The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue - V. E. Schwab Page 0,106

off—but at the slightest pressure, the clasp comes free, and the watch tumbles onto the twisted duvet.

It lands facedown, and there, on the reverse, Henry sees two words etched in hairline script.

Live well.

He scrambles out of the bed, away from the watch, stares at the timepiece as if expecting it to attack. But it just lies there, silent. His heart knocks inside his chest, so loud he can hear it, and he is back in the dark, rain dripping through his hair as the stranger smiles and holds out his hand.

Deal.

But that didn’t happen.

Henry looks at his palm and sees the shallow cuts, crusted over with blood. Notices the drops of brownish red dotting the sheets. The broken bottle. That was real, then, too. But the devil’s hand in his, that was a fever dream. Pain can do that, creep from waking hours into sleep. Once, when he was nine or ten, Henry had strep throat, the pain so bad that every time he drifted off to sleep, he dreamed of swallowing hot coals, of being trapped in burning buildings, the smoke clawing down his throat. The mind, trying to make sense of suffering.

But the watch—

Henry can hear a low, rhythmic knocking as he holds it to his ear. It doesn’t make any other sound (one night, soon, he will take the thing apart, and find the body empty of cogs, empty of anything to explain the creeping forward motion).

And yet, it is solid, heavy even, in his hand. It feels real.

The knocking gets louder, and then he realizes it’s not coming from the watch at all. It’s just the solid thud of knuckles on wood, someone at his door. Henry holds his breath, waits to see if it will stop, but it doesn’t. He backs away from the watch, the bed, grabs a clean shirt from the back of a chair.

“I’m coming,” he mutters, dragging it over his head. The collar snags on his glasses, and he catches his shoulder on the doorframe, swearing softly, hoping all the way from the bedroom to the front door that the person beyond will give up, go away. They don’t, so Henry opens the door, expecting to see Bea or Robbie or maybe Helen down the hall, looking again for her cat.

But it’s his sister, Muriel.

Muriel, who has been to Henry’s place exactly twice in the last five years. And once it was because she had too much herbal tea at a lunch meeting and couldn’t make it back to Chelsea.

“What are you doing here?” he asks, but she is already brushing past him, unwinding a scarf that’s more decorative than functional.

“Does family need a reason?”

The question is clearly rhetorical.

She turns, her eyes sweeping over him, the way he imagines they sweep over exhibits, and he waits for her usual assessment, some variation of you look like shit.

Instead his sister says, “You’re looking good,” which is strange, because Muriel has never been one to lie (she “doesn’t like to encourage fallacy in a world rife with empty speech”) and a passing glance in the hall mirror is enough to confirm that Henry does, in fact, look almost as rough as he feels.

“Beatrice texted me last night when you didn’t answer your phone,” she continues. “She told me about Tabitha, and the whole no-go. I’m sorry, Hen.” Muriel hugs him, and Henry doesn’t know where to put his hands. They end up hovering in the air around her shoulders until she lets go.

“What happened? Was she cheating?” And Henry wishes the answer were yes, because the truth is worse, the truth is that he simply wasn’t interesting enough. “It doesn’t matter,” continues Muriel. “Fuck her, you deserve better.”

He almost laughs, because he can’t count how many times Muriel pointed out that Tabitha was out of his league.

She glances around at the apartment.

“Did you redecorate? It’s really cozy in here.”

Henry surveys the living room, dotted with candles and art and other remnants of Tabitha. The clutter is his. The style was hers. “No.”

His sister is still standing. Muriel never sits, never settles, never even perches.

“Well, I can see you’re fine,” she says, “but next time, answer your phone. Oh,” she adds, taking her scarf back, already halfway to the door. “Happy New Year.”

It takes him a moment to remember.

Rosh Hashanah.

Muriel sees the confusion on his face and grins. “You would have made such a bad rabbi.”

He doesn’t disagree. Henry would normally go home—they both would—but David couldn’t get away from his hospital shift this