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“Well,” Cal said, then spat on a streak of her father’s blood on her shoe and used the hem of her sleeve to scrub it clean. “Do you want me to tell you?”

“Is it bad?”

“That’s a subjective question.”

I put the paper on my desk, and it was like my fingers held opposing magnets. I simply couldn’t unfold it.

“Tell me,” I said, finally.

Cal nodded. I felt her step up behind me. “You had a daughter— do you remember that?”

She asked it quietly, a different kind of quiet than I had ever heard from her. Like she was talking in a library or a church. Like she was acquainted with respect.

I shook my head.

“She was sick,” she said. “Cancer. She was only seven or eight when she was diagnosed, but it was the kind that moves really fast. I don’t remember exactly what. You made a deal. You took the cancer instead.”

She put her hand on my arm, just the fingertips.

“You were a good man, Pey.”

I nodded, inhaling sharply enough to break free from her touch, even though I wanted it.

I had been right. I was once someone who loved and was loved. It should’ve felt vindicating, relieving. But I felt my throat swell and with it a new realization: this information I had been craving for as long as I could remember, at this point, didn’t matter. Even if I cared about my daughter back then, or about Mickey now— even if, in that instant, I wanted her to live more than I wanted to complete my set—that was nothing after millennia of everything else I’d done as Peyote Trip. What I knew I would do, if I got my chance.

Even if I had been a good man back then, I wasn’t anymore.





LILY





“MICKEY!” LILY SCREAMED, HER voice following the bullet as it cut through her place in the shadows and the wide-open night like a tear to another side.

“Mom!” Sean shouted.

There was another sound in the dark, out in the water, a small splash.

“The float!” she yelled. “Go, both of you! Now!”

Sean shoved Ruth to the ground and dove into the water, Silas on his heels. Lily heard the churning of their wild strokes as she stepped out into the clearing, where Gavin buckled from the gunshot and fell to his knees, holding his gut.



* * *



—

WHEN SHE PULLED THAT trigger without pause, Lily knew—not thought, but knew—that somewhere along the way, one thing inside her had been misplaced. One wrong letter in the crossword, one vent turned the wrong way, ruining everything inside. With her mother’s cruelty and Sarah’s death and her own teen pregnancy, she became twisted against herself. But when she pulled that trigger, she straightened out.

She didn’t hate herself. Not for wanting to be a good daughter, or being a jealous teen. Or even for being lonely and falling, blindly, for a man she didn’t ever actually know. No, she thought as she stared down at him in the dirt.

She hated him.

She listened for the last few seconds as his ragged breathing slowed into nothing, and then she let the gun hang from her shoulder and leaned down to press two fingers against his neck.

That was when he grabbed her.

“You fucking bitch.”

Each word hit her face with a splatter of his blood as her elbow and the back of her skull slammed into rocks. He pulled himself up over her, everything slick and hot from the bullet wound in his stomach.

“The Lily Thompson.”

Rose had been right. For a minute, that gun made Lily forget that no matter what else she became in her life, chances were, she would also be somebody’s victim.

Gavin’s hands reminded her.

When he squeezed her throat, she was surprised by the strength left in them, the power of his grip. She kicked and flailed, but she couldn’t reach him. Her vision swam; she couldn’t hear the lake anymore, or her husband and her son splashing in the dark, or the crickets in the trees. She couldn’t hear anything except his inhales against her ear and the roar of her own valorous, foolhardy heart.

That was, until she saw Sarah.

She stood there above them both, so beautiful, as only a memory could be. But she was something else, something they had in common that Lily had never let herself notice before. She could see it now, as Sarah raised her hands above her head.

She was scared.

Suddenly, there was a crack, and Gavin collapsed on top of her, as he had countless times before, his lips against her hair as they made their motel promises.

Only this time, he stayed down.

When Lily had managed to free herself from under him, she lay on her back, heaving. Ruth was in a heap on her father, her white towel heavy with blood, the rock from the firepit still clutched in her grip. Lily hacked and coughed and clawed the ground, but when she could finally breathe, the air was there, ready for her.





PEYOTE





BY THE TIME SILAS called for me, it was too late.

I arrived in the clearing, where the night covered the sight but not the smell of blood. I saw Gavin first, facedown in the dirt, and froze the whole scene immediately. Next to him was Ruth. Or at least she looked like Ruth, if Ruth had been hung up and drained like livestock. Even her hair seemed colorless as she sat on the forest floor, blood all over her towel, running down her wrists from her hands and the rock they clutched.