The Butterfly Garden (The Collector #1)(73)

“Formaldehyde,” he muttered. This time he let me undress him, and stumbled along behind me as I pulled him across the room to sit in the shower. A twist of my wrist sent warm water pouring over him.

There was nothing sexual about what happened next. It was like bathing Sophia’s girls when they were half-asleep. When I told him to lean forward or lift his arm or close his eyes, he obeyed, but numbly, like it didn’t entirely make sense. My shampoo and body wash were both fruity as hell, but I washed him head to toe until the only remaining chemical smell was his clothing.

I draped him in towels and used one of his shoes to push the clothing out into the hallway, then returned to dry both of us off. I had to keep wiping his face—unseen in the shower, a constant stream of tears ran down his cheeks.

“He injected something to make her sleep,” he whispered. “I thought we were going to carry her out to the car, but he opened a room I’d never seen before.” A shudder wracked his body. “Once she fell asleep, he put her in this orange and yellow dress and laid her out on an embalming table, and then he . . . he hooked up . . .”

“Please don’t tell me,” I said quietly.

“No, I have to, because he’s going to do that to you someday, isn’t he? That’s how he, how he keeps you, by embalming you while you’re still alive.” Another shudder, a sob that fractured his voice, but he continued. “He stood there explaining all the steps to me. So I could do it on my own someday, he said. Love was more than just the pleasure, he said; we had to be willing to do the hard things too, he said. He said . . . he said . . .”

“Come on, you’re still shivering.”

He let me lead him to the bed and pull the covers up over him, and I sat beside him, atop the blanket, hands in my lap. “He said if I really loved you, I wouldn’t let any hand other than my own take care of you.”

“Des . . .”

“He showed me some of the others. I thought . . . I thought he just left them back on the streets! I didn’t realize . . .” He broke down completely, weeping with an intensity that damn near shook the bed. I rubbed circles on his back as he choked on the sobs, unable to give him more comfort than that because he still didn’t know the full truth. Zara had the bone infection, and he thought all broken people killed themselves or let themselves go so completely that they died. He didn’t know about attitudes and ages.

And at that moment, when he was so close to broken himself, I couldn’t bring myself to tell him. I couldn’t use him broken. I needed him brave.

I didn’t think he ever would be.

“She picked out her case,” he managed a few minutes later. “He made me carry her there, showed me how to pose her, how to close the glass completely to pour the resin in. Before he closed the glass, he . . . he . . .”

“Kissed her goodbye?”

He gave a jerky nod, hiccupping with the force of his sobs. “He told her he loved her!”

“As he understands it, he does.”

“How can you even stand to be around me?”

“Sometimes I can’t,” I admitted. “I keep telling myself that you don’t know the whole of it, that you’re still ignorant of so much of what your father and brother do, and some days that’s the only way I can even look at you. But you . . .”

“Please tell me.”

“But you’re a coward,” I sighed. “You know that keeping us here is wrong. You know it’s against the law, you know he rapes us, and now you know he kills us. Some of these girls might even have families looking for them. You know this is wrong, but you don’t report it. You said you were going to learn how to be braver for me, but you haven’t. And I honestly don’t know if you can.”

“Finding out about this . . . having it all come out . . . it would kill my mother.”

I shrugged. “Give it enough time and it’ll kill me too. Cowardice may be our natural state but it’s still a choice. Every day you know about the Garden and don’t call the police or let us go, you’re making that same choice again and again. It is what it is, Desmond. You just don’t get to pretend anymore.”

He started weeping again, or maybe it was weeping still, all one massive shock that just kept compounding past his ability to bear it.

He spent the rest of that dark morning lying silently on my bed, and when sunlight came to the Garden, he gathered up his formaldehyde-scented clothing and walked away.

He didn’t talk to me for weeks, and only came into the Garden once: to see Zara after the resin solidified and the wall came away from her case. All the walls lifted then, and the reality that had blurred over the summer crashed back down with resounding force. We were Butterflies, and our short lives would end in glass.




“Wait, I thought you said things changed with Keely,” Eddison says.

“I did, yes. I’m getting there.”

“Oh.”

She rubs her thumbs against the blue dragon’s neck and takes a deep breath. “Keely arrived four days ago.”




It took time to keep my promise to Zara. The Gardener readily agreed to get us a full set of A Midsummer Night’s Dream when I told him what it was for, but he wanted the affair “done right.” He ordered up all sorts of costumes and gave Bliss a box of clays that weighed as much as she did to make us flower crowns. We assigned parts and coached girls through the language. Some of them had read a play or two in English, but most didn’t have much in the way of real exposure.