Chapter Ten

CHAPTER TEN

Mari’s papers are burning a hole under my mattress.

Since that afternoon three days ago, I’ve read them at least half a dozen times, hardly believing they’re real.

Or, I guess I should say, I’ve read most of them. I’ve held off on what appears to be the last chapter. I’d skimmed it, of course. That was the first thing I did when I’d realized what I’d found, desperate to read Mari’s version of Pierce’s murder.

But the pages end before that, stopping when Pierce is very much alive. I’d decided to save that last chapter, wanting to experience that summer with Mari, as she experienced it. Wanting to savor this treasure for as long as possible.

Because that’s what it feels like—an illicit treasure, hidden underneath my bed.

If I can prove that this is the definitive account of what happened the summer of 1974, as written by one of the main people involved, and that my original idea about Lilith Rising holding clues to the events of that summer was right …

It’ll be huge.

Which is why it’s vital that Chess doesn’t know what I’ve found.

But I think she’s beginning to suspect something.

We’ve gone back into Orvieto, craving an outing after several consecutive days holed up at the villa. The skies are cloudy today, making the walled city appear more foreboding than the first time we visited. In the heavy heat, the closeness of the buildings is less charming, the duomo more overwhelming.

I sip from one of the bottles of mineral water Chess brought for us as I pretend to gaze into shop windows, my brain a million miles away, back with Mari and Pierce and Noel.

“You have been a very busy bee this week,” Chess says, bumping my hip as I turn away from the window. Overhead, the hanging baskets of red flowers are very bright against all the gray.

“I feel like I’ve barely seen you, but I hear you, clickety-clicking all the time.”

I thought I was doing a better job of hiding how much I was working, but clearly not.

For a moment, I struggle with how to answer, and then the perfect excuse comes to me.

Making myself look as sheepish as I can, I say, “I’m actually back on Petal.”

Chess stops, her leather bag swinging on her shoulder. “Wait, seriously?”

I nod. “The book about Mari and the villa wasn’t really going anywhere, and then it occurred to me that just like I needed a change of scenery, maybe Petal did, too. So I threw out what I’d been working on before and started a whole new draft. Petal in Italy, solving the case of the poisoned cappuccino.”

“I love it,” Chess replies, squeezing my arm, and the obvious relief on her face tells me more than anything how pleased she is that I’ve put the villa project aside.

But why? Is it because nonfiction is supposed to be her thing, and she wanted me to stay out of her lane? Was she worried I might actually write something that eclipsed even the great Chess Chandler?

Or, I make myself consider as we walk farther down the street, maybe I was imagining all of this, assuming the worst about Chess. Maybe she is just genuinely happy I’m writing again, that I’ll be able to deliver the book that’s due and get the payment that I definitely need.

How is it that someone can bring out the very best and the very worst of you all at once?

Pushing that thought away, I pull out my phone to check the time. Instead, I see I have missed calls.

Four of them.

All from Matt.

I frown, and Chess moves closer to me. “What is it?”

“Matt,” I tell her, and she snorts.

“What does he want?”

I shake my head, checking my texts to see two from him.

Hi. Know you’re busy, but really needed to talk to you about something.

Give me a call when you can.

More paperwork, probably. Some new wrinkle in the divorce proceedings, some extra money his lawyers have figured out how to squeeze out of me.

I know I have to call him back, but not now. Not here. I don’t like the idea of him here, invading this place that’s just mine.

Well, mine and Chess’s.

“I’m sure it’s nothing,” I tell her now, and I put the phone back, resolved to put Matt out of my mind for the rest of the afternoon.

Chess watches me for a beat, and then folds her arms over her chest.

“Em, this is an Ostrich Moment.”

I stare at her, wondering if I’ve suddenly had a stroke, but she’s just watching me expectantly and suddenly I realize this has to be something from one of her books, something I’ve missed, apparently.

“An Ostrich Moment,” I repeat, and yes, I can practically hear the trademark appearing next to it now.

Chess steps forward, taking my hands in hers, rooting us to the spot even as other tourists are forced to walk around us.

“You want to stick your head in the sand, and make this all go away. But the thing is, it’s not going to. The sand doesn’t fix the problem, it just hides it.”

I know there are women who would pay thousands to get their own personal Chess Chandler Therapy Session, but right now, I really wish I were getting Chess my friend, not Chess the Guru.

Even though I know she’s probably right.

“So, you’re saying I should call Matt.”

