“Okay.” I look down at her. Enough rain has collected in her hair to fill it with droplets of light. Mascara runs down her cheek in a long stripe. Her weight against me is both the best thing and the worst thing I’ve ever felt in my life.
I reach up and stroke a finger along that line of makeup.
She sighs and closes her eyes. “I wish I hadn’t done it.” Her voice breaks and she starts crying again.
“Shh.” My lips brush her temple. I would hold her in this cemetery forever. “What do you wish you hadn’t done?”
She straightens a little and pushes rain-damp hair away from her face. Her fingers are shaking. All of her is shaking. “My mother was a photographer. I developed her film. The pictures she took before she died. I wish I hadn’t.”
That’s right. She was going to do that today.
My knee-jerk reaction is to play this the way I’ve played everything else, putting up a front like I don’t know every detail of her sorrow from the other side of an email conversation.
But I can’t do that. Not with her tears soaking into my shirt.
I brush a strand of hair away from her eyes. “What did you find?”
Her face crumples, and she presses her face into my shoulder. I expect a fresh round of tears, but she breathes through it and speaks into my shirt. Her voice is very small. “She was cheating.”
“She was what?”
“She was cheating. On my father. She came home three days earlier than we thought.”
Oh. Oh, wow.
“So the pictures . . .”
“I didn’t know what to expect, you know? I thought maybe they’d be shots for work, or maybe some interesting people she met. She’d do that sometimes, take pictures of people who caught her eye, not because she thought they belonged in the New York Times, but because she thought they deserved to be captured on film.”
“But they weren’t.”
“No.” She snorts, and it’s partly a sob. “They were shots of her in bed with her editor.”
My eyebrows practically hit my hairline. “In bed? Like—”
“In bed. Naked. No mistake.”
“Naked?”
“Yes. Naked.”
“Wow.”
“I hate her.” The words fall out of her mouth like daggers. She’s tense against me now. Rage is building, replacing the misery.
“You developed the pictures at school?”
She nods stiffly against me.
“Was a teacher there?”
“No. He went to get coffee so I could develop them alone.”
“I bet he would have crapped his pants.”
She giggles in surprise. It’s a good sound, and I’d give anything to make her laugh again, especially now.
“Probably,” she says. She straightens to look at me, and her expression sobers. We sit in the mist, breathing the scent of rain and cut grass.
I want to reach out and pull her against me again.
I can’t. I have no idea how much she knows, and the not knowing is killing me.
Tell her. Tell her. Tell her.
Before I can, she shifts away, sitting up against the gravestone. It puts an inch between us, but it might as well be a mile. “God. I don’t know what I’m going to tell my father.”
“Do you have to tell him anything?”
“I don’t know.” She turns to look at me, and her mouth is a hand’s width away from mine. “It seems unfair to tell him—but it seems unfair to watch him mourn a woman who doesn’t deserve it.”
“None of it’s fair, Juliet.” I shake my head and think of Alan. “None of it.”
“I know.” Her voice is soft, her eyes heavy with resignation.
“I know you know.”
“If it were your father, would you tell him?”
She’s still so close, and her words are so intimate, it’s like our exchanges as Cemetery Girl and The Dark. I could close my eyes and forget our real lives and talk to her forever.
“Yes,” I say.
She snorts and looks away. “Of course you would. You’re not afraid to tell anyone anything.”
I go still, unsure if that’s an insult or a compliment.
Unsure if what she’s said carries any truth at all.
Rev called me a martyr for not reaching out last May, when I sat in that police station, terrified when the officers said that no one was coming for me until the next day. But there’s only so much rejection you can take before you finally give up and stop trying.
Or maybe me thinking that is exactly what he means.
Juliet looks back at me and swipes at her cheeks. “I’m sorry I lost it.”
I look at her like she’s crazy. “You don’t have to apologize for that.”
“I know . . .” She hesitates, then finds courage. “I know you don’t want to talk to me anymore.”
I stare into her eyes. Is she talking to me, or is she talking to The Dark? I have tangled this up so thoroughly that I have no way of knowing.
Tell her.
“Oh, Juliet,” I say softly. I rake a hand through my hair. “That’s not it at all.”
She rotates until she’s sitting on her knees, putting her eye to eye with me. “Then what is it?”
“We’re traveling different paths,” I say. “And yours will lead you out of this mess. Mine seems determined to run me into the ground.”
She goes very still. A breeze runs through the cemetery and cuts between us. Her eyes narrow, just a little, and she looks at me carefully. “How did you know I was here?”
“I didn’t. I saw you.” Heat finds my cheeks, and I point at the mower. “I work here. Sort of.”
“Community service.” There’s no judgment in her voice.
I find her eyes and wish this moment could stretch on forever. “Yeah.”
“Juliet!” A middle-aged man is running across the cemetery, slipping on the grass a bit. “Juliet!”
She scrambles to her feet. “Dad!”
Even from fifty feet away, the relief on his face is visible. “Oh thank god,” he calls. “Thank god.”
“What’s wrong?” she says. Tears are in her voice again.
Then he gets to us, and he sweeps her into his arms. “Your teacher said you left a mess and ran out of there. We’ve been so worried. I was going to call the police.”
He’s holding her so tight, and Juliet is crying. “I’m sorry, Dad. I’m sorry.”