gave the driver your credit card number. Tipped him real nice, too. And don’t think that just because—”
She appears in the doorway, her face shadowed by a sunhat. “Fern,” she says. Then she looks at the floor. “What’s going on? What happened?”
“Ted happened,” I say.
I’m about to explain it to her, to expose this impossible story, tell her the truth about the man we shared a house with for so many years. But she sighs before I can. Adjusts the strap of her cotton dress.
“So your Experiment worked?” she asks Ted. “Bringing her back here? Telling her you were moving?” She looks at me, her eyes wary. “You remember it all now?”
My mouth falls open. “You knew?”
Then my mind scrambles. Even after everything, even with the keys of Ted’s typewriter scattered across the floor, I’m still desperate for a loophole. A place where this story veers off and I find my way out.
“But I… I talked to you,” I say. “The day I drove here. I asked you if I knew Astrid Sullivan, and you acted like I was crazy!”
“Yes,” Mara says. “That wasn’t great of me, dear. But I knew Ted would have a fit if I interfered with the Experiment.”
“So you sat back and let him do this? And back then—you let him kidnap me? Kidnap another girl? I can’t—”
“Believe me, I never loved that,” Mara cuts in. She puts her hand in the air, closes her eyes. “And it made it very difficult to love Ted. Why do you think we’re not together anymore?”
For a moment, I only gape at her. Then I breathe in. Force myself to exhale. “Then why didn’t you stop it?”
“I did. In my own way, at least. Afterward, when you didn’t remember, Ted wanted to tell you everything, but—”
“That’s true,” Ted says. “You know me, I always reveal the Experiment.”
Mara cuts a glance at him. “But I saw what he had done to you. And I couldn’t let him put you through that again. I made him keep silent, in order to protect you.”
The air pauses in my open mouth, going neither in nor out. “The time for protection,” I say, “had come and gone. Why didn’t you protect me when he took me?”
Mara sighs again, but this one is heavier than the other. “Ted said it was an important step in his work. He’s always respected my needs as an artist, even when he didn’t like it, so how could I interfere with what he needed to do? A person’s work is their life, Fern. It’s who they are.”
My stomach tightens. I put my hand on my belly, low enough to cradle the life inside.
“But you were parents, too,” I say. “Didn’t that count for anything? Wasn’t that as important as”—I swing my eyes toward Ted—“as beating Brennan, or”—turn back to Mara—“making art?”
“We never planned to have a child,” Mara says. “But I ended up pregnant, and we decided to keep you anyway. You’re alive today because we made that choice. So I think we did okay by you.”
“Okay by me?” My pulse spasms in my neck. “You were… you are”—and I say it now, finally—“terrible parents. Terrible people! I could have died while you were neglecting me.”
“Hey.” Ted’s voice is a single clap, and my head snaps toward him. “You can’t begin to know what a terrible parent is. I never laid a hand on you. I never—”
“You dragged me up the stairs by my hair!”
That stops him for a second. But not nearly long enough.
“You were never in real danger,” he says. “I wasn’t going to kill you. But me—there were times I wasn’t sure my father would stop. There was one night I actually hoped he would kill me. He cracked my ribs and punctured a lung. I couldn’t even breathe. You want to talk about pain?”
“You dragged me up the stairs by my hair,” I repeat, each word so slow it becomes its own sentence. “You tied me up with ropes. That wasn’t an Experiment. It was abuse. And who knows what you did to Astrid! You probably—”
My breath catches, cuts off the thought before I can finish it.
“Oh my god,” I say. And I can’t believe I’ve gone this long without drawing the most obvious conclusion. Somehow, I’m still so slow, I still don’t get it—and while I’ve been stammering and processing and throwing a typewriter around the room, she’s been waiting for me to save her.