Sarah

The lamp didn’t come any closer.

Andy walked toward it at Horun’s side for a long time, past openings in both walls that were lit and murmuring and that he didn’t look into, past torches burning white and steady one after another until he stopped counting them, and the small warm light stayed exactly where it had been—low on the right, and far off. Then he looked up and it was beside him, an arm’s length away, and he could not have said when the last of the distance had gone.

Horun stopped at the opening. Andy stopped a step short of the sill.

It was a small room, and dark: a lamp burned low beside a cradle, and its light reached as far as the chair next to the cradle and gave up there. Sarah sat in the chair. She had a baby asleep on her chest, and she was looking down at it, and her long black hair had fallen forward and hidden most of her face. Just inside the door, at the edge of the light, stood the viewer—Arabella, not doing anything at all.

Laura had told him about this room without knowing what it looked like. Three in the morning, the night before the wedding, her head on his chest. Three weeks. She made that Wish three weeks after I was born. Andy looked at the baby on Sarah’s chest, the small dark head under her chin.

“I know what this one is,” he said.

It came out thin. He swallowed and it didn’t help—his mouth had gone dry all at once. “That’s her. That’s Laura.” He looked down at the sill instead, the clean edge of stone between the corridor and the dark room, because it was easier to look at than the chair.

“Sam told me to ask her,” Andy said. “Arabella. After I told Sam about the letter. She said, Arabella granted it, she’d know exactly what Sarah said, word for word, so go and ask her.” He shook his head slowly. “And I never did. I didn’t want to. I’d rather not know than know it for sure.” He heard how that sounded, out loud, in this place, and did not take it back. “Then Laura and I agreed last night that it doesn't matter. That’s still true. Right now. But the other thing is still true too. Standing here.”

It was the plain truth, and he had known it about himself for a while. As long as nobody told him the words, there was room for the letter to be wrong. He and Laura had been living in that room since the night she put the blue book in his hands. If Arabella had looked at him across her desk and said yes, that is what Sarah asked for, word for word, there wouldn’t have been any room left at all. So he hadn’t asked. He had put on his wedding clothes not asking. Last night, they had agreed that it didn’t matter anyway. And still he had not asked.

Horun looked at him, and then at the room in the wall, and back. “You don’t have to go in,” he said, softly.

It was true. The corridor went on past the opening, down into the older light, and the nursery would stay where it was if Andy walked by it. He could keep not knowing. He had gotten good at it, and he stood there a while longer, as if he might still walk on by.

“Yeah,” Andy said. “I do.”

He stepped over the sill.

He was standing just inside the nursery door, and Arabella didn’t move, so neither did he. Her weight was even on both feet. Her hands hung at her sides. The room was dark except for the lamp by the cradle, and quiet except for the baby’s breathing, small and even. Laura was three weeks old. She was asleep against Sarah’s chest, one fist locked around Sarah’s finger and not letting go. Arabella stayed by the door and came no farther in, and what she meant by it reached Andy as far as it went: she was giving Sarah the room, the way she always did when she could.

The cradle beside the chair was empty, its blanket turned back. Sarah was wearing worn black flats, in a plain red dress that hung loose on her, and she shifted her posture to sit very straight, as though sitting straight were something she had decided to do and meant to go on doing for as long as it took. The baby had a great deal of black hair for something so small. It stood up at the crown, where Sarah’s chin had been resting on it. Arabella’s breath went in and out of her slowly, through the nose, and her hands stayed open at her sides.

Sarah didn’t look up right away.

When she finally did, her eyes were clear. Andy had seen those eyes over a fence a thousand times, and once in a doorway at night, and in the cottage in the Hollow Garden—fixed on nothing. He had never seen them like this. There wasn’t much time in it, and she looked as if she knew that.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay. Before it—”

She didn’t finish that. Arabella said nothing. She waited. Andy waited inside her, because there was nothing else he could do; he couldn’t move a finger to stop any of it, or answer any of it.

