What Lies in the Woods(79)

I let out a long breath. “Can we hit Pause?” I asked him. “Until the funeral, at least. I can’t deal with all of this right now.”

“Of course,” Ethan said. “We can do whatever you need.”

“Thank you,” I said. I stepped into his arms, and he held me there, my cheek against his chest. I felt safe in his arms—the safest I’d felt in a long time.

It was starting to scare me.





The day of the funeral, I slipped the case that held Persephone’s finger bone into the pocket of my black dress.

The afternoon was bright, with only a few white clouds scraped over the sky. We gathered in the church. I’d gone with Liv and Cass a few times growing up, whenever I spent a Saturday night with them. Kimiko was always there, impeccably dressed, with flyaway hair. Marcus never went, and they gave Liv the option. She liked the ritual. The singing. The way it filled your chest and made your skin tingle when everyone lifted their voices together. But I didn’t know that she had ever believed.

Marcus sat in the front pew with his head down and his hands folded around a crumpled program. When Ethan and I entered, the church was half full, but still he seemed to sense my presence. He raised his head and looked back at me, and his gaze seemed to pierce through me. Kimiko turned in her seat to see who he was looking at.

Ethan and I started to take seats in the back, but Kimiko stood and waved us forward. I approached, at a loss for what I should say to her—what I could say, that would begin to put words to the loss that shrouded her.

“You were her best friend. You should sit up front,” Kimiko said firmly. Marcus made a soft sound and looked away. It seemed like they’d already had an argument about this, and Marcus had lost.

Cass arrived soon after, surrounded by her family—parents, Amanda, even Oscar in a suit that strained around his muscular frame and made him look like the punch line to a joke that hadn’t been written yet. Cass guided Amanda up to our pew, the others in tow. Oscar sat at the end and conspicuously didn’t look my way. Cass took a delicate seat next to me and pressed my arm in a comforting gesture—while giving Ethan a skeptical look.

Liv had always loved losing herself in the ritual. For me, it was like a fever haze, full of steps I half knew and words that made my lips and tongue feel clumsy. I stumbled through the prayers and hymns, losing the sense of myself as voices merged in recitation, only to jar free of the unity and feel all the more alone.

Kimiko spoke, and Marcus. They talked about Olivia’s artwork, her curiosity, her passion. They spoke of her troubles, obliquely, and I was glad that at least they didn’t pretend that part of her hadn’t existed. It wasn’t part of herself that she welcomed, but it had defined so much of her. She wouldn’t have been Olivia without having walked through the fire of her own mind.

To my surprise, Cass rose to speak when they were done. They hadn’t asked me. She stood at the lectern and cleared her throat, and I braced myself for the polished version of friendship I was sure she would paint.

“When I was five years old, I decided that Olivia Barnes was going to be my best friend,” Cass began. Her voice was clear and steady, but she gripped the paper on which her notes were written with a faintly trembling hand. “I wanted to be her savior, but the truth is that we rescued each other. Neither of us was the easiest person to be friends with. But no matter how many times we fought, we always made up.

“Olivia and I went through the usual ups and downs of friendship, but we also faced hardships that no one should. Some of those were inflicted on us by another—by evil that strayed into our community. And some of them came from within. Olivia wasn’t just troubled. She was at war with her own mind from the time we were very young. At first none of us saw it. She was quirky. She was odd. She was, to me, magical. Maybe if the horror of that summer had never occurred, she would have had more time to learn how to live with the lies her brain told her. Instead, she was suddenly lost in the woods, and none of us knew how to help her find the way out.

“Olivia believed in me in a way that no one else ever did. And I believed in her. But no amount of faith could fix Olivia. No amount of friendship. And in the end, I gave up. I gave up on her, and on being her friend. I failed her.”

She took a shuddering breath. She looked out at the congregation, and her eyes glimmered with unspent tears. “Olivia taught me to believe in magic. I can’t bring her back. But I can honor her, by seeing the magic in this world. She wouldn’t want us to dwell on the darkness, but the stars she saw within it. And that is what I’m going to do.”

She walked swiftly away from the podium and back to her seat, her muscles tense with the effort of keeping everything together. She sat beside me and grabbed my hand and Amanda’s, and gripped them both as the next speaker—an uncle—stood and made his way to the podium.

I squeezed her hand back and tried to breathe around the cold, white grief lodged in my throat.

Is this what Olivia wanted? I wondered. For you to be obsessed with her death, obsessed with the attack all over again? Suspecting your best friend?

Cass was right. It was the last thing Olivia would have wanted. She had wanted to find Persephone so we could bring her into the light, not to destroy us, to mire us in the past. But even as I thought it, I knew it didn’t matter. I couldn’t let go. I couldn’t stop.

I was going to see this through to the end, even if it destroyed me.