She squeezes my hands. “Get it over with. We’ll head back to the house, and you’ll call him. Find out what he wants, and I promise you, whatever it is, it won’t be that bad. It’ll take, like, fifteen minutes max, and then, instead of agonizing over what he might want, you’ll know. And then you’ll come into the kitchen and meet me, and you’ll have a cocktail roughly the size of your head, and everything will be fine.”

The thing with Chess is, when she says something, you believe it.

Which is why I find myself in my bedroom at the villa half an hour later, dialing Matt’s number.

He answers after the first ring. “There you are. I sent those texts hours ago.”

I can feel my blood pressure rising, but I close my eyes and focus on my breathing just like Chess had suggested. “I’m on vacation, Matt,” I say evenly. “I called as soon as I could.”

“Fine,” he replies, and I picture him there at his desk at work, his white polo shirt bright against his tanned skin, the nervous way he’s probably rubbing his free hand over the top of his head.

Always a tell with Matt.

“I called because your lawyer hasn’t gotten a response from you on the dissolution filing,” he says, and I frown.

“What?”

Matt’s sigh may come from thousands of miles away over a cell phone, but I swear I can feel it. “We talked about this. I think we should go for the dissolution of marriage now since the divorce is … obviously going to take awhile.”

He doesn’t come right out and say that it’s my fault, but of course that’s what he means. Because if only I’d agree to give him those royalties, this could all be over, and wouldn’t that be nice?

A dissolution of marriage is a sort of in-between. It will mean we’re no longer legally married, but that we still haven’t finished hashing out the financial stuff of the actual divorce. My lawyer told me it’s pretty common when one of the parties is ready to move on with someone else.

But then Matt already jumped the gun on that, didn’t he?

“I haven’t checked my email,” I tell him now. “And I’ve been working so—”

“Right, I’ve heard,” he says.

Outside, the sun is setting, and I can hear the gentle twittering of birds, the sound of wind in the trees.

Inside, I’m very still.

“What does that mean?” I ask, but what I really mean is Who told you that?

Two people know. Rose and Chess. That’s it. Maybe he emailed Rose and asked her. Maybe his lawyer did. That’s the only thing that makes sense to me right now, the only thing I’ll let make sense to me now.

“You know, Em,” Matt says, and I picture him sitting forward, his eyes darting around the office as he lowers his voice. “If you’re working on a new book just to fuck me over—”

I bark out a laugh. “Right! Because everything in my life is about you, I forgot!”

“I’m serious,” he continues, a little louder now. “If you write something else just to get out of paying me what I’m owed for the next Petal book, I’ll sue you for part of that, too.”

I feel my stomach drop. He’s bluffing.

He has to be. No one would let him have part of a book I wrote after we split up. But the thought of it sticks in my gut, twists like a knife.

This project, which has started pulling me out of the hole I’ve been in for the past year … it’s a thing Matt would make another anchor around my neck.

“Why are you doing this?” I ask him now, and I hate how pleading it sounds. “You left, remember? Why punish me?”

“This isn’t about punishment. Jesus, you always do this. I took care of you. I supported you.”

I can practically see him ticking off his fingers.

“I put in all this effort, Em. I wanted to save us. I wanted to save you. Look, if it were up to me, we’d still be living in the house we bought together, raising our child. You’re the one who changed. Not me.”

I feel the blood rush to my cheeks. “Matt, I got sick. I didn’t change.”

“You said you wanted a baby, but you never wanted to have sex, and then I found out you were still taking the pill. Even after you promised to stop, you never did.”

“Because I was sick,” I say again. “I didn’t want to fuck with my hormones when I didn’t know what was wrong with me.”

“You lied to me,” he insists. “Which means I spent seven years of my life with someone, thinking we wanted the same things when, clearly, we didn’t. Seven years. So, excuse me if I want a little return on my investment.”

I give a bitter laugh at that. “Serves me right for marrying an accountant, huh?”

“Am I wrong?” he presses, and I don’t answer. He is and he isn’t, and, honestly, maybe ostriches have the better idea because right now, I don’t feel better.

I just feel tired.

“Look, I don’t know what you heard,” I tell him now, my fingers tight around the phone, “but your information clearly sucks because I’m working on Petal. And I’ll email Robert about the dissolution. The sooner I’m not married to you, the better, honestly.”

I don’t let him reply to that, pressing End before he can say anything else.

