The Winter Sister(79)

“Sylvie,” Ben said again, and I felt his hands on my shoulders. When he turned me around to face him, his eyes looked into mine so deeply I wondered if he could see her, too—her blonde hair tinted almost pink by his taillights, her boots leaving ghosts of herself on the ground.

“Talk to me,” Ben said. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

He guided me into his bedroom and flicked on the light switch, a yellow glow flooding the carpet, the walls, the air. Sitting me down on the bed and taking the space beside me, he kept his hand on my back, rubbing it up and down. “Shh,” he soothed. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

It wasn’t until a tear, fat yet weightless, splashed onto my hand that I realized why he kept saying that. My cheeks were wet, I registered now; my shoulders were shaking and my lungs kept sucking in air.

“Whatever it is,” he said, “it can’t be that bad. You were a kid, Sylvie. Just a kid.”

“It doesn’t matter how old I was,” I spat. “She’s dead because of me. Because I—” A burning sob raged through me. “I locked her out!”

Ben was silent, watching me.

“I was—I was always supposed to keep the window open. Just a crack. That’s all she needed to get back in, but I—I was sick of it. I didn’t want to cover for her anymore. I wanted our mom to know what was happening to her. Only I didn’t—I didn’t think that—I only locked it because I thought she’d come to the front door. I thought she’d have to ring the doorbell and wake up my mom and they’d have a fight but then everything would be out in the open. I didn’t know she’d—I had no idea . . . oh God.”

I slumped forward, my face falling into my hands. Tears slipped between my fingers, and as I endured the sobs that spasmed through my stomach, my throat, my lungs, I felt Ben’s body tense up beside me. Even his hand on my back went stiff.

I straightened up, wiping at each of my cheeks, and I looked him in the eyes. “I locked her out,” I confessed again. “She couldn’t come back that night because I locked her out.”

Ben pulled his hand away from me and placed it on his lap. For a while, he just sucked on the inside of his cheek, the one that was scarless and smooth, and I watched his pulse as it throbbed against his neck.

“I locked her out,” I repeated.

Now that I’d finally come clean, now that—for the first time in my life—I’d spoken the words out loud, I couldn’t stop saying them. It was as if my tongue were a diving board, and they kept lining up, one after another, to jump right off.

“I locked Perseph—”

“So what?” Ben snapped his head to look at me.

I blinked, tears catching in my eyelashes. “So what?” I said back. “So everything.”

Ben shook his head. “No. It doesn’t matter. You locked her out, okay, but what about Persephone?”

I stared at him, watching how the light in the room pooled and swirled in his eyes. “What about her?”

“It was her decision to come back to my car. She could have rung the bell, like you said, gotten in trouble and that would’ve been it. But she didn’t. She got in my car instead. And we fought. She said she hadn’t been able to get back in, and I told her we should just tell her mom so this wasn’t such an issue in the future, but she said no. She got angry. She demanded I let her out.”

I narrowed my eyes, my tears stalling on my cheeks. “Are you saying this was her fault?”

“No. Not at all. Because the next thing that happened was that I did let her out. And if I could redo anything in my life, that’s the one thing I’d take back. But even if I did take it back—even if I’d found a way to calm her down and then drove her home again and she’d figured out how to sneak inside—would it matter? Would she still be alive today?”

“Yes,” I said, and Ben tilted his head to the side.

“I’m not so sure about that. Because, just like she made the decision to get out of my car, and I made the decision to let her, someone else made the decision to kill her. And if it was Tommy, then he could have done it another time, too. He was stalking her, Sylvie. He was biding his time. He—”

He stopped himself, taking a deep breath before continuing.

“What I’m saying is—Persephone made a decision to sneak out, to come back to my car, to demand to be let out, and I made a decision to let her go, and you made a decision to lock the window because you were tired of covering up a dangerous situation. But only one person made a decision that night to hurt her. To kill her. You were—God, Sylvie—you were only trying to help her. You were trying to keep her from getting hurt. Why the hell would you blame yourself—let alone punish yourself—for that?”

My lips parted to say something, and then closed, parted and closed, parted and closed. I was stunned into stillness, my hands half open, half fisted in my lap. I was stunned by the reflections of light I could see in those obsidian eyes, the ones my sister had called black holes, the ones that seemed to make their own gravity as they pulled me toward their gaze.

He was right.

I actually laughed when I realized it, my breath gushing out of me as if it were water that had filled my lungs to bursting. In an instant, I felt lighter, pounds and years lighter, and I was about to press my hand to my mouth, dam up the laughter that was coming and coming in an otherwise somber room, but then I changed my mind, let the sound spill from my body until nearly all of it had been drained.