time for things to “settle” before she saw me again. Whatever that means.
She stops a few feet shy of me, biting the corner of her lip. “Hey,” she says. Her voice sounds strange.
“Hi,” I manage, though it comes out more of a croak than a word. “How are you?”
She gives a one-shouldered shrug, looking off a few inches to my left instead of at me. “Okay, I guess. It’s weird, mostly. I don’t necessarily feel different, but I keep going to watch a show I like and suddenly I hate it, or my favorite food is just off. Things that are habit feel uncomfortable and wrong. It’s not like I was someone else. I was me. And I’m still me, but not the same me, and . . . Like I said, it’s weird. Are you . . . ?”
“All better,” I say. “Just a few bruises left.” And a ragged hole in my heart. I search her face, not sure what I’m searching for.
“Thank you for what you did,” she says. “For trying to save me. Us. Her.” She gives a little breathy laugh. “I have no idea how to talk about any of this. Mom wants to act like none of it ever happened, and honestly, that might be easier. Move and start over and pretend to be normal.”
“You’re going back to New York?”
“Is it really going back if I haven’t been there since I was eleven?” she asks. “But yeah. New York and then London, and then we’ll see. I haven’t gotten to go anywhere at all for years. I’d like to do some traveling. Finish school online, and then . . . then the whole rest of my life, I guess.”
“Are you angry with her?” I ask softly. “For keeping you trapped here all this time?”
That familiar small line appears between her eyebrows, her expression quizzical. “Grace? No, of course not. She saved me. I didn’t mean to—she didn’t mean to possess me, or whatever you want to call that. There wasn’t anything evil or violent about it. I just . . . was. Or we were, or . . .”
“Right,” I say, and we both chuckle with forced humor.
“Oh. I brought you this,” Delphine says. She holds out the object that has been tucked under her arm. Grave Belles, I realize, neatly tied again.
“You can keep those,” I say, not reaching for them. “I have the scans. I’d like for you to have them. And I have more pages to send you. The ending. I’ve been working on it, finally.”
“Oh,” Delphine says. Then, hesitatingly, “The thing is, it’s not . . . it’s not really my thing. I loved it when I read it before, but now . . .”
“I see,” I say, feeling like I’ve been punched in the stomach. I blink back tears and reach out to take it. My finger bumps against hers. She flinches back, pulling her hands in against her body. I take a deep breath. I can’t let her go without knowing. “Delphine, you and I—”
“Please don’t,” she whispers. She looks me in the eye at last, her lower lip trembling. “I loved you. Completely. And now I don’t. I wish it weren’t true, because I remember what it felt like, and I care about you a lot. And I’m grateful. So, so grateful. But I’m not her anymore. Del. And I can’t—I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” I say, my voice a wreck. I hold the pages of Grave Belles flat against my chest, both arms folded over them. Like a shield between us. “It was Grace all along.”
Delphine shakes her head fiercely. “I did love you. I did. And I feel like I’ve lost you, but I’m the one that . . .” A sob tears out of her. Her face crumples, and she jams her knuckles against her lips as tears stream down her cheeks. I reach out for her, desperate to comfort her, but she shakes her head, backing away.
She turns and strides back toward her mother, arms stiff at her sides. Madelyn gathers her up, casting me a pained look. There is sympathy in that expression, but a warning, too.
I force myself to turn away.
The girl I loved, whoever she was, is gone.
They say she haunts the Narrow’s shores. She is a slant of moonlight, a brush of wind, a whispered warning.
Every stone of Atwood holds a haunting. She is nothing remarkable, the lady of the shore, but she is new.
“Are you sure?” Veronica asks me as we make our way down toward the Narrow, snow crunching under our feet.
“I’m sure,” I tell her. “Wait here. I’ll be back soon.”
She is waiting on the rock where she died forty years ago. Where seven years ago, she saved the life of a young girl and became someone new. Where less than three months ago, she lifted me from the water. The moonlight shines over her skin. She wears a blue dress the color of the morning sky.
