“Sure you don’t.” May cast her a glance. “I’ve heard the shit people say about my mother when they think I’m not listening. They say it about me, too.”
“They might. I don’t.” Violet looked away from the blueprints. “I know we’ve rarely been on the same side here. But I promise, we both want the same thing: for this town to be safe.”
“I know,” May said. “But I’m not so sure my family has ever kept it safe.”
Violet had never heard May say something like that before. She certainly had her own doubts about the Hawthornes, about all the founders, but it was different to hear it from someone who was always so tightly wound. Her actions indicated that she didn’t approve of her mother’s conduct, but she was still helping Augusta. Or at least, Violet had thought she was.
“What do you mean?” She tried to keep her voice gentle.
“It’s complicated.” May’s glossy lips were parted slightly, her eyes a little unfocused, like she was watching something that only she could see. “Being Augusta Hawthorne’s daughter, I felt like I had something to prove—to show I was worthy of her consideration. Justin made our family look good, and she kept all our secrets hidden. I never really understood what she wanted from me, but I knew that if I wanted her to care about me I’d have to be an asset, too.”
“But you read the cards. Doesn’t that make you a major asset?”
“You’d think so.” May frowned. “She still defended Justin, though. She still lied for him. Because he knows how to make people care about him, and I… I don’t.”
Violet remembered, in a rush, a part of Rosie that she did not like to think about. The girl who’d easily made friends while Violet ate lunch alone. The girl who let Violet tag along, sometimes out of pity. Rosie had been her best friend, her only friend, but Rosie had made a much bigger world for herself that Violet had never belonged in.
Violet still missed her sister terribly. But she knew what it was like to feel adjacent to the spotlight.
“Yeah, about that,” Violet said. “Justin’s my friend, but I have never understood Four Paths’ infatuation with him.”
May snorted. “Honestly, me neither. He can’t even make toast without setting something on fire, he won’t stop using Axe, and his room smells like something died in it.”
“Forget the corruption. This is the real mystery in town.”
May giggled, then paused, pain rushing over her face.
“Mystery solved, though,” she said. “They don’t like Justin anymore. And I don’t know how to be confident like him or powerful like Augusta. I can’t fill the holes they’ve left with their mistakes, but I keep trying anyway.”
“So don’t try to be them,” Violet said. “Be you. Whoever you are, whatever strengths you have.”
“You sound like a birthday card,” May said, rolling her eyes, but Violet could tell from her tone and the slight smile on her face that her words had landed.
They fell into a silence that was a lot more comfortable than the one before as they went back to riffling through the archives. Violet knew that Harper and Justin thought this kind of thing was boring, but for her it was a welcome break from seemingly endless patrolling. Now that her powers had an offensive use, she’d spent a lot of time in the woods, charting the spread of the corruption. It was grueling and demoralizing work that left her physically exhausted, so exhausting her brain was a nice change.
“Huh,” May murmured beside her. Violet turned and saw that she was examining a fragment of something—a piece of paper ripped down the center. It was ancient and yellowed, so fragile it looked as if it could crumble in her hands if not for the plastic sleeve someone had thought to store it in. “Where’s the rest of it?”
Violet’s entire body froze.
“Hey,” she said, trying to stay calm. “Can I see that for a second?”
“Sure.” May placed it carefully on the table. “It’s a shame it’s so torn up. Look…” She tapped the name and date in the corner. “They must have saved it because it’s from Belinda Carlisle. She was one of Thomas Carlisle’s kids—Harper’s great-great-grandmother, I think. Although I guess it’s a letter she never sent.”
Violet stared at the scrawled script, the date. October 24, 1910.
It was unmistakable. The handwriting was exactly the same as the fragment she’d found in the Sullivan archives.
Her mind whirled. May Hawthorne was on her side for now, yes, but could she trust her with whatever this could be? Just a few weeks ago, the girl had been threatening to storm her house in order to yank Harper to the tree. Trust was a precious and fleeting thing in Four Paths.
But May had also given Violet her memories back. And she was starting to open up to her—their conversation was clear evidence of that. Violet didn’t want the families to be divided the way they’d been for so many years, and that wouldn’t change if she continued to keep her cards close to her chest.
“I have the rest of the letter,” she said.
May’s head shot up, her eyes wide. “What? How?”
“It’s a long story.”
Violet transported her half of the letter from her bedroom to the dining room as carefully as she could. The edges did not fit together perfectly, but it was close enough that Violet could clearly see that they were in fact two halves of the same letter. Pieces were missing from the middle, destroying the occasional word or phrase, but not so much that she couldn’t decipher the general meaning.
Silas, my dear—
I regret to inform you that Millie, Clark, and I have discussed your proposal, and we must decline.
“Silas?” Violet turned to May.
“A Sullivan, I think.” May frowned. “Millie is definitely Millie Hawthorne, and we know this is from a Carlisle—”
“So Clark probably has a creepy taxidermy dedicated to him somewhere.”
“Probably, yeah.”
“What they’re saying…” Violet stared at the note. “About the Beast. About the founders—”
“No,” May whispered. “No, that can’t be true.”
“Can’t it?” Violet asked. Behind them, the forest beckoned, trees that were slowly becoming tipped with silver. A world the founders had supposedly bound themselves to in order to protect it. But Violet thought suddenly of a phrase the Beast had taunted her with. It had stayed with her for weeks now—Do you really think I was bound here out of altruism?
“We draw our powers from the Beast. Our families trapped it. They use it. Why does it seem so impossible that they made it?”
May barely remembered going home. She was normally a cautious driver, but today she was careless with the silver family pickup, heedless of the fact that she’d only gotten her license a few months ago. She turned the radio up the highest it would go, pop music blaring through the speakers as she careened down the bumpy roads.
She didn’t want to think about the letter she and Violet had found or the picture she’d taken of it, now stored in the phone stuffed in the cupholder. But the loud thumping of the music and her tires screeching on the road weren’t enough to drown out the worries swimming in her mind.