The sun has fully set now, the villa dim as I make my way downstairs. True to her word, Chess is in the kitchen, and there’s a frosted martini glass on the counter filled with a bright yellow liquid.

I reach for it, the stem bitingly cold.

“It’s my own concoction,” Chess says. “Limoncello, obviously, a little bit of that gorgeous floral gin Giulia brought the other day, some elderflower liquor…”

It could be antifreeze for all I care right now. I suck down almost the whole thing, putting the glass back on the counter with a raggedy sigh as Chess raises her eyebrows and reaches for the cocktail shaker.

“I take it the phone call didn’t go great.”

I accept a refill, leaning back against the counter, one arm wrapped around my waist like I’m trying to hold my insides together.

“He talks like I’m the one who fucked everything up,” I say. “Like I tricked him or something by magically not having a baby. That’s what started all this. Once he’d decided he wanted kids, it was like that was the only thing that mattered.”

Chess is quiet for a moment, taking a sip from her bottle of mineral water before saying, “Did you want kids, Em? Really?”

“I did,” I insist, but even as I say the words, I can hear how unconvincing they sound.

I drink more, the lemony taste bright on my tongue. We’ve never talked about this, not really. Chess knew we’d been talking about having a baby, but she’d never asked me outright if it’s what I wanted. No one did.

Not even Matt.

“I mean, I didn’t not want kids, I guess. It was just that it still felt kind of vague to me. Like something future me was going to figure out or suddenly wake up and know the answer to. Or that I wanted them for him, if that makes sense.”

She nods. “That’s very you, Em. You live to make other people happy. It’s the one thing you have in common with Nanci.”

Chess so rarely brings up her mother that I’m actually stunned out of my pity party a little bit.

“Did you just compare me to the person you wrote an entire book about? A book where the thesis is, ‘this person is both terrible and useless’?”

Chess rolls her eyes, and picks up the dishcloth on the island next to her, flicking me with it. “I didn’t mean it in a bad way! Well, okay, I kind of did because it’s a trait you have to shake off, girl. Nanci never has. At least not where men are concerned. Making me happy? That was not exactly the highest of priorities, but some dude she met in the frozen foods aisle at Publix, well, he got whatever he wanted. And look where that’s led. She’s on her fourth husband, Em. Fourth.”

Chess holds up four fingers. “And living in his shitty condo in Florida even though I bought her a house in Asheville last year. But nope, she sold it because it was Beau’s dream to retire to Florida.” She shakes her head. “And it’s not even the pretty part of Florida. The beach is like a two-hour drive away, and Nanci hates everything about it, but, hey, if Beau’s happy, she’s happy!”

Stepping forward, she grabs my shoulders, giving me a light shake. “That could’ve been you! But it’s not because you’re free of all that now. You just have to get free in here.”

Lifting one hand, she taps my forehead.

It would be nice if life were as easy as Chess seems to think it is. But then, I remind myself, she doesn’t know how bad it all actually is. She doesn’t know about the money Matt’s asking for, or this new threat. I could tell her, but again, something stops me.

“Well, now that you’ve warned me I could turn into your mother, I am indeed a new woman,” I tell her, and she grins, pressing a smacking kiss to the place she’d just poked.

“That’s why they pay me the big bucks!” she singsongs, and I laugh, putting my now-empty glass back down.

I watch her back as she begins rifling through the cabinets for dinner supplies, and think again about Matt’s call. He’d heard I was working, and suspected it was on something new.

Chess is humming to herself, something from Aestas, and I keep my voice casual as I ask, “You haven’t talked to Matt recently, have you?”

She turns around, pulling a face. “Matt? Jesus Christ, no. Not since you split up. Why would I?”

She looks so baffled that I feel stupid for even asking. It was Rose, surely. Something to do with all this legal wrangling.

“I just wondered,” I offer lamely. “You two were close, too.”

She turns back around, pulling down a large serving dish. “Only because we both loved you. Once he was out of your life, he was out of mine.”

She spins back around, squinting her eyes at me with exaggerated suspicion, her mouth twisted to one side. “Why? You haven’t been talking to Nigel, have you?”

That actually makes me laugh. Nigel was Chess’s last serious boyfriend, some rich tech bro who was obsessed with cryptocurrency and said “San Fran” instead of San Francisco and owned sunglasses that cost more than the down payment on my house. Still, Chess had been completely crazy about him, and their breakup had hit her harder than I’d expected.

