Bone Music (Burning Girl #1)(133)

She’s never seen him this angry. It takes a form as penetrating and focused as every other intense swell of emotion he’s displayed.

“And then?” she asks.

“And then, one day, I saw you standing over my mother’s grave.”

For a second she’s got no idea what he’s talking about. Then she remembers. The road trip. The road trip she wrote about in her journal only days before.

“After Cole shut down the project, it was like my one connection to my mother died. I wandered around for a bit, but I ended up in Asheville, where she lived. I was trying to put together pieces of her life. And then one day, I walked out to her grave, and there you were. Burning Girl. And you were crying.

“I’d seen the news. I’d read about the lawsuit. I knew you’d won. But you weren’t off vacationing on some island. Instead you’d traveled across the country to bring my mother her favorite flower. And that’s when I realized, we don’t get to pick the other survivors of the shipwreck, and on our darkest days, they’re all we have. So I decided to find out who you really were.”

“You followed me all the way to Arizona?”

“I followed you back to Asheville. Heard you use your new name. I used that to do the rest.”

“The rest . . . pretending to be a therapist. Lying to me.”

“It was not my best plan. In the beginning, it wasn’t really a plan at all. It was . . .”

“What?” she asks. “What was it?”

“Hope.”

“For what, Noah?”

He whirls, a visible pulse in one corner of his jaw. “I call you by the name you’ve chosen. Can you do me the same favor?”

“You didn’t do me any favors, Dylan.”

His shame, if that’s truly what it is, shows itself in the quick breath he sucks in through his nostrils, the speed with which he looks out into the woods beyond.

Should she tell him they’re being watched? Shouldn’t he already know? After all, he’s worked with Cole Graydon far longer than she has.

“So who was I?” she asks. “When you finally got to know the real me, who did I turn out to be?”

“You were everything I said you were during our sessions. Brave but deluded. Convinced you were weak simply because you were grief stricken and exhausted. But on a fundamental level, what you’d been through had turned you into something I’d never anticipated. Someone resourceful, determined, honest. But in need of a push.”

“A push?”

“Do you regret it, Charley? Not our sessions. Not what I had to do with Jason. The Mask Maker. Do you regret it? Do you regret bringing him down?”

“Is that what you expected me to do?”

“Never in a million years,” he says with a warm, contented smile.

“Then maybe you didn’t get to know the real me after all.”

“Maybe,” he whispers, his smile fading but his stare growing more intense, as if he’s convinced he might learn more about her in this single moment than he did during those three months.

“You said in the beginning, I was hope. Not for . . . your drug, but for something else. What, Dylan? Hope for what?”

He’s studying the view beyond the collapsed walls now. He’s searching the woods; she’s sure of it. Searching for the glint of sunlight off binoculars or a rifle’s scope. But he doesn’t seem frightened.

“Dylan?”

“I thought you might have seen her. When they brought her here.”

“Your mother?” she asks.

He nods.

“I didn’t,” she whispers. “I never saw any of them. I’m sorry. I would tell you the truth if I had.”

“I know,” he whispers back. “I know.”

Either he hasn’t seen what he expected to out in the woods, or he’s given up looking for it. He turns to her now.

“Forgive me, Charley. It wasn’t my plan to involve Cole and Graydon right away. I didn’t want to snare you in their net so soon. I thought we’d have time. I thought we’d have time to work together. To come to an understanding.

“I knew you’d see the worth of what I was trying to do. The implications. For our mothers. For women everywhere who live in fear. For people everywhere who live in fear, overpowered and silenced and erased by those who lack morals or possess brute strength . . .” He studies the altars all around them, and she wonders if these general, academic words are the closest he can come to describing his mother’s murderers in any kind of detail. “Or are pure evil.”

There’s a tremor in his voice when he speaks these last two words. He’s turned in to the shadows so he can face her. If there are tears in his eyes, she can’t see them.

“I take it Cole’s made it clear he has a continued desire to work with you,” he says.

“He has.”

“Has he said what will happen if you turn him down?”

She can’t bring herself to lie, but she can’t bring herself to answer, either.

He looks up, stricken by her silence.

“What has he said to you?” she finally asks.

“That your decision will determine everything.” She nods, avoiding his stare for the first time since entering the house.