“I wish—” Sarah stopped. She started again, slower, as if she were testing each word before she let it out of her mouth. “I don’t want the rest of it. Whatever else is on the table. I don’t want safe, I don’t want fixed, I don’t want any of what’s happening to me undone, because I already know that’s not actually on offer, so I’m not going to waste this time pretending it is.”

She looked down at the baby.

“I want her to never be alone. Not the way I am. Not ever, no matter what happens to me after tonight.” A breath. “There’s somebody. Somewhere. I don’t know who.” A small laugh, more pain in it than anything. “Her soulmate.” She laughed bitterly. “You once told me that’s a real thing, didn’t you? He could be twenty already. He could be a baby right now, asleep in some crib somewhere, doesn’t even have his teeth yet, I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter, because whoever he actually is, wherever he actually is—he's the one that could make her happy. Really happy. The kind I don’t—”

She stopped that sentence too, and didn’t go back for it. Her eyes were wet.

“So find him. That part, yes. Find him—don’t build him. I’m not asking for somebody made out of nothing just so he fits her. I want the real one. Whoever he actually turns out to be, flaws and all, wherever he is, I don’t care. Just real.”

Her breathing changed. This part was harder.

“And I want—” She stopped herself. “No. Not want. I keep saying want, and want isn’t the right—” She shut her eyes for a second. “I know what it looks like when somebody doesn’t get a say. I’ve been living inside it for a year. I will live inside it for the rest of my life. I am not doing that to some stranger’s kid just because it’d be easier for me to know for sure.” She opened her eyes again. “So point him at her. Make sure he finds her, yes. And if he wants her, if he sees her and chooses her, in his soul. Someday. Whenever someday ends up being, whatever age he is by then, whenever they meet—if he looks at her and actually wants her, not because something’s pulling him there, not because he can’t get away, not because someone tells him to, but just because he does, deep in his soul, and she does too—then let it take. Let them find each other thereafter. Let them always have each other. Let it be real, all the way down.”

A pause. Her voice came quieter.

“But if he doesn’t. If I got it wrong, or he grows up and it’s just not there, or if there isn't such a thing as a soulmate after all—don’t make him. I mean it. Don’t you dare make him. I would rather she grow up lonely than grow up loved by someone who never got to choose it, because I know exactly what that turns into. I’m looking at what that turns into every single day of my life right now. I’d put my hand in a fire before I did that to her on purpose.”

She pressed her mouth to the top of the baby’s head. When she spoke again it had gone soft, almost not meant for anyone in the room, not even the woman by the door. Her eyes were glimmering with tears.

“Just give them the chance. Both of them. Give them every chance to meet each other, at least. Starting now—starting whenever now has to start for him, doesn’t matter if he’s too small to know his own name yet. If he sees her and loves her, and she feels the same—let neither of them have to find the other by luck. Let them get every chance there is.”

She was quiet for a second. “That’s it. That’s the whole wish. I won't be able to make her happy, and that's what I want. I want her to be happy.” Then, so quietly it barely counted as sound: “Please.”

Arabella didn’t say anything back, but her heart lurched in her chest, and Andy could feel the tears she held back. She stayed where she was and let Sarah have the rest of the minute. The baby breathed. The small fist stayed shut on the finger. Then, after long moments and after finding it in herself to recompose the Host mask, she murmured, “Your Wish is granted, Sarah. I’ll give them both every chance there is to meet, and I will watch over her.”

The memory ended.

Andy was in the corridor, and his hands were shaking. He looked down at them. They shook in front of him in the white light, both of them, and he couldn’t make them stop, and he didn’t try very hard.

“Oh,” he breathed. It was most of the air he had. He had backed up against the far wall of the corridor without deciding to, and the stone was cold through the mantle. Across from him the nursery sat lit in its opening: the lamp, the empty cradle, a woman in a chair with her mouth against a baby’s head, and Arabella at the door. The small fist was still shut on the finger. It would stay shut there for as long as the wall held it.

I want her to never be alone.

