XXXV
Mom has a roast in the oven when we get back. Henry sniffs the air appreciatively. Mom promises she’ll make him up a plate and sneak it to him. We both decide it’s a better idea all around if Henry doesn’t eat dinner with us—Mer would be seriously confused if Mom let a boy who spent the previous night in my room eat dinner with us as if it were a perfectly normal thing to do, and it would probably lead to Mer asking some very uncomfortable questions later. Henry doesn’t mind, though. As soon as he gets his shoes off in the mudroom, he disappears into the study to look for William Parish’s journal, then takes it upstairs to my room to read. Mom agreed he can stay up there while Mer’s here, but he’ll be sleeping on the couch tonight.
Mer arrives shortly after. Her eyes widen as I answer the door. “So, are you grounded for the rest of your life?” she whispers.
“Not grounded so much as indentured.”
“Lucky. If my parents found a boy in my room, I’d be shipped off to a convent faster than you can say chastity belt.”
“Come on,” I say, leading her into the family room. “Let’s get to work.”
An hour of studying and a cross-examination about what Henry and I did and did not do last night later, Mom calls us into the dining room for dinner. Mer digs into the roast beef and twice-baked potatoes like it’s her last meal. She talks to Mom about school, and Mom talks to her about work and tries, once again, to sway her toward studying archaeology when she gets into Ohio State.
“They’re not going to take me,” Mer says. “My grades are too low and my practice ACT scores have been way below average.”
“Well, that’s why Winter’s helping you. Isn’t that right, Win?”
“Hmm? Oh. Yeah.” I’ve been zoning out all night, thinking about the wood, about what would have happened to Henry if the fireflies hadn’t gotten to him in time, or if Varo had made good on his threat to stop them. Can I even trust going back into the wood again now that my greatest ally, the sun, can be stripped from me at any moment? Now that Varo has invaded my thoughts twice?
I think of Dad, too. I know it isn’t safe to hope, but I can’t help wondering … Have Henry’s parents discovered something new about Dad’s disappearance? And if they’re still alive, just in another place and time, does that mean there’s a chance Dad’s still alive, too? Will they be able to help me find him if he is?
And I think of Joe. A week ago—heck, a day ago—I would have called for him when Varo took the sun away from me. Would have told him everything that’s happened and would’ve trusted him to handle it. But Henry’s right—we don’t know whose side anyone is on, and until we do, until this all comes to a head and Varo’s supporters are forced to reveal themselves, Joe has to be just as much a suspect as anyone else.
I try to force those thoughts from my mind, knowing it’s unhealthy to think so long and so hard about things that are out of my control, but I just end up thinking of the boy in my room. The way his fingers brushed my cheek last night, his lips inches from mine. The way he looks at me, like I’m strong and smart and independent and mesmerizing. The way he moves, graceful yet with purpose, a blend between his aristocratic upbringing and the days he spends working alongside the tenant farmers in his fields.
“I like working with my hands,” he told Mom this afternoon while I rummaged through the fridge for butter and cheese. “Besides, it’s my land. What kind of caretaker would I be if I just ignored it and let everyone else handle it?”
He’s brilliant and responsible and amazing, and there’s this part of me, deep down, that whispers every time I look at him: What if? It’s a dangerous start to a question. What if things could be different? What if he could—I don’t know—move here, to this century, with his family? If his parents can really live in any time period they choose, then why can’t Henry? Sure, he isn’t an Old One, and if Henry doesn’t live out his life in the eighteenth century, it could have serious ramifications, but should that really stand in the way of true love? If fairy tales are to be believed, I should be able to have my prince and keep the space-time continuum from imploding, too.
Get over it, Win, I tell myself. He’s leaving whether you want him to or not. You’ve known that since the very beginning.
But I’m not ready to let him go. God, how selfish is that? We’ve accomplished what Henry came here to do. We’ve tracked his parents, and we have every reason to believe they’re alive, and that they have information about Dad. And I’m so happy about that, happier than I’ve been in twenty months and six—almost seven—days, but imagining Henry not being here anymore …
It’s like imagining another piece of myself being lost to the wood forever.
*
“So, are you in love with him?”
“Mer!”
“She can’t hear me,” Meredith whispers as she turns the page of her Algebra II book.
I glance at Mom in the dining room, grading papers with a red pen in one hand, massaging her temples with the other.
“You don’t have to say anything anyway,” Mer says, stretching her legs out behind her. “It’s written all over your face.”
I squirm from her all-knowing stare. “It is not.”
“Please. So, when’s lover boy going back to New York?”
I push off my stomach and sit up, leaning my back against the couch. “Tomorrow, probably.”
“Will he be back to visit?”
My throat goes dry. “No.”
She nods. “So that explains the sleepover.”
“We haven’t been doing anything. We just talk.”
She taps her pen against the glossy page, leaving behind blue spots that, if they shifted an inch to the left, could really screw up the answers to some work problems. “Sometimes talking can be more dangerous than anything else,” she murmurs.
I study her. “Is that why you’re a serial dater?”
She shrugs. “If you don’t get to know a guy, he can’t break your heart. He can hurt your pride by breaking up with you, or make you feel like an idiot when he turns out to be a total ass, but he can’t make you fall in love with him. Not if he’s just one frog in the long line of amphibians you have to kiss before you find your Prince Charming.”
“You know, there’s just one little problem with your theory. You’ll have to actually get to know a guy to find out if he’s your Prince Charming or not.”
“Well, then,” she says, sitting up. “Enlighten me. How’s this whole getting-to-know-Henry thing working out for you?”
“It sucks.”
“Gee, don’t make it sound too appealing.”
I exhale. “It sucks because I really like him. A lot. And he’s leaving. And I’m never going to see him again.”
“And you call me dramatic. There’s always college, you know. You could track down where he’s going and—”
“No.”
She rolls her eyes. “Are you kidding? With your grades you could get in anywhere, and you wouldn’t be the first girl to chase a guy to college.”