As the music washes over her, she understands her father’s words to Phee. He does love her, just as she loved her mother and Trey. It’s just that the cello is a part of him, a part of her. Cut that away, and what’s left is something undead, like a zombie. A tortured thing without a soul.
“Beautiful music to die to,” Ethan says.
Allie shakes her head, which is a mistake. The room spins faster, and she closes her eyes. It takes two attempts, but she finally coordinates her mouth and tongue to shape words.
“Have you ever seen anybody die?”
Ethan doesn’t answer. His eyes have drifted closed, his head nodding forward.
“Ethan. Have you?”
“What?”
“Have you seen anybody die?”
Still he doesn’t answer.
Allie watches Trey die all over again, as if her closed eyelids are a movie screen. His body twitching, convulsing. The desperate, ragged breaths. It wasn’t beautiful, at all. It was horrible and wrong.
Is this different?
She tries to force her eyes back open, but they are too heavy. Her limbs are weighted. She fights it.
The phone. There’s something about the phone.
A dim memory, her own phone hurtling into the ocean. Ethan’s lecture about phones and tracking devices.
“Whose phone?”
Ethan blinks slowly. He’s sliding out of his chair, leaning sideways. “Mine.”
No. You don’t have a phone. You said.
She’s waiting for the answer that never comes before she realizes she hasn’t spoken, that the words are only in her head. It’s so hard to think, the music making it even harder. She can’t give in, not now, something is wrong.
Allie wrestles with her body, trying to make it sit up straight, to make her arms and hands work. Little by little, she manages to fumble one of the pill bottles into her hand. This seems like the most important thing, a reason not to die. Her vision keeps going in and out, but she can just read the name on the prescription.
Ethan Bannister.
Not right. A doctor wouldn’t prescribe all these for him.
And then she sees the letters following the name. Sr.
But Ethan’s dad is dead. He said so. Died from suicide years ago. These pills can’t be his, unless that was a lie, just like the phone.
Her tongue is made of cotton, and her lips are disconnected from her brain. She manages to get her eyes half open.
Ethan’s breath snores in and out of his throat. Drool trails down over his chin. He’s not beautiful anymore.
Her brain is a small spark of consciousness, but it flickers like a candle in the wind.
Ethan lied. About the phone. About his father.
She doesn’t want to die as part of a lie.
Call for help.
She reaches for his phone, but her fingers won’t work right, and it slips away, out of reach. She tries to stand, but her legs seem to belong to some other girl and drop her onto the floor. The carpet stinks of mold and old tobacco. Her eyelids are heavy while the rest of her body is floating. Moving is hard, too hard. She’d like to say goodbye to her father, to tell him that she loves him. But even that seems too far away. Maybe it’s too late for it to matter.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
PHEE
Phee lays a clean white cover over the instruments she’s working on and puts her tools away. Everything as usual, everything in its place, except for her thoughts. She’s thoroughly at war with herself, not that this is anything new.
“Obsessed,” “incorrigible,” “obstinate”—these are words that have woven themselves into her being from the time she was a very small child. Every lecture that came her way from her parents or her teachers involved the word “too.” Too loud, too excited, too bossy, too opinionated, too much.
Somewhere along the line, she’s made peace with that, has turned the words into an inside joke for her own private amusement. Her business cards read:
Ophelia MacPhee, Luthier
Your instrument is my obsession
She has to make a decision and make it soon. A vacation rental cabin somewhere in the woods or the cabin she has in mind. Just because Braden’s sister didn’t want to talk to her doesn’t mean she can’t figure out where it is. Does she proceed? Or take a step back. Let Braden and Allie find their footing with each other. At least the cello is in a place where she can keep an eye on it.
She’s just getting ready to climb into bed and let go of the day when her phone rings.
Braden.
Her hand moves toward the phone in slow motion, and her voice sounds