Wilder Girls - Rory Power Page 0,60

doesn’t say a word.

I raise my eyebrows. “What?”

The flare light catches on the curve of her mouth as she smiles. “You don’t really want an answer to that question.”

“No, come on.” Maybe I’m goading her. But I can’t stand the way she’s looking at me, like she knows something I don’t. “Say it.”

“I just…I guess you know a different Byatt than I do,” Reese says, shoving her hands into her pockets. “Because I’m not sure she ever missed anything in her life.”

“We’re her best friends, Reese.” I blink back the sudden sting of tears, feel them catch and freeze on my eyelashes. She can’t be right. What has all this been for if Byatt doesn’t want to come back to us? “Her best friends. Don’t you think that matters to her?”

“Well,” Reese says, and there’s an edge to her voice, a warning, “let’s not pretend. It was the two of you and then me, and that’s fine. Because people are messy and that’s how it goes. But let’s not pretend.”

Shame curdling quick, because she’s right, and I hate that I’m proud of it, proud of how much closer I got to Byatt than she ever did. But I’ll never tell her that. “I think it’s pretty selfish of you,” I say instead, “to be pissed about that when Byatt is God knows where, suffering through God knows what.”

“I’m not pissed.” She shrugs. “It’s just true. That’s all.”

I should never have brought her. I should have known she wouldn’t understand. “Why are you even here?” I snap. Around us, the patchwork walls of the house pressing in, the birch looming, Byatt’s initials traced in blood. “Why did you come at all?”

Reese doesn’t answer. But I can hear it all the same. Everything about her—the sorrow buried in her eyes, the tightness of her mouth—all of it screaming the same thing:

For you, Hetty.

It’s too much. I can’t even say I never asked her to, because I did—I did, over and over again. I’m doing this for Byatt, and Reese is doing this for me.

Fuck.

“I need some air,” I say.

I stumble out the back of the house into what used to be a small square of yard. Around me, Raxter Irises, their stems crumpling underfoot, and I think of the vases full of them that we kept everywhere at school, their petals blackening as they fell, of the dried bouquet tucked up among the pictures on the mantelpiece of the Harker house. Her parents’ wedding bouquet, Reese told me that first day we visited. Even after her mom left and they cleared out all the pictures, she kept that.

Was it really so clear to her? That it was me and Byatt first, and her second? Even with how badly I’ve always wanted Reese closer, that didn’t change the fact that Byatt was the one who waited for me at breakfast every morning. Byatt was the one who cut my hair and showed me which side to part it on. Byatt was the one who put the bones in my body.

I drop down onto the porch, cradle my numb hands to my mouth, and breathe the feeling back into them. Byatt is what matters right now. She’s the only thing. Soon the people on the other end of the walkie will show up to collect Mona. Wherever they take her, that’s where Byatt will be. And I’ll find a way to get there.

I’m expecting Camp Nash, where the Navy and the CDC are headquartered. And it turns my stomach to think of Byatt taken off Raxter. I never knew her off the island. The closest I ever got to it was that day on the ferry across from the mainland, when I first saw her, sea laid out behind her, and Raxter on the horizon, her hair unfurling in the wind. When I find her on the mainland, will she still be my Byatt?

A noise from inside the house. I leap to my feet, grab the shotgun. Somebody’s talking, somebody who isn’t Reese.

I barrel into the house. Nobody here but us.

“You heard that?” Reese says, and I nod.

“Welch coming back, maybe? Or someone from Camp Nash?”

“It sounded different,” she says. “Familiar. I don’t know.”

“There.” I point out through the shattered walls into the trees, where something else is moving, coming our way. The shape of a man.

CHAPTER 14

I raise the shotgun. Too dark to see a face, but there’s something familiar about the build of him, something that stays my finger