“Did we leave her behind when we left Boston?”
Her ashes are in a subdued urn that looks a bit more like a wine tube than anything else. Dad insisted we keep it on the mantel, but Mum and I keep it packed away, waiting for France and the chance to spread the ashes in lavender fields. Not that Chavi ever asked for that, because how many seventeen-year-olds have to think of funerary wishes, but it feels appropriate. She loved excursions to the Loire Valley when we used to visit, back when we lived in London.
But Chavi isn’t really her ashes. She’s more her photo in our chrysanthemum-and-candle shrine than she is her ashes, but it’s still not . . .
“Is France going to be home?”
“Ah. Now it takes shape.” Twisting around to face me, Mum wraps her arm around my ankles so she can comfortably rest her chin on my fuzzy socks. “We’ve had houses since Chavi died, but we haven’t really had home, have we?”
“You’re home.”
“And always will be,” she says easily. “But that’s a person. You’re talking about a place.”
“Is it selfish?”
“Oh, sweetheart, no.” Her thumb rubs the hollow behind my anklebone. “Losing Chavi was terrible. That wound will be with us, always. I know we’ve been in a bit of a holding pattern, with all the moves, but when we settle in France, can you even imagine how pissed she’ll be if we don’t make our home there? If we always make ourselves feel transient?” Her chin digs into the top of my foot. “Five years ago, it would have been impossible to imagine a life without Chavi in it.”
“But that’s our life now.”
“But that’s our life now,” she agrees. “And once we’re in a place for longer than five months, once a place is ours, we owe it to ourselves and to your sister to really make it ours. To make it home. It’s a terrifying thought, isn’t it?”
I nod, the world blurry.
“We love her; that means that it isn’t possible for us to leave her behind.”
I nod again.
“There’s something else.” When I don’t answer immediately, Mum walks two fingers up my leg until she can poke the ticklish spot near my knee. “Priya.”
“Another girl is going to die this spring,” I whisper, because it seems a terrible thing to say out loud. “He’ll kill again, because as long as they don’t catch him, there’s no reason for him not to keep going. So how do you make a man stop killing?”
“Personally? String him up by his balls and skin him with a dull, rusty knife. I hear the police frown on that, though.”
And maybe that’s the thing still niggling at me about Inara’s letter. Everything about the Garden is caught up in a media shit storm, and that’s not going to change anytime soon. Everyone has an opinion, everyone has a theory. Everyone has their own notion of what justice means. I used to think I wanted nothing more than to see Chavi’s murderer get arrested, but the older I get, the more I see the appeal of Mum’s more straightforward approach.
So what does that make me?
The morning of the funeral, Eddison picks Ramirez up from her tiny house (which she insists is properly called a cottage) and drives over to Vic’s place. It’s obscenely early, the sky not even grey yet, but it’s a long drive to the Kobiyashis’ home in North Carolina. He parks on the curb so he doesn’t block in Vic or either of the Mrs. Hanoverians.
The front door opens before they even get to the porch. Mrs. Hanoverian the elder, Vic’s mother, steps back to let them inside. “Look at you two,” she sighs. “Crows, the both of you.”
“It’s a funeral, Marlene,” Ramirez reminds her, dropping a kiss on her cheek.
“When I eventually kick it, none of you are allowed to wear black. I’m writing it into my will.” She closes the door and tugs Eddison down by his coat so she can kiss his cheek. It’s only been an hour since he shaved, so for once he isn’t stubbled and scruffy. “Good morning, dear. Come into the kitchen and have some breakfast.”
It’s on the tip of his tongue to say no—he doesn’t like eating this early; it just sits in his stomach and makes him feel ill—but Marlene Hanoverian had her own bakery until she decided to retire, and he’d have to be much more stupid than he is to turn away anything she’s made.
They walk into the kitchen and he stops short, staring at the already occupied table. Two young women, both eighteen, look back at him. One of them twitches her lips in acknowledgment. The other grins and flips him the bird. Both have cinnamon rolls dripping with icing on small plates before them.
He’s not sure why he’s shocked. Of course some of the other survivors might want to be present for the funeral. While it would be too traumatic for some, he can well imagine some might come purely to see their fellow former captive safely lowered into the ground, rather than preserved in glass and resin in the Garden’s hallways like most of the others had been.
“Morning,” he says warily.
“Vic offered us a ride,” says the taller one. Inara Morrissey—he seems to recall hearing that the name change is official now—wears a deep red dress that should probably clash with her golden-brown coloring but doesn’t. She looks elegant, and entirely too put together for this early in the morning. “We took the train down yesterday.”
They live in New York now. Well, Inara did before she was kidnapped. Bliss lived in Atlanta, and moved in with Inara and the various other roommates as soon as she was out of custody. The rest of her family migrated to Paris for her father’s job, and if Eddison occasionally wonders whether or not that particular set of relationships is mending, he’s not going to poke the bear by asking.
He knows he shouldn’t call her Bliss—that was the name the Gardener gave her, and it’s both painful and wildly inaccurate—but he can’t call her Chelsea. Chelsea is such a normal name, and Bliss is such a hellion. Until she tells him otherwise, she’s Bliss. She’s tiny, barely coming to Inara’s shoulder even when they’re seated. Her wild black curls are caught back in combs and she’s wearing a bold blue dress a few shades richer than her almost violet eyes.
He’s not surprised that neither of them is wearing black. He knows they don’t avoid it in general. Both are fairly well-adjusted (though he sometimes has his doubts about Bliss) and both work at a restaurant that requires them to wear it. Their only clothing in the Garden, however, was black. Black, and open-backed to show their wings. To honor one of their own, they would never choose it. He just hopes the Kobiyashis won’t think it’s rude.
But then, Bliss is rude. It’s not the first time she’s said hello by flipping him off.
“Is anyone else coming?” he asks, exercising healthy caution by letting Ramirez slide in first on the curved bench seat. He can respect the hell out of both girls for coming through what they did more or less intact, but he’s never quite sure if he likes them. That ambiguity is entirely mutual. Any time he can keep at least one person between him and them, he does so, and doesn’t feel like a coward for it.
“Danelle and Marenka might,” Inara answers, licking icing off one finger. Small remnants of discoloration on the backs of her hands mark the worst of the burns and gashes from the night the Garden exploded. “They hadn’t decided yet when we spoke to them on Wednesday.”
“They’re worried the Kobiyashis will be assholes to them,” adds Bliss. When Ramirez glances at her, questioning, Bliss draws the shape of a butterfly over her face.
Both agents shudder.