Sever

“Maybe he would have if I’d refused,” Gabriel says. “But I didn’t.”

“You went,” I say, and only when I hear the anger in my voice do I realize how upset this makes me. “Willingly. After all that effort to be rid of him.”

“I wanted to be rid of him,” he says. He raises my chin with his thumb. “But not if it meant being rid of you. I climbed in beside you, and you put your head in my lap. You can’t think I would have left you like that.”

“Look what it got you,” I say.

“Tea in bed and you here in front of me,” he says. “It was a terrible decision, and I confess I’d make it again.”

It’s impossible for me to resist his smile. One day after awakening from the coma, he is doing astoundingly well. Vaughn’s strongest chemicals are no match for the will to live, it seems.

“I’m not through being angry,” I say, my words muffled when he kisses me.

“Stop ruining it,” he says, and kisses me again, and again, until I let go and I move into his waiting arms.

His parted fingers move up my neck and through my hair, and the rush of nerves is overwhelming, and I freeze, stop breathing.

After all the months without him, my bed somehow kept Linden’s scent, and I’ve just found it in the pillow.

“Rhine?” Gabriel says.

I’m sitting up now. My eyes are aching. “I should make dinner,” I say. “Cecily and Rowan probably haven’t eaten, and you should try something solid. I’m sure your stomach will handle it now.”

He means to say something, but I’m on my feet before he can get the words out. I kiss his forehead and hurry away, to the scent of incense in the hall. Cecily has been lighting the sticks.

The kitchen is empty when I enter it, but the moment I make the slightest noise, the head cook is there, swatting at me with a wooden spoon and telling me to stay away from her ingredients. She’ll make whatever I’d like if I get out of her hair, she says.

No one eats, though. Rowan is out exploring the grounds somewhere, and when I bring dinner to Cecily’s room, she pretends to be asleep. I set the plate on her nightstand, kiss her forehead, and close her door on the way out.

Gabriel doesn’t press me. I tell him about Hawaii and he listens. We don’t discuss the fact that Vaughn was the one to bring me there, or the things that happened to my brother, or the things that happened to me. We talk only about the colors, and the blinking lights, and how from up high the ocean looks like a giant spill.

We stay away from words like “cure” and “hope.” Hope has been especially cruel.

When I close my eyes, I see the traffic lights changing and the triangular sails moving across the water. Gabriel sweeps the hair from my forehead as I lie with my head on his chest. Here I am telling him about these beautiful things, and I don’t deserve a single one of them.

“It’s my fault that Linden’s dead,” I say. “He was in my seat. I don’t even know why I let him have it; the view terrified him.”

“If he was sitting there, it wasn’t your seat,” Gabriel says. “Rhine. Look at me.”

I open my eyes and tilt my face toward his. My vision is blurred and I realize I’m crying, my throat heavy with the taste of it.

Gabriel tightens his arm around me, gathers me close. And I wrap my arms around him, because I am human and selfish and breathing. I’m still alive and I don’t know for how long, or what for. I shudder and sob, and the guilt and the hurt are so heavy, but not so much that it stops my heart from beating.

A feeling can’t kill you. That’s what I told Cecily. That’s what I’ve told myself so many times before.

“He wouldn’t want you to feel this way,” Gabriel says. “I didn’t know him very well, but I’m sure of that.”

“It’s because he was better than me,” I say. “He never wanted to hurt anyone. I didn’t want to hurt him, either. I only wanted to go home, and instead I made a mess of everything. I killed him.”

“You didn’t,” Gabriel says. But he says nothing more, because I’m sobbing and he knows that I’m in no state to listen to his reason. He rubs my back and he says impossible things. He tells me that I’m strong and that I deserve to be here. He tells me that I’ll never have to be alone.

As the day turns darker, I weave in and out of sleep, dreaming of the world through an airplane window. I try to find Linden, but he’s not on the crowded beach or in any of the gleaming windows. I listen for his voice, but I only hear Gabriel’s whispers filling the clouds and turning them pink as the sun goes down.

“I’ve loved you since the day I stole the atlas for you,” Gabriel says, because he thinks I’m asleep.

The door creaks open, startling me awake.

Timidly, Cecily moves into the doorway. “I knocked but you didn’t answer,” she says. “There’s a man downstairs to speak with you and your brother.”

Even before I’m fully awake, my heart is pounding. “What does he want?”

“I don’t know, but he’s rude,” she says. “He won’t tell me a thing. He just demanded to talk to you.”

She glances at Gabriel sleeping beside me, but her blank expression doesn’t change.

