sense. But by then, it was too late. I never figured any of it out in time to actually make a difference, until today.”
“Sera?” Kori had made the connection, but she couldn’t understand it yet. But then, neither could I.
“Here.” I took the notebook and flipped through the pages, looking for the familiar entry. I’d read them all a million times, but that one had always stood out, because of the directive.
“Damn, Kris,” she mumbled as I scanned page after page. “How long were you two...a thing?”
“Six years.” I didn’t realize my sister was staring at me until I found the right entry and looked up. “Off and on,” I amended, with one glance at her stunned expression. “Mostly off, for the last two, when... Cavazos. Then Hadley.”
It hurt to think those thoughts, but it hurt even more to speak them.
“Oh, shit.” She covered her mouth with one hand. “So, you and Elle were still together when she met Ruben?”
“We were never really together. Not like that. Not exclusively.” I’d tried for exclusivity, but Noelle was the kind of bird that dies in captivity. She’d needed the freedom to soar wherever the wind took her, and it took her away from me as often as it brought her back.
But in the end, freedom killed her faster than captivity ever could have, surely. And maybe I would have seen it coming, if I could have interpreted that damn notebook.
When I found my way out of my own head, Kori was still staring at me, waiting for more information. For the glimpse into a side of Elle’s life she’d never seen.
“She left after high school, like everyone else.” Anne and Liv had gone to college. Kori had attended the school of life and nearly flunked that the way she’d nearly flunked high school, because she refused to play by the rules. I’d had no better college prospects than she’d had, so I’d stayed with Gran and Kenley, working for anyone who needed a shadow-walker. I hadn’t been picky about the jobs, then. I hadn’t understood that not all of the syndicates’ recruits were volunteers.
I hadn’t realized I’d become a subcontractor helping them fill quotas until something that went very wrong turned out to be very right. I’d spent most of the decade after high school trying to make up for what I’d done the year I was nineteen, but Noelle had...
Well, no one really knew where Noelle went after graduation. She just kind of disappeared about the same time I was turning my life around. But...
“Elle came back more often than the rest of you,” I told Kori as I turned the pages of my notebook. “And when she was in town, we’d just pick up where we’d left off.”
That was all my sister needed to know. She didn’t need to hear about ice cream in bed, and all-night Abbot and Costello marathons, and the conversations we’d had when Elle was awake.
She didn’t need to know that every time Elle left town again, she’d sneak out of my bed in the middle of the night, with no note. No goodbye. It might be months before I saw her again. Once, it was years. And she’d arrive just as suddenly as she’d left. With no warning.
Until she stopped arriving.
“You found it?” Kori’s voice brought me back to the present, as if time was a rubber band being snapped against my skin.
It stung.
“Yeah. Here.”
She followed my finger to a passage written in blue ink, nearly eight years earlier. Noelle had been twenty. I’d been twenty-two. “Take the girl in the yellow scarf.” Kori looked up at me again. “That’s it? Just, ‘Take the girl in the yellow scarf’?”
“Yeah. It meant nothing until today, when I saw Sera standing there in that yellow scarf.”
Fresh skepticism swam in my sister’s eyes. “How do you know she meant this girl? This yellow scarf? Is she seriously the only girl in a yellow scarf you’ve ever seen?”
I thought about that for a second. “Yeah, actually, I think she is.” The only one I remembered, anyway. And that had to mean something, right? If I’d seen another girl in a yellow scarf, I hadn’t noticed her, and that had to mean something, too, right? “Anyway, I know because the moment I saw her, I thought of this. And not just my handwriting, blue ink on white lines. I thought of the night Noelle said this. The night I wrote it down. It just felt...” Right. “It felt like this