Keep moving, I tell myself. If I stop, I might break through the ice—the water flat and black beneath my feet.
Miners dropped things into the lake to appease the wilderness, Mr. Perkins said. A place to make offerings. To quell the forest. But I have not brought an offering. Only myself.
I’m nearly to the center when I see it: the change in the surface of the ice, the reflection of stars on water. A hole has been broken away in front of me.
A hole in the ice.
I inch closer to the edge of the jagged opening—spiderweb cracks fanning out around it, turning the black ice white along the veins. A hole in the ice. Large enough for a person to fall through.
Is this where Max broke through the ice and fell into the deep, hands pawing at the surface? His eyes wide while his limbs went numb—becoming useless—and the others only looked on? I try to imagine Oliver standing over him, watching as Max drew in his last breath—his chin, his eyes, dipping beneath the surface. Did Oliver stare in shock with the others? Or did they laugh side-splitting laughs? Did they want him to die?
Did Oliver want him to die?
They aren’t my friends, he said. So why was he here that night? Why was he with them?
And how did he end up in the forest?
I shuffle an inch closer, wanting to see the dark water, to imagine a person sinking, sinking, sinking, falling into a bottomless chasm, never to come back up. Never to return. Did he stare up at the pinhole of light through the broken ice, the last thing he saw before he was swallowed by the black? I shudder and take a quick step back. But my boot slides over something—something thin and shiny.
I bend down and pick it up, hold it in my hand. It’s a tiny thing, silver and glimmering. A chain. And it’s broken at one end, with a silver ring at the other.
I know what it is—and I wish I didn’t. I almost drop it, a shiver slicing up my spine, my pulse pounding against my throat.
It’s the missing chain from the pocket watch I found in Oliver’s coat.
The watch with Max’s name engraved on the back.
I close my hand around the chain, squeezing tight. The link broken and bent.
All this time, it has sat here in the center of the lake, where a boy fell into the dark water and sank.
And now I know for sure they were here. Max and the others. This is the place where he drowned. Where the chain broke and Oliver clutched the watch as if it were a prize. The one who survived.
I don’t need him to admit it, I’m already certain.
He killed Max.
My heart unspools in my chest and I tilt my head up to the sky, feeling like I might faint.
Everything is wrong.
My knees start to buckle and I want to cry, but the air is too cold and the tears evaporate against my eyelids. I want to yell into the trees. I want to blame someone—anyone—other than Oliver. But my head clatters and my grandmother’s words keep repeating: The lake remembers. But I don’t want to know the truth. I want to go back to the loft, to earlier tonight with his lips on mine and his hands in my hair and my palms against his rising chest. I want to forget. I want to undo everything that’s been done. I want to go back to the night of the storm and tell Oliver to not go to the cemetery. To not go out onto the lake. To avoid this place and those boys. Because once death has wrapped its cool hooked claws around you, it cannot be undone. And only regret remains.
Sorrow and guilt and regret.
And now the lies cannot be put back together. Not when you hold the truth in your hand.
I slide the chain into my pocket, my breath flat and fettered. All this time. Maybe this is why he went into the Wicker Woods—to hide, to wait until the road thawed so he could flee. Escape the punishment he would face.
But he got lost, went too deep into the forest—a forest that is ancient and cruel and doesn’t so easily let people back out. I found him and brought him back, and now he is asleep in my room, in my house. And I am split in two.
I shuffle away from the icy hole, my whole body trembling, my mind wheeling forward and back, remembering my lips sinking against Oliver’s. Remembering his hands in my hair, the same hands that surely struggled with Max, that forced him into the icy water, that broke the chain of the watch. The same hands that refused to pull Max back up—to save his life. The hands that touched my skin, my collarbone, so close to my throat.
I blink down at the hole one last time, branding it to memory, when I hear the sound of hairline cracks spreading out beneath my feet.
I’ve stood here too long, the hole widening in front of me, pieces of ice bobbing at the surface, some sinking into the dark, dark water below. Shit. I waited too long.
Cold mountain air blows through my hair, and I take several slow, careful steps back—the ice a sheet of glass beneath my feet. Bending, breaking, giving way.
In the distance, I hear my name, carried up and away by the wind—almost not there at all. My head turns slowly, afraid to move, afraid to blink, and I see Oliver standing on the shore, snow whirling around him. He calls my name again, his voice swallowed by the cold.
Fractures spread outward from the hole, little white veins, crisscrossing and separating. I lift one foot and place it behind me, careful and slow. The ice bends away, water bubbling up through the cracks. It’s too thin, my head screams. It’s too late.
I suck in a deep breath, then let it slip out through my nose. My eyes feel huge, unblinking, and I glance at Oliver, a word resting beneath my tongue: Help. But I never get a chance to say it.
In one violent crack, the ice breaks beneath me.
Shatters into a hundred tiny fragments.
And I plummet into the lake.
Black black water. A million knives stabbing my skin, slicing me open. My lungs shrink in on themselves, my hands claw for the surface, already going numb, and I feel my grandmother’s ring—the moonstone she gave me—drift to the end of my finger. I reach for it, almost catch it, but it slips off—sinking, sinking, sinking. No, I want to yell. My eyes shiver open, staring through the dark water, the shock of cold.
I watch the tiny gold band flit down beneath me, into the deep.
My ribs crush my heart, my whole body caving in on itself. I’m in the lake. The cold too cold. My mind slowing…
Above me, the surface of the lake and the moonless sky split open, revealing a palette of stars. So beautiful, I think. A stupid thought—my body, my mind, already going into shock. Heart rate battering against my chest.
I need air, my body screams. Air.
OLIVER
Nora is gone.
Daisy-printed sheets tossed back from her bed, pillow crinkled where her head lay, bits of yellow pollen scattered across the cotton—fallen from the dried flowers hanging over the headboard.
They say she’s a witch, and maybe they’re right.
She thinks I’m a murderer, and maybe she’s not wrong.
I fell asleep when I promised I’d stay awake. And now, the wolf follows me down the stairs, my mind skipping back to earlier—to Nora’s rose-shaped lips pressed to mine, the smell of her hair on my neck, like jasmine and vanilla. I don’t think she knows how much she upends me. How for the briefest moment, the dark of the forest felt very far away. How her fingertips blotted out the cold of the trees that’s always writhing along my joints, twisting around my kneecaps and shoulder blades and down my spine. When she’s close, my memory of that place falls away.