He had heard that already tonight—not those words, but close to them, a little way back up this corridor. A cold step in the dark, a five-year-old in thin pajamas with her chin on her knees, and Arabella beside her, saying it so quietly the words had to be lifted out one at a time. You won’t ever be alone. He had taken it for Arabella’s. It had been Sarah’s first—Arabella had carried it out of this room and kept it, and then given it to the child it was for.

Andy turned to Horun. “She loved Laura so much, from the very beginning. She knew what was going to happen to her. She didn’t— Find him, she said,” he whispered. “Don’t build him.” His voice cracked on it, and he went on anyway. “If he doesn’t want her, don’t— Don’t make him. Don’t you dare make him. That’s what she— That’s what she asked for.”

Horun did not say anything. His eyes stayed on Andy.

“She meant it.” Andy was breathing too fast, and he made himself stop. “She meant every word of that.” The Wish had never made him love her. It had gone out into the world and found him—a baby in a crib on Twin Yews Road, a few weeks old, without a tooth in his head, exactly as she’d said—and then it had stopped, and left the rest to him. To them both.

I want her to be happy.

The gap in the back fence. The bike rides. The raft. The fort. The meteor shower. The crabapple tree. The paper crown. The chocolate cakes. The river, and the sixteen years after the river. None of that had come out of this room.

And the letter, he could have recited it. He had read it so many times in his head, and once out loud, on the floor of Laura’s bedroom, with his voice sticking on the words he least wanted to believe. You are asleep on my arm. You have my finger in your fist and you will not let go of it. He had just watched that fist. Sarah had written the letter later the same night, with the baby still asleep on her arm and the lamp still burning, before she went back down to Greg, before he grew angry that she had not wished for money, and instead received a house as a gift, because Arabella knew the Wish, and knew who was the one boy-child the Wish would wait for.

Laura’s soulmate. The kind of romantic thing a young woman believed in, and it broke Andy’s heart to realize how desperately Sarah had wished that to be true, that Laura could have one, that she could be happy, even as Sarah herself looked ahead at a life of servitude and misery. And Arabella had told her there was such a thing as soulmates. Perhaps there really were.

Sarah had written the letter the way she said she would, badly and fast, slanting hard to the right, doubling back on itself, out of order. I grabbed him and pointed him at you, and he did not get a say in any of it. He’ll find you. He won’t be able to help it.

Laura had heard him stumble on that line, and she had made him go back to it. Read the line again, both her voices together, and then she had quoted it to him herself, perfectly level, as if it were the only line in the book.

He had looked at that handwriting the first day and seen a frightened woman writing fast. And Sam had told Laura almost the same thing: a letter written in a panic after the Wish was spoken might not say what had actually been said in the room. They had both been right. Neither of them had been anywhere close to how right.

“The letter isn’t—,” Andy said. “She pointed me at her. Told Arabella to give us every chance, and—and she told her it was up to me. To us. It’s not even— The letter, the letter is a frightened woman writing quickly and simplifying. It isn't what she actually said.”

“No,” Horun said. “It isn’t.”

He said it softly, as he said everything, and nothing came after it. He didn’t soften it, or explain how he knew, or tell Andy what to do with it. Andy laughed, or something did. It came out wet and wrong and broke in the middle. He dragged the back of his wrist across his eyes, and then the other one, and then gave up and let his face be wet. “Sorry,” he said, when he could. “I just— Sorry.”

Whether what you feel about me was ever actually yours to feel. Laura, at three in the morning, saying it to the ceiling. Or whether my mother put it in you.

But her mother hadn’t put anything in him. Her mother had stood in front of the one thing in the world that could have done it—and told it not to dare. If he had gone to Arabella the way Sam told him to, and she had told him all of this across her desk, he didn’t know whether he would have believed her, or whether Laura would believe it now. He stood in the white light and breathed until his hands were almost still. Then the next thing was already there, right behind the last one, and he turned to Horun with it before he could decide not to.

“Then how is there a bond at all?” Andy asked. “If it didn’t make anything. If it never made me— Then where did it come from?”

Horun looked at him, and did not answer yet.

