weaving in and out and around our silence, as it becomes the story of a sinking ship and of us getting stranded on an island. She talks for an hour, at least, before her voice gets dry and thin, and she finally looks up at Ruby.
She opens her eyes. And, after a moment, shakes her head. “Nothing. He’s listening. What you’re saying is getting through—it’s like little fizzles of images here and there. I can’t hold onto any one of them long enough to chase it.”
“What are you saying?” Charlie asks.
He’s fading, he’s too far gone, he’s slipping away—
“Do you think he needs that one story?” I ask, finally. It feels too much like a fairy tale for me to really invest much hope into it. Instead of the right prince coming along to wake a sleeping beauty with a kiss, we have a boy who needs the right recipe of words and ideas and images.
“You guys really don’t remember it?” she asks. “Is there anyone else who might?”
So it all hangs on this: the one memory I can’t touch. Of course.
“My parents, but they’re gone,” Mia says. “He wrote the stories down, but he—”
I sit straight up. “He wrote them down. He wrote all of the stories down.”
“Yeah, and?” Mia asks. “Mom probably threw out all of his journals with the rest of our stuff before we moved—”
“No, she didn’t,” I interrupt. “Lucas gave them to me before you left.”
Her dark eyebrows shoot up. “And you seriously think that your parents kept them? That they’re still in the old house, and they’ll be happy to have you come up and knock on the door?”
I know she doesn’t mean that last part to be cruel; it’s the truth and we both know it, but it goes down burning like unflavored cough syrup.
“I didn’t leave them in my house,” I say. “I hid them in the tree house.”
Silence sweeps through the car as everyone absorbs this.
“Ruby,” Charlie says, taking his glasses off to rub at his forehead, “don’t tell me we’re going to push back your check-in in the hope that a bunch of notebooks haven’t been moved or ruined.”
“We are going to push back my check-in in the hope that a bunch of notebooks haven’t been moved or ruined,” Ruby says.
“Really?” Mia asks, clinging to that thought with every ounce of desperation I feel. I know what Ruby did to me, the way she stowed away my memories of her and retrieved them with all the ease of someone pulling old, dusty file boxes off a shelf. I knew this, but somehow I never once considered that she could help Lucas.
I reach down, brush the hair off his face. I reach into his shirt for the IV bag and hang it from one of the car’s plastic hooks, watching the liquid drain down the long, thin tube again. It sways each time the SUV hits a rough patch on the road.
“Not to be the proverbial rain on this proverbial parade, but please, God, tell me this house is somewhere in the great commonwealth of Virginia,” Liam says. “We’re cutting it close as it is.”
He’s right—I’ve been the picture of selfishness in going after Lucas, in focusing on him and him alone, when, according to Nico, we have an almost seven-hour drive through the darkening evening ahead of us.
“Bedford’s about forty-five minutes from Salem,” Ruby tells Liam, and it strikes me all over again how strange it is that despite how close our old towns are, we never would have met in another world.
She looks back, catching my eyes in the rearview mirror. We communicated like this at Thurmond, all stolen glances and raised brows, we had to—no speaking, no touching, nothing. I thought, with all the time we’d been apart, this connection between us would feel brittle, splintered, now that we’re back together. But what connects my life and hers is a thread that knots itself back together each time it begins to break. There is a Sam that exists only with Ruby, and when she’s gone, that piece of me will disappear.
Are you sure? she’s asking.
I hope my message comes through just as strongly. Yes, please, do everything you can.
Liam gives her one of those easy smiles, but it doesn’t diminish the tightness in his face. “Okay, copilot, you’re up.”
I don’t know if this will work. I have no idea what Ruby is planning to do, exactly, but I accept that things can’t always be in our control. The