toward her, still babbling about a woman. Somewhere in the house a child’s wail sounded. Coco.
“This,” I said, picking up a purple pacifier I had just spotted on the floor. A moment of adrenaline-fueled genius. “Coco’s favorite pacifier. She’ll be needing this tonight, I think.”
“Right,” Maren said, narrowing her eyes. We both knew what happened when Coco was without her favorite pacifier at night.
My heart close to bursting like a piñata through my rib cage, I walked quickly to Coco’s room before Maren’s gaze burned a hole through my back. Coco woke up with a desperate howl, groping around the bedclothes.
“Here you are, darling,” I said, slipping the pacifier into her mouth.
I sat for a long while in the chair beside her crib, my heart still pounding from what I’d seen and heard in the kitchen. I had heard someone whisper my name. A woman. And I had seen her—I remembered that there had been a trail of soil: proof that she had been there. And quickly I thought back to the morning I had woken to find large hoofprints in my room, leading to my bed. If it wasn’t weird enough to find actual hoofprints in the house, indicating that a creature had come in while I was sleeping and had stood over my bed, weirder still was the absence of a second set of prints from where the creature turned around and left. It hardly went out through the window. So why just one set?
After that night, I became more vigilant. Instead of writing in the evenings, I studied YouTube videos and Pinterest boards on all kinds of early learning activities. I learned all about the milestones Coco should be reaching, and how to deliver a Montessori education through drawing and play. I never found any logbook, but I made one out of a notebook and kept detailed notes about the girls’ development. And every time I went near the kitchen I dived for the light switch lest some weird woman should be standing at the window. When I read to the girls, I read aloud in my new southern accent. How now brown cow. I was beginning to sound, look, and even smell like someone else. Like Sophie Hallerton.
I couldn’t prevent the truth from coming out entirely, but I could certainly do my best to stall it as long as I could. Gaia and Coco laughed more, slept better. I found some old sandbags in the nursery and stitched them to the corners of a quilt to form a weighted blanket, which had the effect of enabling Gaia to sleep in her own bed—and without screaming—for the first time. This earned me a lot of brownie points with Tom.
But when I spoke with Maren, I saw it in her face: suspicion.
10
the hole you left
NOW
Don’t go too far,” he calls to Gaia.
She skips into the trees. “OK, Daddy, I won’t.”
He promised the girls a picnic in the woods—a bear’s picnic, which sounds much more ominous now that they’re in actual bear territory—and so he lays out a groundsheet in a dry part of the clearing and sets Coco down on a seat pad while he unpacks his flask of tea and pasta salad, along with a box of sandwiches and blueberry muffins for the girls. There’s no rational explanation for why this most banal of tasks—pouring the tea into a sippy cup for Coco, peeling the edges off Gaia’s sandwich so she doesn’t complain about it later—should suddenly have him in tears, but there it is. He weeps silently as he prepares lunch, glad that Gaia isn’t here to ask him why he’s crying. Is it because of Mumma? Yes, he thinks. Yes. I’m crying because the river has been restored to life and yet my wife remains dead. Why couldn’t it be the other way round?
The raw reality of Aurelia’s death is a maw he steps into again and again. All her clothes, perfumes, soaps, and shoes are still in her closet, untouched. Books she read, notebooks holding her writing. He keeps her phone charged, watches videos of her. Listens to her voice recordings, compulsively checks her Instagram account for updates, and each time he sees that the account has stalled at that last haunting image of fir trees whitened with snow, his heart lurches. She is dead—actually, stunningly, dead. How can that be?
He keeps looking for a map of some kind to navigate this alien terrain, help him find a way out of the nightmare. Grief