Andy sat down with his back against the wall. He didn’t do it well. His shoulders found the stone and his knees let go, and he slid down it until he hit the floor, and the scabbard caught on the way and knocked once and lay over at an angle across his thigh. The lamp’s light came out of the nursery across from him, low and warm, and lay across the corridor in front of his boots. He could still hear the baby breathing in there, just barely, the way you can hear a clock in another room once you’ve noticed it.

Horun looked down at him. Then he lowered himself onto the floor beside him, unhurried, folding all that height down a little at a time, and sat with his bare feet stretched out in front of him and his robes pooled around him, white on the side nearest Andy and black on the other. He did not say anything. He let the question stand where Andy had left it, and waited, as if there were nowhere either of them had to be.

Andy looked at his own hands on his knees. They had mostly stopped. He turned the left one over and looked at the palm—it told him nothing. “Give me a second,” he said.

Horun gave him a good deal more than a second. The torches burned. Somewhere far down the corridor a door in one of the memories opened and shut, and the sound came up to them late and small, and went. Horun’s head was tipped back against the stone, his hair black on one side and white on the other, and his strange eyes, dark at the rims and silver at the center, rested on the lamp in the wall.

“It only made a chance,” Andy said at last, slowly. He was working it out as he went, and he could hear himself doing it. “That’s all it did. It found me, and it made sure we’d have the chance, and Arabella gave Greg the house to create that chance, and then she said—if he wants her, let it take.” He turned his head. “So if there’s a bond at all—and there is, it’s right there, she’s right there, I can feel her on the other end of it—then somebody let it take. I let it take. We both took it. Didn’t we?”

“Yes,” Horun said.

Andy opened his mouth to ask when. The bond had been there for as long as he could remember. So he couldn’t have been more than a baby. He’d have been a few weeks old; he couldn’t have chosen anything, he couldn’t have held up his own head—

He stopped, with his mouth still open on it.

He had seen it. A little way back up this same corridor, from across the street in the dark, through his parents’ big front window: a yellow blanket on the carpet, his mother on her knees beside it, and two small heads turning.

“It was the blanket,” Andy said, in a whisper. “Wasn’t it. It was—that night. The blanket.”

“Yes,” Horun said. “Not when she made her Wish. The first time anyone laid the two of you down side by side, a little over a month old. My sister ensured they would live next door to you. Sarah left her with your mother so she wouldn’t be there to see what her father would do. She had to choose whether to trust strangers or bring her daughter back in that house, and trusted your mother, even if she didn’t know you were there, she didn’t know at all. And your mother put you next to her, on that blanket. You turned your head and saw her, and you knew her for yours, and you loved her. And she knew you for hers, and she loved you. Right then. You didn’t have a word for any of it, and you didn’t need one. What the soul knows, it knows. And when your hands found each other, it took.”

Andy’s breath went out of him all at once, and didn’t come back for a while. “I don’t remember it,” he said, when it did. “I don’t remember any of it.”

The two small hands in the air over the blanket, uncertain, the fingers opening and closing on nothing. Then finding each other. He had watched it from under a maple across the street, inside a woman who didn’t go one step nearer—and he had not understood what he was seeing. His mother’s voice through the screen, late, every word of it arriving. Andy, this is Laura. Laura, this is Andy.

But Arabella has known. He remembered the tears in her eyes when their hands touched, the sense of something enormous happening.

And later that same night, two lit windows at either end of his parents’ house and two babies crying in them, on and on, until someone carried one into the other’s room. It was his mother’s story, the one about the two of them as babies, and he had only ever heard it as a funny one. It had taken that evening. It had already taken—and the two of them had lain in separate rooms in the dark and screamed about it, not used to it, not understanding it yet.

His mother had kept it for him as a story, and Arabella had kept the rest—standing under that tree the whole night, until the last window on the street went dark. Between the two of them, everything he couldn’t remember had been looked after. He looked at his right hand where it lay on his knee. It had found hers before it could hold a spoon.

“It never made the love,” Horun said. “The love was first. The bond came after it.”

“The love was first,” Andy repeated. Then again, quieter, as though he were testing whether it would hold his weight: “It was first.” It held.

