A Lesson in Vengeance(95)

Beside me, Leonie shivers.

“What?” I whisper.

She shakes her head. Her lower lip blanches where she catches it between her teeth. “I don’t know. I just…What if it’s all true? The story about the Dalloway girls. What if this is history repeating itself? First Alex, then Clara, and now…”

I reach for Leonie’s hand and squeeze it tight, and tell her: “Magic isn’t real.”

Quinn catches my eye from across the graveyard. In Ellis’s absence they are a shadow of themselves, all their colors subdued without Ellis’s light to brighten them.

Or perhaps that’s how everyone looks to me now—everyone who knew her.

“Felicity,” someone says, once the ceremony is over and I’m heading back to the car, flanked by Kajal and Leonie.

I turn. Two women have approached, each with a white lily pinned to her lapel. Ellis’s mothers. I recognize them from the service.

“Oh,” I say. “Hi.”

Leonie’s hand presses against the back of my elbow, but I wave her and Kajal away, offering Ellis’s parents my best bathroom-mirror-approved smile. I try not to actively think about the fact these are the women who left Ellis alone that winter with her grandmother. Who didn’t come back until their small daughter had been forced to do abhorrent things to survive.

One of them, the older one, steps forward and digs around in her satchel until she finds a stack of papers. She presses the pages into my hands, and I take them on reflex.

“This is for you,” Ellis’s mother says. “She would have wanted you to have it.”

I glance down. The first page, typewritten in a familiar font, reads:





AVOCET


A novel


by Ellis Haley



“No.” I try to shove the manuscript back at the woman who gave it to me, but she steps out of reach, both arms folding across her middle. “No. I don’t want it.”

“You have to take it,” the other woman insists. “Please. It’s the last thing Ellis ever wrote. She—”

I know what it is. I know, and I don’t ever want to read it, don’t ever want to crack open those pages and see what kind of mockery Ellis made of us.

“I don’t care. I don’t want to read it. I can’t. Take it.”

The two women exchange glances, but I don’t wait for them to speak again. I bend over, set the stack of pages down in the damp grass, and dart away, chasing the distant figures of Kajal and Leonie, the mourners milling like ravens in the church parking lot.

When I glance back, Ellis’s mothers are flitting around, chasing pages that have caught the wind, snapping desperately after paper and ink—the last that remains of their daughter.





London is not where I thought I’d live, at the end of it all.

I always thought I’d want mountains towering overhead, a wide-open sky and seasons as fickle as the sea. And yet here I am, with a flat in Mayfair, and a little dog, and a favorite bakery where they know me by name.

I’ve decided I like the city. I like the anonymity of the crowd, the way it feels as if possibility explodes around me in all directions. I like knowing I’ll never go everywhere in this city, eat at every restaurant, meet every person who calls London home. There is always something and someone new. There is always a mystery I haven’t solved yet.

I step out of the English building at Imperial College and head away from the Thames, into the bustle of the city proper. My phone buzzes in my pocket—my girlfriend texting me, probably, checking in again about dinner plans. Now that I’m almost done with my degree, I’m thinking about breaking up with her. I want to move on, opening up a new doorway in my life. Maybe I’ll go to Paris. I’ll meet a French girl with blond hair and a quick smile, one who will stay up all night naked in my bed. Perhaps she’ll have a fixation with classic films—just to add character.

I don’t want to go home yet and be confronted with Talia’s demands in person, so I dip into a nearby bookshop and wander between the shelves, picking up books, only to set them down again. I’m so busy with assignments that it feels like I barely read for pleasure anymore.

I’m on my way out when I spot the display in the window: a full fifteen-book spread, complete with a photo of the author blown up to massive size. The poster announces the release of the posthumous masterpiece by Ellis Haley: Avocet.

My feet have grown roots that stretch deep into the floor. I stare at Ellis’s photo and Ellis stares back, her gray eyes steady and alive, somehow, despite being printed by pixel. It’s not the same portrait that was printed in her first novel. I know, because I spent hours staring at that original photograph back when we were still at Dalloway, fantasizing about what Ellis’s mouth could do to me.

This photo was taken more recently. Ellis has the same hairstyle she wore when we were at school together, a few stray strands tumbling over her brow and her lips set in a flat line.

“Have you read it?”

I whip around. The bookseller stands over my shoulder, with both hands clasped in front of her lap, a hopeful expression painted over her face, an expression that says I make commission.

“No.”

“Oh, well, you should.” She chooses one of the books off the display and presses it into my hands. I glance down at the front cover: spare, minimalist, emblazoned with the gold medal of the National Book Award.