“I’ll be right down,” I say.

Once she’s gone, Gabriel, with his eyes still closed, says, “I heard her moving around all last night.”

“She’s having a terrible time with everything,” I say.

“What about you?” Gabriel says.

“Me? I slept well last night.”

“That isn’t what I meant.”

“I know,” I say, climbing out of the bed, seeking out my reflection in the mirror and gathering my hair into a ponytail. “I’m not ready to get into all of that. You’re here, I’m here, my brother and Cecily and Bowen are here.” I tug the wrinkles out of my shirt and jeans. “I’d like to focus on being grateful for all of that, if you don’t mind.”

He gives me a wan smile.

“Maybe over breakfast I’ll tell you what Madame has been up to. I guarantee that most of it isn’t what you’d expect.” I smile at him as I leave.

The man waiting to speak to me is an official sent by the president—a doctor-slash-scientist who has been assigned to monitor Rowan’s and my progress and escort us to our monthly physical examinations in Hawaii. He won’t be staying with us, only monitoring our vitals via our tracking devices. It turns out that there was never any rule about us staying on the property; that was something Vaughn devised to keep us contained. While we’re bound to confidentiality on penalty of execution, we are, as the official puts it, free to go where we please, provided we are here in time for our monthly flight.

I would just as soon cut the tracking device out of my body and be done with it, but Cecily comes out from her hiding place in the hallway and begins an eager round of questions about what she can do to participate in the study. She insists that she was Vaughn’s protégé, that he planned to include her as soon as a new round of subjects was recruited. Though this isn’t true, Rowan and I readily agree. There’s no reason to suspect that a man as in love with research as Vaughn was wouldn’t have planned to save his other daughter-in-law.

After the official leaves and Cecily has gone upstairs, Rowan and I sit at the kitchen table.

“Why did Dr. Ashby hate Cecily so much?” he asks.

“He told you he hated her?”

“He didn’t have to. I could tell by the way he treated her that night when we all had dinner. That, and he never expressed any interest in trying to cure her.”

I stare at my tea that’s gone cold. “I think he was jealous of her,” I say. She endured much of Vaughn’s venom, and perhaps the worst part of it was that he once pretended to love her. “Linden was finally beginning to grow up. He was making decisions that had nothing to do with his father’s wishes, and she was the reason for much of that. He chose her over his father.”

Rowan nods into his tea. I don’t know if my explanation makes sense to him. He only knows Vaughn as a brilliant doctor. He wasn’t here for all the gory affairs of the family dynamic. And part of me doesn’t want to sully the image of his hero, because the fact is that we may all live beyond our expectancy because of that man.

“Someday I’ll tell you all of it,” I say.

“I’d like that,” he says.

“No,” I say. “I promise you won’t.”

Chapter 31

IT’S NEARLY a year before there are openings in the study and Cecily is able to sign up. Gabriel joins her. By then the years of careful planning that went into Vaughn’s basement experiments are undone. We’ve searched every room, and while we found every manner of machinery, we never found any bodies. I decide that’s for the best; there are some questions I never want answered.

Reed does away with the key card system, and he opens entire rooms and levels of the house that I never saw before. He fills them with his strange and wonderful things. He turns an entire wing of the basement into a sort of greenhouse.

Cecily and I keep our old bedrooms, and we still call ourselves sister wives, or sometimes just sisters. Eventually Cecily decides that Jenna’s room would make the perfect nursery for Bowen. And our sister wife’s room, which was stagnant for far too long, comes alive again, in an entirely new way.

Rowan understands what made Cecily pull the trigger. He’s made it clear that he’s on our side. But he still maintains that Vaughn, despite his destructions and downfalls, is the one who ultimately saved us. He resorted to drastic means because he was fulfilling his calling to save the world. I still haven’t decided if the world can be saved, but there’s talk among those of us in the study now of opening our borders. Vaughn’s formula for the cure is bound to reach the rest of the country if the cure works.

Gabriel has stopped trying to understand Vaughn. He says that we have to move forward, and I agree. We don’t talk of revenge or bitterness anymore. We don’t forget our losses, but we’ve stopped counting them. There are so many other things to live for. We still aren’t allowed to explore the countries outside of our own—not just yet. But President Guiltree grants the study’s participants access to his private Hawaiian beach sometimes. From there we can hear the traffic. We can feel the pull of a thriving world that we will one day be able to join. The hope is most palpable there, and sometimes Gabriel and I disentangle ourselves from the others. We go as far out into the water as we dare, and only when we’re alone in this way do we talk to each other of love, like it’s a faraway city.