The Unexpected Everything - Morgan Matson Page 0,160

getting harder to breathe. Was this really how it was going to end? Without saying anything else, without even getting to hug Bertie one last time?

“Clark,” I called, when he was almost to the door. He turned back to me slowly, keys still in his hand, his expression wary. “What happens?” I blurted, before I could stop myself. “With Karl and Marjorie?” It was such a small thing compared to everything that had just happened, but it was a world we had built together, and I needed to know.

Clark looked at me for a moment, then unlocked the door. I thought for a second he was going to ignore me, but then I saw him unclip Bertie’s leash and let him in before he turned and crossed the driveway toward me, stopping when there were still several feet between us. “You really want to know?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Well, Marjorie kills Karl.”

I drew in a breath—it felt like someone had just pressed on a bruise. “What?”

“Oh, yeah,” Clark said, his voice certain, like this was the only answer, like there was no other way this could go. “She finally remembered that she was an assassin. She was just pretending to be someone else, but in the end, it wasn’t who she was.”

Clark’s voice was cold and dispassionate, and I had never heard him speak that way before. When I thought about the gentle way he’d talked to me when I’d first arrived at the house, not even an hour before, I knew that he sounded this way because of me—that I was the one who’d done this to him. I bit my lip hard and felt tears, the ones that had been lurking behind my eyes, threaten to emerge. “No,” I managed, shaking my head, but before I could say more, Clark was continuing on.

“And then Marjorie dies too,” he said, folding his arms over his chest. “After she kills Karl. The king’s men kill her in a tavern. They can’t have her talking. It’s best to just erase the evidence, so it’s like it never happened. The end.”

“You can’t just do that.”

Clark looked at me for a long moment. “I just did,” he said, then turned and walked back up the driveway, then into the house, letting the door slam behind him.

I walked to my car, and my hands were shaking so hard it took two attempts to get my key in the ignition, and it wasn’t until I’d gotten the car started and driven two streets away that I pulled over and really let myself cry.

Chapter EIGHTEEN

Maya looked at me from across the table at Flask’s, concern on her face that didn’t seem to match her purple and pink hair. She pushed aside her blended coffee drink—pumpkin spice. It was the last week of August, but apparently, as far as Flask’s was concerned, that meant it was fall. “How are you doing?” she asked, leaning toward me.

“I’m fine,” I said automatically, taking a drink of my iced latte, since this was just what I said now.

It was what I told my dad when I passed him in the kitchen or the hallway. We weren’t doing our Sundays in the study with movies anymore, and we hadn’t had a dinner, just the two of us, since Peter had appeared in the kitchen. My dad was busier now, but he was still suggesting places we could eat and threatening to make me watch more Westerns. But I had a feeling he was just going through the motions. And even though he kept telling me he hadn’t decided if he was running again, I could read the writing on the wall. So I found a way out of everything he proposed. I told him I was busy, that I had plans with my friends, that I had to work. I didn’t want to fall back into the habit of spending time with him like he was going to be around, when clearly he had one foot out the door.

It had been two weeks since my friends and I had imploded, two weeks since Clark and I had broken up, and it felt more like months. For the first few days I was texting everyone—both on our group thread and individually—but when the silence became deafening, I stopped. The silence of my phone just underscored how alone I was now. I could sometimes get Tom to text me back, but never for very long. He was clearly worried he was being disloyal to Palmer