Lo is sleeping—really sleeping—when Bea lets herself into the room. Her face is blank, her lips slightly parted, her breathing deep and even. She’s so small there’s enough space for Bea to crawl into the bed next to her, and so Bea does, with a lump in her throat and tears rolling down her face. She is torn between the tension of what she has been called to do for Lev, for God, and the cost of that calling. Bea loves Lo, no matter who she’s become, even if she seems like a stranger wearing her sister’s body. And it doesn’t matter if the accident stole their secret language or leveled their secret place because these things, by their very nature, have to change because nothing can ever stay exactly the same—isn’t that just how life is?
But one thing will always remain true.
Bea reaches out, running her hand over Lo’s head, smoothing her hair back from her pale face. She gets as close to her as she can.
I’ll always be your sister, she whispers. I promise.
She closes her eyes. She dreams of him.
NOVEMBER 2017
“Gloria.”
He’s taller than I realized, his shoulders broad. He’s wearing a white Henley with the sleeves rolled up, half-tucked into a pair of worn jeans. He has a prominent nose just crooked enough to suggest his tragically violent upbringing, made widely known through Project literature—there’s nothing more inspiring than overcoming a tragic past only to be chosen by God—and his guarded, deep brown eyes suggest the same. His curly black hair is pushed from his face, and a five o’clock shadow trails the sharp edge of his jaw, surrounding his bowed mouth. The weak light catches the small silver pendant around his neck, and it glints at me, briefly, as the screen door creaks slowly shut behind him.
He’s just a man.
As soon as I think it, anger courses through my veins, alighting my blood. It’s a wrath strong enough to make me want to disappear the space between us just to break him into pieces.
That Lev Warren could do everything he’s done to me—
And be only a man.
Foster faces Lev, who inclines his head toward the back of the house. A silent order. Foster nods and goes that way, leaving us alone. The little girl must be his charge.
Lev turns back to me, his eyes meeting mine. My chest tightens painfully because my head is full of my sister and what she might have seen and felt in a moment like this. God?
Really?
It was nothing I could accept at the time, but at least then it was abstracted by her grief and her sudden, desperate need for faith in the face of our loss. Now that the reality is in front of me, I accept it even less and I hate her even more.
I stand before the porch as Lev stands on it, looking down on me, waiting for me to do something because whatever is next is, apparently, mine to do. I understand what is being extended to me now is unlikely to ever be extended again, so I make my way slowly up the path and the steps of the porch until I’m in front of him. His eyes search my face for a long moment, trailing over my scar, and then he leads me into the house.
* * *
I follow him down a dim hallway, its deep wood paneling swallowing what little light filters in from the windows of the door at the very back of the house. There are old, framed pictures on the wall: the farm in different days, from before The Project, when it only belonged to the Garretts. The Garretts pretty clearly don’t live here anymore and I wonder where they went and if they wanted to go. If they were happy to give their lives to a God or if it was a necessity born of The Project’s increasing popularity. What kind of price did they put on their lives and history to leave it all behind? Money or blessings? Lev glances once over his shoulder and then turns, leading us into a small kitchen. It’s brighter in here, sun shining through the window over the sink. Beyond the glass, Foster and the little girl play in the yard. The mess of a few meals surround the table and sink, plates of half-eaten food, crumbs and cutlery. All of it speaks to more people than are present. I listen, wondering if they’re somewhere in the house—if she’s hiding somewhere in this house—but all I hear is the sound of a clock ticking faintly from another room.
Lev crosses his arms and faces the window, tracking the silent movie happening outside. A game of tag from the looks of it, but even from here I can see the tension in Foster’s body at the knowledge that something—someone is here who doesn’t belong. After a moment, Lev turns back to me, leaning against the sink, arms still crossed. There’s no tension in him. The way he looks at me carries with it a certain inevitability.
“You look well.” His voice is quiet but firm. Firm, yet somehow edgeless. “Are you?”
He once again studies my scar—then the rest of me. The question feels more personal than he has a right to ask, but anything less than my answering it feels cowardly.
“Made a full recovery,” I say.
“Good. Then Ossining was the best thing for you.”
I press my lips together, preventing a bitter smile. Living with Patty in her place, on her terms … well, it wasn’t the worst thing for me, but I’d be hard-pressed to call it “the best.” I remember the day I left the hospital, I asked Patty to drive us past the house. The feeling in my gut when I saw the swing in the yard—everything looked so unbearably the same that it was as though my body believed the loss was a dream I’d finally woken up from. I sobbed, begged for her to let me out, but she told me it was too much for me. She would always think it was too much for me. I’d never go home again.
It’s like we talked about, Patty had said of the arrangement, but I swear no one talked to me about it. There are so many gaps from that time, so many ICU nightmares that felt more real to me than what was actually going on. Some of my memories confuse me still, and now I have no one to tell me the difference between what was and was never.
Bea called me once at Patty’s. I was on painkillers and all that remains of the conversation was the last thing she ever said to me. I know that was real because it burrowed itself into my bones, became a life raft for the months that followed.
We’ll see each other again.
Two years at Patty’s and I never saw her.
Even after I made it back to Morel, I never saw her.
I blink at the sudden sting in my eyes. The weight of the moment presses down on me in this small kitchen, standing across from Lev Warren, and it wants to drown me in its truth: he’s only a man, and if he’s only a man, what does that make me?
Less than her sister?
“You have my time. You have my attention,” he tells me.
“I’d rather hers.” The words fracture as they leave my lips, too pathetic to be an insult. The look they inspire him to give me makes me feel impossibly bound to a body that has only shown him its weakness. I close my eyes, turning my face away.
“I’m not your sister’s keeper and The Project has never been your sister’s prison. I accept that you think of me as your enemy because it’s easier than believing she made a choice that you were not made a part of.” He pauses. “Gloria.”
I open my eyes.
“You have my time,” he says again. “And you have my attention.”
“Casey said if I keep trying to expose you, I’ll fail.”
“She’s right. We have nothing to hide.”