A small sliver of panic lanced through him. He hadn’t seen a winding key on the table, or inside the clock for that matter. Evan finished hanging the weight and sifted through the papers on the table, picking them up and setting them aside with care. After scouring the table, he searched under it. Nothing. He opened the clock door and half crawled inside, running his fingers along the base. He bumped the pendulum with his shoulder while standing, causing the chime to utter a muted bong. It sounded ominous, a single drumbeat in the middle of an uninhabited jungle. Licking his lips, he stepped back and closed the encasement door. His eyes traveled up its length, to the very top, where the two carved points—horns—came together.
Evan grabbed the chair and pulled it close to the encasement, and stood on its seat. The top of the clock was level with a small trim piece that ran its entire edge. Nothing but cobwebs and dust lay on its surface.
“Shit,” he said, stepping down from the chair.
His gaze fell on the three holes at the bottom of the clock’s face. Three holes that would accept a single, specially made key, which wasn’t here. A black anger began to flow through him. Even if he put the clock completely back together, he would have no way to make it work without the key.
He raised a fist, sure in that moment that he would smash it through the glass door, pull out all the work that he’d done in the last two nights. Destroy it, burn it.
Slowly his fist fell to his side, and tears flowed into his eyes like rain filling cisterns during a storm. Why? He pulled the chair close to the table and dropped onto it. Why? Fate had brought them here, he knew it, for one single purpose: to go back.
“It wasn’t supposed to happen,” he croaked. “We weren’t supposed to get hit, Elle wasn’t supposed to die.” He ground his teeth together. “We’re supposed to go back and fix it.”
Evan sniffed once and wiped his palms across his eyes, smearing the tears away, disgusted. He stood and opened the encasement door again, making sure that the long chime rods were securely in place.
It’s ready, and the key has to be here somewhere.
He started by searching every drawer and cabinet in the workbench and found nothing. He pawed through boxes of fabric and knickknacks that lined the opposite wall. He crawled from one end of the basement to the other, his face inches from the cool floor as he tried to spot the shape of a key lying somewhere.
Somewhere.
Evan tramped up the stairs, a sheen of sweat standing out on his face. The palms of his hands were dark with dust and dirt, but he barely noticed the smudges he left on the kitchen counter and drawers as he sifted through their contents. Towels, silverware, pens, pencils, pots, pans—everything went on the floor.
When he finished with the kitchen, he continued in the living room, pulling the cushions from the couch and looking behind the entertainment center. The front closet held only an old rain slicker and an ancient tackle box. He dumped the tackle out and left everything in a heap on the closet floor, finding nothing.
His room didn’t take long since there weren’t many places for a key to hide. As he pulled the last drawer in the bedside table open, a growl left his throat, sounding more animal than human.
He banged the door open and moved to the far end of the house, not pausing before walking straight into the master bedroom. Evan strode to the bed and flipped up the mattress and box spring to look beneath them. He dropped both and went to the closet, pulled the double doors open, grunting upon seeing the empty space.
One place left.
He went to Shaun’s room, his eyes casting back and forth as he walked, thinking that the key could be sitting in plain sight, and had been the entire time they had been there. He pushed through Shaun’s door and slowed, seeing his son’s thin body beneath the blanket, the rise and fall of his chest, a shadow clinging to the opposite side of his head, the side with the scar.
An overwhelming sense of defeat crashed into him, and he stumbled with its weight. In slow motion, Evan fell to his knees beside the bed. His head hung down, chin against breastbone. He’d been a tornado until that point, sure that the key must be somewhere within the house. Life couldn’t possibly be that cruel, but it was, he knew it was. And he also knew that— “It’s not here.” Evan lifted his head, speaking in a trembling whisper. “It’s not here, honey. I was hoping, really hoping.”
He sniffled, and Shaun turned a little in the bed, so that he faced Evan more. Evan reached out and stroked his smooth cheek with one finger.
“I wanted to fix it all, buddy, take you back and we could try again.” A small laugh slipped out. “We could be a family again.” A wrenching tightness in his chest squeezed, and then broke. “But that’s not going to happen, buddy. I’m so sorry, son, so sorry all this happened.”
Evan sobbed into his forearm to stifle the sound. Hot tears streaked down his face, and he remembered the last time he’d cried this much. It was when Elle had slipped away. She hadn’t been awake for almost a day when it happened. The morphine in her system was blunting most of the pain, the doctor said, but Evan wondered, he really wondered. He remembered how she’d twitched and then moved her legs and arms, so strong before, now just sticks with drying flesh coating them. It was as though she’d already died and was decaying before his eyes.
He remembered her turning toward him. He supposed it was because of the window; the light had been behind him. She turned and then— —opens her eyes. Her beautiful eyes. He stands and clutches the hand she holds out to him, a skeletal thing that grips his palm with no strength. He waits, hovering there beside the god-awful bed, in the god-awful hospital, with the god-awful smell of death. She purses her lips, their surfaces dry and cracked no matter how much water she drinks or how many layers of lip balm they apply.
“Be ...” she begins, and her eyes roll back before returning to focus on his face.
Something is tearing within him, and he realizes it is her leaving his side after almost a decade of being together. His other half that carried his child. His soul mate.
“It’s okay, honey, it’s okay,” he says, knowing full well it isn’t. It isn’t okay that she is dying. Nothing will be okay ever again.
Her eyelids flutter, and she seems to compose herself for the last time on earth.