“It is rare, exceedingly so,” Horun said softly, “for someone to meet their soulmate at all. Rarer still, for them to meet that young. My sister knew. In accordance with the Wish, she gave you the chance, that was all. You complete each other. Halves of a whole. You recognized each other when you first saw each other. The bond is simply an affirmation.”

Since the night Laura handed him the blue book and asked him to read the last page, some part of him had been going back over his own life with a lantern, looking for the seam—the place where something had been fitted in from outside. The light he used to watch for across the yard at night. Cherry and blue raspberry at Sunny’s. Walkie-talkies at night, whispering under the blankets in their beds. The sixteen years after the river, when he had sometimes thought that nobody should miss anyone that long, and had gone on missing her anyway.

There wasn’t any seam. There never had been.

He let his head go back against the stone and shut his eyes. In the dark behind them he was in Arabella’s office again, with Laura’s hands locked on his and Marie beside them, and Arabella across the table from them with her own hands flat on the wood. She was unreachable, Andy. Except for you. No one else could have crossed over, no one else could have survived it. Only you.

Laura had sat through all of it beside him and hadn’t let go of his hands once, not even at the worst of it, and when it was over she had said almost nothing. She had taken it in and kept it, the way she kept everything that mattered.

Laura had been conceived in the Hotel and born in it, and her soul had come out of it so tangled that none of the usual ways back would reach it. Arabella had needed one particular person: the one person who had loved Laura enough to carry her soul even after her death.

Loved. Nobody had built any of it. The love had always been his, and the bond that grew out of it was the one thing anywhere that could reach her.

He opened his eyes. The lamp was still burning in the opening across from him, low and steady, as if nobody in that room had ever been in a hurry. “If she hadn’t wished,” Andy said. He went slowly. “Sarah was already living under Greg. A year already. The Wish didn’t put her there. All it asked was that Laura wouldn’t be alone, and that if I wanted her, and she wanted me, it could take. And the house was only given to Greg because of that Wish.”

Horun nodded. “The gift of that house was permitted to fulfill the Wish,” he said softly, “My sister would not have been able to give it to him, otherwise.”

Andy swallowed. “So no Wish, no house at 286. He takes them somewhere else. Some other house, some other street, and I’m not—” He stopped, and turned his head on the stone. “You’d know. Wouldn’t you? What happens to her, if I’m not there.”

“No,” Horun said. “It never happened. There’s none of it here to show you.” His eyes went back up the corridor, the way they had come. “Only what did. But you know the answer.”

Andy looked where he was looking.

The nurse’s office, earlier tonight: Laura at nine with the knees of her jeans soaked dark, saying Don’t call my house while Arabella was still looking for her card. The card itself, in Sarah’s small, hard-pressed hand, and lower down, in the same hand: If you can’t reach us: Carol Cooper. The window she had been halfway out of at eleven, on her way to him, when Greg’s ring caught her jaw. And Riley, once, telling him something he had never known: Laura, the summer before the river, turning up in Riley’s room one night in her pajamas, with a bruise on her shoulder. If I don’t make it, you have to make sure Andy doesn’t go to shit. She had made it sound like a joke. But she had made Riley promise.

“She had us,” Andy said. “The whole time. A window that went somewhere. My mom on her card. My parents trying to get Social Services in, offering to take her—” He had to stop. “And she was still telling Riley ‘if I don’t make it.’ With all of that. She had all of that, and she was still— she was still drowning.”

Horun didn’t answer.

Andy went back over it looking for the hole. He wanted there to be one: some other kid on some other street, a teacher who looked twice, somebody who would have done what his mother did. But Sarah had filled out that card herself, and the one person she had trusted to it lived next door.

“Take the house away,” he said, low. He didn’t want to be the one to say it. “No fence. No next door. The window opens on some street where nobody knows her name. And she’s in there with him, and there’s nowhere to—” His throat shut on it. He made himself finish. “It’s Greg’s hands, or it’s her own. Sooner or later. One or the other. Isn't it?”

