The Night Country (The Hazel Wood #2)(15)

“Why are they—wait a minute. Alice, did you lock the door?”

I crouched between shelves, listening to him let someone in. Before he could come find me, I shoved the Austen under my shirt, into the waist of my cutoffs.

“I’m buying you a coffee!” I announced, springing to standing.

“Yah!” Edgar pressed a hand to his heart. A grad student–looking dude stood behind him, browsing the overstock table. “Did you lock the door, then hide? Why, Alice?”

“I need more coffee. I’ll get you one, too. I’ll be back in ten, okay?” I was barely listening to my own words, I just had to get out.

The heat and noise and bright insult of the sun were a shock after the shop’s quiet. It was coming on five and he was everywhere.

There, on the corner, leaning over a bucket of bodega flowers to fish out a fistful of daisies. Jumping onto the bed of a truck, the back of his T-shirt thin with sweat. Headphones over his ears, holding a blue-and-white paper cup, gaze gliding over me as he walked by. All of them, for a moment, were Ellery Finch.

The air felt thin, the sun felt close, the sidewalk gave under my high-tops like it was made of rubber. The guy behind the counter of the coffee shop was him, too, staring back as I stared too long, before shaking myself and ordering something cold. And decaf. My blood was already buzzing.

That boy, the one who’d saved me, then let me go. In my memory he was soft and hard and shining. Eyes a carbonated color and smile with secrets in it, good ones and bad.

You are one of those impossible things.

I didn’t remember walking back to the shop, but I got there somehow. A couple my age were prowling the shelves when I walked in, and Edgar was looking at me expectantly.

“Oh.” I brought a hand to my face. “No. I forgot your coffee. Want me to…?” I gestured at the door.

He rolled his eyes. “Forget it. Just … go talk to a customer.”

I stashed my bag, the Austen shoved to the bottom of it, beneath the counter, and went to give the couple some extremely cursory service. They left with books anyway, and Edgar was appeased.

He headed out soon after they did, leaving me to close. I read the letter a dozen times, slow then fast. I read the chapter leading up to it, trying to recapture the feeling of finding it for the first time. I read it all at once and in pieces. It never wobbled, or turned back into Austen’s words, and every time it sent fire through my veins.

By nine I was doing laps of the shop. All of yesterday’s angst and terror and confusion had burned off like fog. The world felt limitless, its bright spaces brighter. I craved high skies and open sidewalks and to run flat out till I couldn’t breathe. Finally it was closing time. I counted out the drawer, locked the door behind me, and headed to the train.

Persuasion was nested under my arm like a talisman. But untethered from the shop, I became less certain. The sticky press of anxiety settled itself back around my shoulders, like it had been waiting all day for me to be alone. I wanted to be sure. I wanted to know. So I didn’t take the subway down, back to Brooklyn. I took it up, toward him.

The train was full of teenagers with good shoes and too much confidence. I wanted to put sunglasses on to block out their light. I’d felt younger than them once, and older than them now, but we’d never really been the same age. I didn’t know what age I was. I wedged in between a dude pointedly reading a scuffed copy of Siddhartha and an Orthodox woman bowing her head over a child, the subway light bouncing greenly off the smooth brown wings of her hair. At Eighty-Sixth Street I climbed out and into our old life on the Upper East Side.

We’d lived here when Ella was married, when I briefly attended private school. I was afraid now of seeing someone from my past, but nobody I knew showed their face among the scatter of summer-dressed women and men in suits, the tourists with their heartbreaking, shower-damp hair. The summer light had held on tight, but now it was finally gone. I walked to Central Park first, skirting its edge till I was across the street from his old building’s front door.

It had been a while since I’d come here. In the early days I kept my head down, but now I didn’t bother. I looked so different. I’d grown an inch, my hair was darker and grazed my neck.

The building looked like it always did: imposing and implacable. There was no sign that a boy had lived here once, with his books and his wishes and his questing heart, and that he was gone now, farther than you could reach with money or longing.

What would Finch think of me now? He’d given so much to save me from my own monstrousness. What would he think if he saw me wading back in? I wasn’t sure what I’d expected, coming here, but all I got was the empty feeling of calling down a cut line. There was no secret knowledge waiting for me, no final chapter. For a minute I’d felt sure of something at last—sure of him. But staring at the building’s indifferent face, my certainty drained away. He was distant. He was gone. And the letter in the book was just words on a page.

And three of the Hinterland were dead.

And this morning I’d brushed blood off my teeth.

It was late and I had better reasons than the hour to hurry back home, but the park was an appealing patchwork of dark and light, and I just felt so damned low. Finch and I had walked here together once. Well, we’d run. From the sight of fairy-tale horror unfolding on the sidewalk, our very first glimpse of the Hinterland. Back before I understood what I was running from was me.