Now, I joke along with her, saying, “Just every other Friday. We’re talking about starting a book club. Maybe getting a time-share.”

“You fucking traitor,” she replies, and I laugh again. The drink has relaxed me, and I’m thinking about getting back to work on the book after dinner. I want to write a chapter about Mari’s mom, about Lilith and the connection between Marianne Godwick’s short story and Mari’s book. It was clear her mother’s death had had a huge effect on Mari, and given Lilith’s influence on Victoria in Lilith Rising, it feels like there’s something to say there. About the ways in which a legacy is both a gift and a curse. And given the villa’s own legacy of both horror and beauty, I thought I could tie those two ideas together somehow, really dig into the idea of how artists are inspired and influenced.

Normally, that thought would fill me with a kind of giddy excitement, an itch in my fingers to get back to work.

Now, though, there’s a weight in my stomach.

What if you write it, and it’s all you wanted to be, and then Matt sues over the fucking thing?

He can’t,I remind myself again. Or he can, but he won’t win.

But would that matter? Wouldn’t it just mean more lawyers, more bullshit, more—

That’s when I feel it.

Not a sudden thing, more like a slow-motion wave approaching the shore.

It’s been months, but I recognize the sensation immediately, and the terror makes me feel cold and hot all at once.

My head swims, the room tilts just the littlest bit, and I feel sweat beading on my forehead, my upper lip, the small of my back.

“Em?” Chess asks, but I’m already sprinting away, heading for the tiny bathroom in the hall.

I barely make it, retching into the toilet, my fingers clenched around the sides of the bowl.

It feels like forever, feels like my body is turning itself inside out, but finally, it ends.

I flush the toilet, but experience has taught me that sometimes there’s a second wave, and so I don’t risk trying to leave just yet.

I crouch there like an animal. My eyes are closed, but I still feel like I’m spinning, and I press my hand to the base of the toilet to steady myself.

Not again,I think, desperate, tears and sweat mingling on my cheeks. Not again, please, please, please.

It’s been months since I’ve felt this way, and I let myself believe that everything was finally getting better, that I was getting better. Instead, it seems like whatever it is that’s wrong inside me has just been coiled up, waiting to strike again.

“Em?”

I hear Chess enter the bathroom, the sink running, and then Chess is there, wet towels in hand.

Her face crumples in sympathy as she moves to kneel next to me.

“Oh, honey,” she says, and then she presses the towels to my face. They’re cool and damp against my heated skin, and I’m thankful for it, closing my eyes as more tears spill out.

“I thought I was better,” I say, and I hate how weak my voice sounds.

“Maybe it was the shrimp you had at lunch,” Chess suggests, helping me sit up. “Fish is always a risky business.”

She’s still got the towels pressed against my cheek, and she slides them to the back of my neck as she hands me a bottle of Perrier. I take a sip, grateful.

“Maybe,” I say, hoping she’s right, hoping more than I’ve ever hoped for anything.

I was better, I was better, I was better.

We crouch there in the bathroom, Chess’s hand on my knee as I take slow, steady sips of the Perrier. “My doctors all thought it was psychosomatic,” I say. “Stress or something.”

Chess wraps her arms around me even though I have to be a sweaty, disgusting mess. “And talking to Matt stressed you out. I’m so sorry.”

I close my eyes again, shaking my head against her shoulder. “It isn’t your fault,” I say, but I hope that it is. I hope that’s all it is, my system going haywire because Chess insisted I call Matt back and then he pissed me off.

Because if it’s not that, then what the fuck is wrong with me?

MARI,1974—ORVIETO

“I don’t know why you’re so insistent it’s mine. Or that she’s up the duff at all, frankly.”

Noel is sitting on the floor in front of the fireplace in the main drawing room. The good weather has finally returned, and the day is sunny and warm, but Noel has, for some reason, insisted on making a fire. He jabs at it now with an ornate poker, scowling into the flames.

“It’s yours,” Mari tells Noel, her voice flat. “And she’s two months late, Noel.”

This is the third time they’ve had this conversation in two days, and Mari is getting very tired of it. It doesn’t help that the room is boiling, and that Noel is in one of his moods, but Mari is determined to have this matter settled.

“And you’re so sure of this, why?” he asks. “Because she told you so?” He scoffs. “Would think you of all people would know better than to believe Janet about anything.”

Mari doesn’t admit to him that when Lara had first told her, she’d had a moment of sickening free fall, her head spinning, her mind and heart a chant of you promised, you promised, you both promised, never again.

