The Becoming of Noah Shaw (The Shaw Confessions #1)(78)

“I would have given anything to bring you back.” She looks at me then, reining all feeling in. “So I did.”

There are a thousand words circling my mind, but none can escape my throat.

“My grandmother wrote me a letter,” she says, and I vaguely remember reading it, but nothing in it to explain the expression on her face. “She said, ‘You can choose to end life or choose to give it, but punishment will follow every reward.’ I can reward people, did you know?” She says that almost to herself, looking over my shoulder out at the city. “It’s one of the things she wrote, in her suicide note. One of her memories I have. Along with your great-great-grandfather discovering her. Her moving to England to live with your family.”

“The letters you were reading, the journal”—I gesture to the trunks, the boxes, newly raging—“you knew what it was all about, yet you were giving me shit about keeping things from you?” Everything in me turns in on itself. “Who are you?”

“I didn’t know I could bring you back that way. I didn’t know it would work.” She shrugs. Like she’s not talking about having murdered innocent people, but thought she’d try getting high because she was curious. “But I’m not sorry it did. You’re here.”

“And they’re not,” I say in my newly hollowed-out voice.

Her eyes glass over, hard and fathomless. “?‘I would do it again.”

It’s unreal that we’re standing in the same room, in the same universe, having this conversation. “I suppose it doesn’t matter now that the power’s out, as it were.”

“Mine isn’t.”

“How do you—no.” I nearly laugh. “I literally don’t want to fucking know. You’ll never do it again,” I manage to say, at full volume and without hesitation.

“I’ll have to do it again. Because you don’t heal anymore. And it’s not temporary. I’ve been reading up.” She looks at the trunks. “Your father was right about some things.”

“Not this,” I say. “Not ever this, not ever again.”

“I’m not apologising for saving your life.”

“It’s my life!”

“And how many times have you tried to end it? Would you let me die?” she asks, but I’m not ready for it, so I say no.

She leans back against the desk, jagged and unmovable. She’s a rock I want to break myself against. Her expression clarifies that she thinks this is a victory of sorts, and I’m so furious and consumed by shame that the last thing I say to her is, “But I never want to see you again.”





47


NO OTHER LIFE BUT THIS

IF SHE REPLIES, I DON’T remember it. I don’t remember her packing and leaving. Only the sound of the door as it closes behind her. I stare at it for a moment and then lean my forehead against the wood and scream.

In that forever moment there’s a storm inside me. When I can breathe again, I move to the window and stare at the street below. The day’s escaped, somehow—at dawn, Stella’s spine was intact and my life was unbroken. Now the dark street’s empty but for a black car. And then I see her. Mara strides down the cobblestones, a small speck, a dot, moving farther away until she turns the corner.

I need to stop staring at the space where she used to be, but when I force my eyes from the window in a minute that feels like an eternity, I’m still here, in this fucking room, somehow fantastically unchanged since she’s left. It’s beyond fathoming—how did I get here? Pacing alone in a room of relics, so completely fucking lost?

I can’t stand still and I can’t seem to leave, so I unlock one of the other trunks, small and brass, and start furiously looking through it, searching for a distraction, a diversion. I find one.

An envelope, large and black, with gold calligraphy addressed to me at the North Yorkshire address. A condolence card, likely—the others seemed to be—but this is unique enough to divert my attention, which desperately needs diverting, so I rip it open, tearing a bit of the thick card that bears only two sentences.

Condolences on your loss. Congratulations on your inheritance.

—A.L.

I throw the card like a disc, giving in to the fresh wave of disgust. I’m about to crush the envelope and bin it when I notice something peeking from the fold. Another paper, which I unfold as well, knowing I’ll regret it, but what’s one more regret to throw in with the lot?

It’s a page torn from a book—some sort of history book. The title isn’t on it. A section about priest holes, the sixteenth-century secret passages created when being a Catholic priest was high treason.

There are rooms in this house even I don’t know about.

I crush the paper in my fist, toss it back into the trunk. The lid slams shut on its own, and with it, everything I’ve faced, to bring me to exactly this moment. He engineered what we are. I knew it, ignored it, and still ended up playing a hand of cards dealt long before I existed, without even knowing the game.

“Only play the games you can win,” Jamie had said. I didn’t realise that the mere fact of my existence makes me a player. How do I win at someone else’s game, with someone else’s rules?

I check my mobile, because it hasn’t sunk in, quite, that she’s gone. I check our texts, e-mails, expecting that little (1) to show up in the account I’ve got just for her, but there’s nothing new. Realising that there might never be anything new again—that I’ve told her I don’t want anything from her again, and she listened—that pain is next level. I can’t take my words back. I also can’t give back the lives that she took.