that she’d lost him. It was stone in her heart; that she’d pushed away someone so good. What a cliché to say she didn’t even realize how much she loved him until she’d screwed it all up. Her past had bubbled up like a noxious gas and poisoned her present.
The Henry Hudson was thick with traffic, the city disappearing in the rearview mirror. Hank was a hulking presence. When he’d tossed his pack in the truck, it had clanked heavily, and she could only imagine what was inside. Was he really going to do this? Were they really going to do this?
And yet, wasn’t there also a giddy anticipation? The terrible thrill of imagined revenge tingled through her nerve endings. The idea of facing someone who terrorized you as a child and making him pay, there was a kind of comic-book justice to that. It was a Technicolor idea, bright with reds, oranges, yellows and blues, one that recast everything that came before it. It turned her from a black-and-white figure, cowering in fear, into someone powerful, ready to make things right.
She hadn’t talked about her rage much. Maybe with Dr. Cooper, early on. The size and scope of her anger; it was nothing she’d ever experienced, and it didn’t even feel like it fit in her body. But when she thought about Tess, about Kreskey, about how they shouldn’t have even been where they were, about how a million little things went wrong—Tess’s mom called into work, the tire flat on Tess’s bike. The injustice of it swelled, filled her—there was a scream of rage bigger than the world lodged in her center. If she let it loose, it might shatter everything with its terrible pitch and volume.
She’d swallowed it, held it inside. Like the box.
They drove and drove. When they entered The Hollows city limits, she sensed a change in him—even though they hadn’t exchanged a word in miles. He sat up straighter, the rhythm of his breath shifted.
“Hank.”
He turned to look at her, then back at the road. She’d done a little research on this, what might be wrong with Hank, talked to a psych student she knew.
“I mean, split personality disorder—like a Sybil kind of a thing where there are different personalities, characters so to speak—it’s rare. Like so rare that many doctors don’t think it exists,” he told her over a falafel in the park. She’d dated Steve briefly in her freshman year, but the chemistry was more friendship than anything, and the few kisses they’d shared were forgettable.
“On the other hand, childhood trauma is very tricky. In extreme cases, the psyche will split. It’s a survival mechanism, really. But it’s more like two sides of the same coin—a stronger self emerges to protect the child self. There might be some dissociation, fugue states where one part of the self is more in control. This might lead to blackouts, foggy memories, blank spots in recall.”
The park had bustled around them, but Rain was back in the tree hollow. Steve had watched her carefully, put a hand on her shoulder as if intuiting her bad memories. He was wiry, with a few days of dark stubble, big soulful eyes.
“Jung called them splinter-psyches,” he said. “One part of the ego regresses. Another part basically grows up too fast in response to trauma. A kind of false self emerges. May reemerge in times of great stress later.”
“Does one self remember the actions of the other self?” Rain asked.
Steve shrugged. “Possibly yes. Maybe not. It might be like the memories we have of our dreams—disjointed, nonsensical. Our dream self is effectively another self. It’s probably best likened to that.”
She remembered Hank’s face, how confused he’d seemed. It was as if he’d awoken from a dream.
“Hank?” she said again.
He didn’t even answer her.
“Rain?” Gillian still on the phone. “Are you there? Girlfriend. What’s eating you?”
She parked outside the gate to Hank’s property.
What in the hell did she think she was going to do? Ring his buzzer. Yeah. Yes. She was going to ring his buzzer and tell him what she was thinking, what she was remembering, what she suspected him of doing. But then what? She’d be destroying him. Ruining his life. Again.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“Rain.”
“Gil,” she said. “I have to go. Hey, don’t call the house, okay? Greg thinks I’m with you.”
She ended the call before Gillian could say anything else.
She nearly jumped out of her skin as the gate swung open and Hank pulled out; she saw his