“I told him,” Lara had said through her sobs, “I told him I was on the pill, but I wasn’t. Or I was, but I forgot to keep taking it, you know how I am with that kind of thing, Mari.”

There had been a wheedling note in her voice, her hand coming to rest on Mari’s knee, and the camaraderie, the love she’d felt for Lara just moments before had dissolved. Right then, she had wanted nothing more than to grab that hand, push it off of her.

No, more than that.

She’d wanted to grab that hand and squeeze. Bend. Break.

And then Lara had looked up at the ceiling and wailed, “How can I have a baby with Noel?”

Relief rushed over Mari, dizzying and thick.

“We’ll get through this,” she had promised Lara, gently taking her hand. “We’ll fix it.”

What that actually meant, Mari hadn’t known. Noel certainly wasn’t going to marry Lara. He couldn’t, seeing how he was already married. But he could support Lara in whatever she chose to do. Give her money if she wanted to keep it, give her money if she didn’t.

Mari was sure he’d see reason, understand that he bore some of the responsibility. Yes, he was wild and rude and heedless, but he wasn’t heartless.

Or so she’d thought.

Noel looks up at her now, but she gets the distinct sense that he’s actually looking down at her, and for the first time, Mari truly understands that he’s the son of an earl. Noel may play at being a bohemian, but his blood is deeply blue, and she suddenly feels very sorry for Lara.

“Be that as it may, I made it very clear to her how I felt about her and exactly how permanent I considered our situation. Which is to say that I considered it about as long-lasting as whatever hobby she decides to pick up next. Basket-weaving, perhaps.” The words are languid, Noel’s usual bullshit.

His eyes, though.

His eyes are hard.

“She’s made her own bed, Mistress Mary,” he finishes, “and I suggest she lie in it.”

The nickname is usually affectionate, if a little ribbing, but now she hears it for the insult it is, and her hands clench at her sides, nails biting into her palms.

“You’re such a bastard, Noel,” she tells him, and he gives an elegant shrug.

“So my father occasionally claimed, but I think the only bastard you need to be worried about is the one your sister is going to have.”

“So, you’re not going to help her?”

Noel gives an extravagant eye roll. “Don’t be ridiculous. If it’s money she wants, she can have it. But you know as well as I do that she expects me to marry her and move to some country pile in Somerset where we’ll raise this brat and probably two or three others. She’ll name them things like, ‘Archibald’ and ‘Primrose,’ and I’ll eventually die of terminal boredom.”

He turns back to the fire, pulling his dressing gown tighter around him, and Mari shoves his shoulder as she turns away.

“You don’t know Lara at all then,” she says, and he makes a sort of grumbling noise in protest, but Mari doesn’t hang around to indulge him further.

Money is all Lara really needs or wants from Noel, and money is what he’ll give, so that’s sorted, at least.

She goes in search of her stepsister, but Lara is nowhere to be found, and when Mari heads outside, she sees Pierce sitting by the pond.

The grass is soft underneath her bare feet as she makes her way toward him. He’s wearing that pair of jeans he likes so much, with their faded patches and holes in the knees, and as he strums his guitar, Mari wonders if he’s picturing the album cover already: the brooding rock star reclining in the Italian countryside, hair rumpled, chest bare, the leaves overhead casting atmospheric shadows.

He barely glances at her as she approaches, lost in his own thoughts, and Mari sighs, leaning against one of the trees, her arms folded over her chest. “Noel says he’ll take care of Lara. Financially, that is, which to be fair, is all she wants. So that’s a relief.”

She and Pierce had spent last night whispering in the dark about Lara, about Noel, and what would happen next, so she’d assumed he’d be pleased that Mari had sorted it all out.

But he doesn’t reply. He just keeps strumming that guitar, looking out over the water.

“Don’t you have anything to say?” she asks him. When he finally looks at her, those blue eyes she’s always loved so much are hazy. Mari can feel her book pulling her to her room, and wants more than anything to go back to it, back to Victoria and Somerton and the chaos she’s about to unleash, but no. No, once again, Lara needs rescuing, so here she is, standing by the fucking pond with Pierce instead of at her desk, doing what her heart wants.

“I guess I wasn’t all that worried about it,” he says, shrugging those pale shoulders. “We’re a family, and the baby is just gonna be a part of it.”