“Grace,” I say. She sees me, and a smile lights her features. Damp strands of hair cling to her cheeks. Her dress flutters, not in the breeze but in the tug of the current. When she touches my face, her hand is cold and wet. I cover it with my own, lean into her touch.
“You’re still here,” I say.
She looks behind her at the river. “I still belong to it. I have held on this long. I don’t think I can last much longer.”
“I should have come sooner,” I say. “I didn’t know.”
“Time doesn’t matter,” she says. “I was always going to be here when you came to find me. And when you’re gone, I will return to the Narrow.” She looks down at the water, her expression troubled. “She’s down there, somewhere. I can still feel her.”
“Maeve.”
“I loved her, you know.”
“I know. And she loved you.” I felt it. It’s easy to say that a love like that isn’t really love, but I know that’s wrong. It was a poisoned love of possession and jealousy. A love unworthy of the loved.
“I don’t know if that makes it better or worse,” Grace admits.
“Maeve thought that love was a storm. Violence and passion,” I say.
“And what is it, if not that?” Grace asks.
“A shelter from the storm, maybe,” I say. We stand shoulder to shoulder, looking down at the water. Our hands don’t quite touch. “The scent of rain in the air before you feel the first drop. The flowers that bloom after. I don’t know.”
“It sounds like you do,” Grace says. She lets out a breath and looks up toward the sky. Tears or river water trickle down her cheeks—I can’t tell which. “It shouldn’t have ended like this. We shouldn’t have died. She wasn’t evil. She was . . . she could have changed if she lived.”
“But the dead don’t change,” I say.
My fingers brush against the back of her hand. It feels insubstantial, as if I’m only imagining her touch.
“She let me go,” I say. “At the very end. I don’t know why. Maybe she did change. Just a little bit.”
“We got to live again, she and I,” Grace says. She laces her fingers with mine. “Maybe that was enough to change us.”
“How much of her was you?” I whisper. I don’t need to explain what I mean.
“I don’t know. It wasn’t this part is Grace and this part is Delphine. I was just me. And I still feel like me. I still feel like the girl who loves you. I love you, Eden.”
“Then stay with me. Stay,” I say, knowing she can’t.
“I can hear the river calling me,” she whispers. There is a tension in her limbs, a trembling. “I have to go.”
“No. This can’t be what happens. You can’t be trapped down there forever.”
“What the Narrow takes does not return,” she says. She touches my cheek, thumbing away a tear I didn’t know I’d shed. “I know how it should end.”
“What?” I ask, confusion stealing past my devastation.
“Grave Belles. You said you didn’t know how to end it, but I do. Lenore and Belle, they end up together. They’re happy, and they’re safe. They live. Both of them live.”
“Grace, I—” I begin, but she kisses my words away. One soft, swift kiss, too quickly ended. She steps back.
“I have to go,” she says. “The Narrow is calling. I can’t hold on any longer.”
I look at her helplessly. Can this be it? In the end, a surrender after all?
No.
“Take my hand,” I say, voice shaking.
“Eden . . .”
“Take my hand,” I say again, and this time, puzzled, she does. I lace my fingers with hers. I face the river. Only a short jump to the other side. To the east, the sky is growing light with the first hints of the dawn. I look at Grace; she nods.
And together, we jump.
We jump to defy the Narrow.
To be free.
For a moment, we are in the air, only our linked hands to tether us to anything at all.
And then I land on the other side, alone, the first rays of sunlight slicing through the air where we leaped. The air stirs across my cold, damp skin, and Grace is gone.
Not below. Not lost in the deep, in the dark.
Gone.
My knees shake. I sink down into a crouch, unable to stay upright. I stay there until Veronica comes to find me. Gathers me in her arms, plants a kiss against my brow.
Light spills across the Narrow, and we make our way back along its banks.