it.
There was a knock on the door.
“It’s occupied,” I said, angry that my voice sounded thick and unlike me.
“Isabel?” My mother’s voice.
I had been crying so hard that my breath was hitching. I tried to speak evenly. “I’ll be out in a second.”
The knob turned. In my haste, I hadn’t locked the door.
My mother stepped into the room and shut the door behind her. I looked down, humiliated. Her feet were the only thing I could see, inches from my own. She was wearing the shoes I’d bought her. That made me want to cry again, and when I tried to swallow my sob, it made an awful strangled sound.
My mother sat down on the bathroom floor next to me, her back to the sink as well. She smelled like roses, like me. She put her elbows up on her knees and rubbed a hand over her composed Dr. Culpeper face.
“I’ll tell them you threw up,” my mother said.
I put my head in my hands.
“I’ve had three glasses of wine. So I can’t drive.” She took out the keys and held them low enough that I could see them through the crack between my fingers. “But you can.”
“What about Dad?”
“Dad can get a ride with Marshall. They’re a good couple.”
I looked up then. “They’ll see me.”
She shook her head. “We’ll go out the door on this side. We don’t have to go past the table. I’ll call him.” She used a tissue from her purse to dab my chin. “I hate this goddamn restaurant.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay?”
“Okay.”
She stood up and I took her hand so she could pull me up. “You shouldn’t sit on the floor, though — it’s filthy and you could pick up rotavirus or MRSA or something. Why do you have a piece of bread in your shirt?”
I picked the crumbs delicately out of my shirt. Standing next to each other in the mirror, my mother and I looked eerily similar, only my face was a tearful, disheveled ruin and hers was not. The exact opposite of the twelve months leading up to this point.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go before they start singing again.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
• GRACE •
I didn’t remember being woken up. I just remembered being. I sat up, blinking against the harsh light, cupping my face in my hands and smoothing my skin. I ached — not like from a shift, but like I had been caught under a landslide. Beneath me, the floor was a cold and unforgiving tile. There was no window and a row of blinding lightbulbs above the sink made everything permanent daylight.
It took me a moment to pull myself together enough to look around and then another moment to process what I was seeing. A bathroom. A framed postcard of some mountains next to the sink. A glass-walled shower, no tub. A closed door. Recognition dawned all at once — this was the upstairs bathroom at Beck’s house. Oh. What that meant hit me all at once: I’d made it back to Mercy Falls. I’d made it back to Sam.
Too stunned to be properly appreciative, I climbed to my feet. Beneath my toes, the tile of the floor was spread with mud and dirt. The color of it — a sick yellow — made me cough, choking on water that wasn’t there.
Movement caught my eye, and I froze, my hand over my mouth. But it was just me: In the mirror, a naked version of Grace with a lot of ribs and wide eyes looked out, her mouth covered by fingers. I lowered my hand to touch my lowest rib and, as if on cue, my stomach growled.
“You look a little feral,” I whispered to myself, just to watch my mouth move. I still sounded like me. That was good.
On the corner of the sink sat a pile of clothing, folded with the extreme tidiness of someone who generally either folded a lot of clothing or none at all. I recognized it from my backpack, the one I’d brought when I came to Beck’s house however many months ago. I pulled on my favorite long-sleeved white T and a blue T-shirt over the top of it; they were like old friends. Then jeans and socks. No bra or shoes — they were both back at the hospital, or wherever things left behind at hospitals by bleeding girls went.
What it came down to was this: I was a girl who turned into a wolf, and I had almost died, and the thing that