“I have an idea,” she whispered, “for how you could do it right.”
“Do you?”
“Yeah.” Maybe someone else would have played it coy, but Violet had never been particularly subtle. And if Isaac was going to date her he would have to deal with that, so there was no point in trying to hide it. No point in trying to pretend to be anybody else. “You could stop freaking out and just kiss me.”
Isaac’s mouth widened into a sharp, incredulous grin. “Well. If you insist.”
He leaned across the piano bench. The kiss was a slow, gentle thing at first; Violet felt the tension in both of them, the fear of doing it all wrong.
The past few months in Four Paths had been a time of endings, of letting go. And in the wake of everything, Violet decided that she was tired of being scared. Of guarding herself from happiness.
So she gave herself permission to sink into the moment, his hands on her back, her arms curling gently around his neck, as, all around them, the room filled with the warm golden light of the sun setting behind the trees.
It was time, at last, to start building something new.
They met at the lake, which Harper supposed was fitting, even though it was early December and the weather was not cooperating. The water was beginning to freeze over, a thin crust of ice forming at the edges of the lakebed that wouldn’t thaw until spring. But outside was preferable to the Carlisle cottage. Slowly but surely, things were improving with Harper’s siblings, and she was overall glad she’d come back. However, one of the things Harper really hadn’t missed about home was sharing a bedroom. Privacy was a complete impossibility in there, and she refused to have this talk with Justin in front of her siblings, who had a terrible habit of making kissing noises at them.
“Too important to text me, huh?” The tip of Justin’s nose was already turning red from the cold, and a giant gray scarf was wrapped around his chin. Harper was still grateful, every time she looked at him, that the silver veins and iridescent tears were gone.
But today looking at him didn’t make her feel relieved—it filled her with dread.
She took a deep breath and spat the words out. “I got in.”
Harper hadn’t been expecting it so soon, but when she’d gotten home from school that afternoon it had been waiting in her inbox. Early admission to her top-choice SUNY—and a hefty merit aid package to boot.
Justin’s face transformed immediately. He grinned, wrapping her in a hug. “That’s amazing!”
“It is,” Harper agreed, drawing back. “But I’m going to accept. And it means…”
His face changed. “It means you’re leaving this summer.”
She nodded.
It had been a strange few weeks. She and Justin had mutually agreed to simply focus on their own families in the immediate aftermath of the Gray dissolving. It had been necessary in order to survive the increased scrutiny of the town, and Harper had been determined to keep her promise to Seth and Mitzi to be an actual part of their lives.
The town knew what had happened now. She had braced herself for infamy again, but to her surprise they seemed more stunned than anything else. The fact that the original founders had lied sent shock waves through all of Four Paths, and Harper had noticed the changes not because of how they treated her and her friends, but how they treated the town itself.
The founder portraits in the town archives had been put in deep storage, the lobby placed under renovation. A new sheriff was appointed, one with no connection whatsoever to the founders. Mayor Storey had sponsored a cleanup effort where people helped clear the debris from the woods, now that it was no longer contagious. A copse of trees still grew around the founders’ seal, their roots slowly breaking apart the stone. Everyone seemed too frightened to try to move them.
Harper had watched all of this with the full knowledge that she was letting life happen around her, that she wasn’t grasping the freedom she’d fought so hard to earn. And then Violet and Isaac decided to start dating, and college decisions happened, and she knew she couldn’t put it off any longer.
“The thing is,” she said now, “I know it feels like a long time away. But I also know that you’re staying.”
Justin nodded. “I can’t leave May and my mom.”
“I know,” Harper said. And hesitated.
She wanted him and he wanted her. That much was clear; that much had been clear for a long time. But Harper was also very tired of Four Paths. She’d been thinking for the last few weeks about how good it would be to leave all of this behind, now that it was actually possible. It was over now, and she was ready to go. To find out who she was in a world without founders and beasts and blood.
She could not do that if she was dating Justin Hawthorne. He would always be as much a part of this town as the tree he’d been named after, and she would never ask him to be anything else. But she would not make herself someone different for him, either.
And although she knew they had an expiration date, that kissing him now would only force them to have this conversation in the not-so-distant future, part of her wanted to do it anyway.
She steadied herself and thought again of how much they’d both survived. It was better if they did this now, before it could hurt even more than it already would.
“We don’t work as a couple,” she whispered, her voice trembling. “Not like this.”
She studied Justin’s face, waiting desperately for a reaction, but it didn’t change.
“I love you.” The words rang out in the cold winter air, through the tall, dark skeletons of the trees. “And I think we both know that you deserve to get out of here, without anyone holding you back.”
Harper stared at him, tears freezing on the edges of her eyelashes. “I’m sorry. I wish—”
“No, you don’t.”
His smile made her break inside, gave her a massive twinge of phantom pain. And she understood that he’d been expecting this on some level. That he was willing to bear it. She hugged him, sniffling against his chest, and he held her as she cried, until at last, she was finally ready to let him go.
One day this would fade. They would grow up and move on and he would be a distant memory, or maybe even a friend.
But that did not stop the unbearable sadness she felt now. So she did not walk home after Justin left—instead, she took the familiar path through the woods and up the Saunderses’ snow-covered front steps. When Violet opened the door and saw the tears on her face, she hugged her without speaking.
“Boys,” Harper managed to choke out, and Violet yanked her up to the spare room where she had lived for a few weeks, a room that Violet had told her in no uncertain terms she would always be welcome in.
“You can cry as much as you want,” Violet told her as they sat cross-legged on the floor, Orpheus prowling at the edges of the woolen rug, his stripy gray fur gleaming in the light of the candles Violet had lit. They were a reminder of those desperate few hours they’d all spent together at Isaac’s apartment, a night where Harper thought the world might really end. “This is a no-judgment zone.”
“I just hate this,” Harper said. “That I know it’s right, and it hurts anyway.”
“Of course it hurts right now,” Violet said as the candles flickered and the world around them flickered, too. “But it’s not going to hurt you forever.”