The Winter Sister(58)

Ben shifted his feet. “No,” he said. “I didn’t want to upset anyone. I figured you guys would have heard that I left Persephone on the road that night, and . . .” He cleared his throat. “No, I didn’t go.”

“Well your dad did,” I said. “And I hated that, because he was your dad. But it made sense, I guess, because the other council members were there, too—except my mom only shook hands with them. But when she saw your dad, she just . . . collapsed against him, and he sort of . . .” I gestured with my hand to demonstrate. “Gently patted her hair. I didn’t think about it back then, but now, it’s like—it was the kind of thing you’d see between people who have history.”

I paused, remembering the way she’d gripped his arms, how her tears had seemed swift and endless. “I don’t know,” I added. “I just think that if I’d actually thought about it, then maybe I would have put things together. It would have been too late, obviously—but still.”

Ben was silent for a moment. “Well, if we’re going by that logic,” he said, “then I should have figured it out a long time ago, too—even before Persephone died.”

I tilted my head to look up at him, but he was staring at the wall. “Why?” I asked.

He crossed his arms, squinting a little. “Your mom came to my grandfather’s funeral,” he said. “My dad’s dad.”

Richard Emory? But Mom had just spoken about him with such venom in her voice.

“It was soon after Persephone and I started dating,” Ben continued. “Soon after your mom said that we couldn’t. And when I saw her there, I thought maybe things had changed. Maybe she was coming around to the idea of the two of us. Maybe Persephone had mentioned that my grandfather had died and how—how close he and I were, and maybe your mom was trying to, I don’t know, offer her support to our family? I mean, she didn’t actually speak to me that day, but still. I asked Persephone about it, but she said nope, nothing had changed, your mom still didn’t know we were together. She couldn’t even believe your mom had been at the funeral in the first place, so it was just this weird, inexplicable thing. But now . . .”

I watched his face, saw the realization of something gather in his features, and I waited for him to continue. When seconds passed and he still hadn’t spoken, I rolled my eyes.

“But now what?” I prompted.

He shook his head slightly. “My mom had just left my dad, not that long before my grandfather died. So maybe . . . maybe your mom came to the funeral to see my dad, and to see if—now that he wasn’t married—if there was . . .” He trailed off.

“There was what?”

“Space for her again?”

He framed the words as a question, but when I snapped my head up to look at him, I could tell that, already, he believed them as fact.

“Are you serious?” I asked. “You think your father’s so great that my mom came crawling right back to him the second he became available again? Do you really think that anyone could be that pathetic?”

Ben scratched at his cheek, the one with the scar that cut across his skin. “I don’t think my father is so great,” he said.

“But you think my mother is pathetic?”

“What? No, I—”

“Then what are we talking about here?”

I stood up, latching my eyes onto his, and I waited to see who would last the longest, who would be the one to see the other look away. Even though the darkness of his irises, so close in color to his pupils, made my neck prickle, I knew that it had to be me. I crossed my arms and shifted my weight, and in a few more seconds, his gaze dropped to the floor.

“I just think,” he said, “that it’s possible to love someone for a really long time, even if you can’t be with them. I mean, I still love—”

He stopped himself before he said her name. I narrowed my eyes to slits.

“Let me start again,” he said. “I don’t think your mom would be pathetic if she still loved him. Love is love. You can’t just kick it to the curb, even if sometimes you wished like hell you could.”

But it had been nearly two decades from the time Mom and Will had been together to the time Mom went to his father’s funeral. I couldn’t imagine loving someone that long—not when they were just a memory, a wound, a thing that was already gone. How could a love like that remain so constant, dependable as the change of seasons or the months in a year? I pictured the pages of a calendar turning, the squares of days that my mother might have wasted holding out for a ghost. I envisioned her marking each date with a small, carefully drawn heart—the third, the twelfth, the twenty-first, all days she might have loved him—and then I felt my breath catch in my throat.

“Did your dad ever have Dark Days?” I asked.

Ben tilted his head. “Dark what?”

“The fifteenth of every month—does it mean anything to you? Did you ever notice your dad acting strange on those days?”

He bit his lip, seeming to consider it, and then slowly shook his head. “No,” he said. “I don’t think so. Not that I can remember anyway. Why? What’s the significance of the fifteenth?”

I sighed. “I have no idea. Just this weird thing with my mom. Guess I’ll add it to the list of all the other mysteries about her, right after why the hell she loved your dad and why she trusted Tommy Dent.”