He smiles lazily, and she realizes that the haziness in his eyes isn’t inspiration or creation. He’s just high, stupidly so, and Mari takes a deep breath. At moments like this, she tries to remember exactly how she felt that day when she walked into her father’s house to see Pierce sitting there. How the same smile that now makes her want to scream used to make her feel like she’d swallowed pure sunlight.

But all she can think about are all the times she’s seen that smile turned on Lara, or a maid at a hotel, or a waitress in a short black skirt, and she suddenly feels very, very tired.

“I’m not sure Lara wants to have the baby, Pierce,” she says, and he shakes his head.

“I’ll talk to her. She’s just freaked out right now, but she’ll see that this is what we need, the three of us.”

He reaches out to encircle her wrist with one hand. The calluses on his fingers are rough against her skin, irritating, and she pulls her hand back in horror.

He’s talking about Billy. Mari had a baby and lost it, but now, look! A new baby, coming along, just like magic.

This is, she knows, how Pierce thinks. Nothing in life is too hard or too ugly, everything can be worked out.

But only because the rest of them bear the hard and ugly bits for him.

Up at the house, an unfamiliar car is pulling up in the drive, and Mari glances over at it before turning her attention back to Pierce. “Lara has her own music, you know. Beautiful music.”

“That’s cool,” is his only reply, and Mari moves closer.

“It is. And the point is, she deserves a chance to make it, Pierce. You can’t … you can’t talk her into having a baby just because you want your own little hippie commune.”

But he’s lost in the guitar now, the guitar and the drugs, and Mari turns away from him, her heart in her throat.

To her surprise, Noel is walking toward them from the house, his usually louche expression serious, his limp slightly more pronounced. He’s holding a piece of paper in his hands, and as Mari gets closer, she realizes it’s a telegram.

“What is it?” she asks, and Noel’s eyes move past her to Pierce, and somehow, although later, she’s never sure how, Mari knows in an instant.

It’s Frances, Pierce’s wife.

The details are blunt and to the point. Three days ago, she drowned herself in the lake behind Pierce’s family home. His son, Teddy, is with Frances’s family.

Mari watches Pierce read the telegram, and waits for some kind of reaction, for grief or regret to cross that lovely face.

She feels her own grief—and her guilt; god, the guilt—like the stones Frances placed in her pockets that summer morning. She never met Pierce’s wife, never knew her as anything more than a name, but she had sometimes felt like a third presence in Mari’s relationship, a ghost always haunting their steps.

And now she’s gone.

Pierce crumples up the paper, shoves it in the back pocket of his jeans, and looks up at the sky, his chest moving up and down as he takes a deep breath.

“Pierce,” Mari starts, moving toward him, and he lowers his head, meeting her eyes.

“She’s free now,” he says, and he actually smiles a little as he says it. “This world was rough for her, you know? She was … she was sweet and delicate, and it was just too much.”

Mari stands there, unsure of what to say to that, unsure of why it suddenly seems very important that she remind Pierce that the roughest element of Frances’s world was him.

“We’ll go get Teddy,” he goes on. “When we’re done here. He can come live with us in London.”

“In the flat? Pierce, it’s too small now as it is with the three of us—”

“We’ll make room,” he says, and then he grabs her face between his hands, kissing her hard on the mouth.

“And we’ll finally get married. Make an honest woman out of you.”

He’s openly grinning now, and Mari looks into this face she loves so much, and realizes that there’s no grief there at all.

She knows she’ll think about Frances Sheldon until the day she dies, but for Pierce, his wife’s suicide is just another obstacle removed, another worry he no longer has to deal with.

Will it be that way with her one day, too?

“Mrs. Sheldon is dead, long live Mrs. Sheldon,” Noel mutters as Pierce walks back up to the house, guitar slung across his back.

“Shut up, Noel,” Mari snaps, but when she goes to follow Pierce, Noel catches her arm, bringing her up short.

“Mari,” he says, his eyes surprisingly solemn. “I know you think I’m a despicable human, and most of the time, you’re not wrong. But listen to me now. Cut yourself free from all of this.”

“All of what?” she asks, and his mouth thins.

“You know bloody well what I mean. From Pierce and Lara and the whole mess. Use a knife, use a sword, use a pair of fucking kitchen shears if you must, but cut yourself free. Because if you don’t, you’ll drown just as surely as Frances has.”

He lets her go then, limping off back toward the house, and Mari stands there on the lawn, wondering how, on such a sunny and warm day, she can feel so cold.