For a moment I can’t tell if she’s talking about herself and the rumors surrounding Nick Tate or she’s simply pointing out the obvious about eternal life.
“I see you are confused.”
“OK.” I laugh. “I’ll admit to that.” My laugh carries across the pool to the outdoor kitchen and makes Sydney and Jax direct their smiles at us for a moment. Then they go back to whatever they’re talking about.
“Let me explain better.” She pauses and her blue eyes roll up as she considers what to say. She’s still the same Sasha to me. Same blonde hair. Same pretty little face. She’s still thirteen in my mind. She will always be the little girl in braces. She will always be the heartbroken kid crying her eyes out in a hotel room after Nick left. She will always be the empty shell left behind after she shot Nick in the head that day.
It doesn’t matter how I see her. Sasha Cherlin-Aston-Barlow writes her own script in this life. She has always been the one in control. She’s not a little girl. Those braces are long gone. She has been very happy for many years now and the fact that she has spelled it out very clearly that she is not interested in knowing Adam’s secret, even if it’s about Nick Tate, tells me all I need to know about her mental health these days.
She adjusted.
She moved on.
She lived.
That’s what a good little Zero girl does.
“Sometimes,” Sasha says, “ignorance is bliss, Merc.”
“Right.” I chuckle again. “Yeah. Agreed.”
“Because if we don’t know what we’re missing, do we ever truly miss it?”
“What’s this got to do with eternal life?”
“Turns out, almost nothing, actually. But you gotta watch out for the believers, right? Because belief is a lot more powerful than you think.”
“You’re in a very profound mood today.”
She nods. “Yeah. This thing with Adam.”
“What about it?”
“I dunno. It’s a thread, I think.”
“And you don’t want me to pull it.”
“No. But—” She looks away, but just as quickly looks back at me. “I would like to save Donovan. I would like to save everyone, actually. But I don’t have any say in most of that.”
“And you have a say in this,” I finish for her.
She nods. “A small one. Obviously, ignorance is still bliss. But it’s too late to be ignorant now, isn’t it?”
I nod my agreement.
Then we drop it. Because she told me what she wanted me to know—she wants to save Donovan but she doesn’t want to find Nick and whatever I find when I pull on this thread, she wants it to end with her blissful ignorance.
The next day Sasha and Jax pack up their kids in their truck and I pack up Sydney and our kids into ours. Then I follow them up to Fort Collins, Colorado for a much-needed, impromptu vacation with some old friends.
But I don’t stay in Fort Collins.
I call up a good friend with a small plane and he picks me up at an airstrip about forty miles east of Fort Collins like we’re livin’ in the old days.
So three days later I’m sitting in a truck in front of a cottage in Key West wondering if this is the moment when it all goes wrong.
Because somehow, in the time between my convo with Sasha and this moment right here, I became a believer.
CHAPTER THREE - WENDY
BIRTHDAY #17
7 YEARS AGO
Where do I come from?
Well. There is a lane in the woods.
The woods are in Kentucky.
I once asked Chek, “Why Kentucky?” And he said, “It was either here or West Virginia. And West Virginia is too close to the assholes.”
That was it. That’s all I got out of him.
I was young at the time, maybe seven, so I didn’t get it. Took me years, actually, to figure out who the ‘assholes’ were.
He was talking about Washington, D.C.
The lane is crowded on both sides by trees. Buckeyes, and black walnuts, and red maples. The whole place is thick with them as soon as you turn down the narrow gravel lane. Chek liked the overgrown look, the sense that the trees are in charge here. The way their enormous boughs stretch out over the road like a canopy and how traveling down the lane that leads to the cabin is almost a lesson in claustrophobia.
I am seventeen years old today and Chek has been dead for seventeen days.
There is a code in this. These numbers. They mean something. They say something. It’s just… I’m not sure I speak that language right now. There are two warring thoughts running through my mind as I pull the truck up to the mailbox at the end of the lane.
One is, You are a disease, Wendy. You are a sickness.
The other is, It’s not your fault.
I believe them both. That’s the hard part about being me. It’s all true. Everything they say and think about who and what I am, it’s simply all true.
Anyway. The mailbox is not a box, it’s a pillar of stacked river stone. Smooth, dark gray stones that we actually pulled out of our own river in the woods back when I was six to make this mailbox.
The pillar is five feet tall, two feet square, and it’s hollow inside. It’s lined with a super-sized trash bag. There is a lock. There are four of them, actually. And a slot on the front side that looks like the slots on real mailboxes that you see at the post office. The kind that keeps the weather out. This is so the mail person can drop letters inside the box. There is nowhere to put packages here. This is not a place you have packages sent. Just letters.
When I open the mailbox there are maybe… I dunno. A hundred of them?
They are birthday cards. All of them. Every single envelope is a birthday card for me.
And I am suddenly very tired of living. I don’t really see the point, but I have this overflowing sense of self-preservation, so don’t worry. I’m not going to kill myself. Even if I wanted to end it like that, and I don’t, I wouldn’t be able to.
Now I have no problem going out doing a crazy job. But I’ve done plenty of those and I’m not dead yet. Plus, no one is gonna hire me now.
Chek is dead.
The jobs are over.
I am just… a leftover now. Just one of Adam’s leftovers.
I gather up the edges of the bag, pull it out, and shove it into the passenger seat of my truck. Then I lock the box back up, get back in, and crawl down the lane. The gravel crunches under the tires, but this is all very familiar. Only the mail hurts. The rest of it is fine.
It’s fine.
The cabin is literal. An honest-to-God log fucking cabin. The kind with the mortar between the logs and everything. It is thirty feet long and twenty feet wide. The front door is a thick slab of wood that could probably stop a bullet if it had to.
On either side are tall, skinny windows. The windows almost break the rules. They come off as trendy, partly because they are. People are so into the farmhouse look these days. But they aren’t meant to be trendy. They are original. Each one is split into sixteen tiny panes lined with lead. And when you look through them, you have to bob your head a little to find a clear view because the glass is over a hundred years old and very wavy and distorted.
I like the windows. They give the place a certain kind of split personality. Everything else is all rustic and crude. It’s a lot of raw-edge wood, and stone, and tin. Like the guy who built it was one of those trail-blazing Daniel Boone kind of people but the lady he talked into doing this whole wilderness shit with him was some East Coast society bitch who demanded these extravagant windows so she could hold on to a little piece of her civilized life back in Philadelphia or wherever the fuck she came from.