Horun watched him for a few moments. “It is.”

Andy sat with that a while. “The Wish didn’t do that,” he said. “That was him.” He swallowed. “But without it there’s no bond. If she was going to die anyway—nothing holding on to her. Nothing for me to hold her with. She’d have just gone on. Wherever people go. And Arabella said Laura’s soul was affected by her birth in the Hotel, that resurrection would have been impossible, except…” His voice had dropped almost to nothing. “Sarah’s Wish is the only reason Laura came back. That’s what it did.”

“Yes,” Horun said.

Andy nodded, and kept nodding a moment after there was any reason to. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.” Then he made himself stop, and sat with his wrists on his knees and his hands hanging, and let it be as big as it was.

He thought of Sarah in the cottage in the Hollow Garden, in her rocker by the window. The same slow motion over and over, as if the planet were turning it for her, and her hands gripping the arms of the chair, and her lips moving, telling her sweet girl she was sorry. He had stood in that room and taken her hand and said his own name to her, and she hadn’t known he was there. Laura went every day she could.

And in this room, thirty years ago, Sarah had had the whole thing in front of her. She could have asked for a boy made to love her daughter and never stop, and never once wonder why. It would have been easier. She’d said so herself: easier, to know for sure. She had turned it down, not for her own sake, but for a stranger’s kid she was never going to meet.

Flaws and all. She had asked for the real one, whoever he turned out to be, and the real one had not turned out to be much for a long while. A long stretch of his life had gone into a hole after the bridge, and he had climbed out of it late and badly and mostly by accident and by the love of a group of women who had had more faith in him than he had had in himself. Sarah had said she didn’t care. She had said it with her daughter asleep on her chest, about a boy she would never see grow up, and she had meant that too.

“She could’ve had it,” Andy said, half to Horun and half to the wall across the corridor. “It was right there in her hands. She could’ve made somebody—she could’ve made me—and she wouldn’t. She’d have put her hand in a fire first.” His voice went. He waited for it to come back. “She didn’t even know me. And she was that careful with me. And that’s what brought Laura back. Her being careful with me.”

Horun did not answer that. He sat with his hands loose in his lap and looked where Andy was looking, at the lamp in the wall and the chair beside it.

Laura didn’t know any of this. Laura thought it was artificial. It was a piece of machinery, she had said, in her bedroom, with both her faces gone flat and level. Installed by someone who never met you, and left running ever since. She had heard Sam say the letter might be wrong, and she hadn’t been able to let go of what she’d already decided.

And Andy had seen the handwriting the first day and said nothing about it, on purpose, so that when someone finally told her the letter might not be the whole truth, it would come from someone with nothing to gain. He had everything to gain. Anything he told her about this room, she would hear the way she had already told him she would. That’s how good the machinery is.

The last night before the wedding she had pressed her face into his shoulder and said she didn’t want to give it up either way, built or grown. They had agreed to keep what they had, whichever it was. It had been enough to get them to the altar. It wasn’t the same as knowing—and he needed her to know. She needed to believe that she had been chosen. She needed to believe that whatever happiness she had ever found with him, was not artificial.

There was only one person she would believe it from.

He reached up the bond for her without deciding to. She was where she always was now—right here and impossibly far, and afraid, so scared. He couldn’t send her any of this. The bond would take where he was and how frightened he was, and nothing else, and he sat a moment with that, his hand gone flat on the stone floor as if he could push something up through it.

Andy sat up off the wall. “After the Gate. After the Gate, I’m going to wake her up. Sarah. I’m going to wake her up and bring her to Laura—wherever Laura is by then—and let her tell her what she said in there. All of it.” He breathed out. “I don’t know how yet.”

He didn’t. He didn’t know how you woke someone who had been sitting with her eyes open for sixteen years, or whether a voice from outside could reach whatever was still in there to hear it. But he could see the end of it, if he got there. Sarah in front of her daughter with her eyes as clear as they had been in that room, saying it to Laura’s face. Find him. Don’t build him. Laura would believe that. She would know it was her mother’s voice, and not his.

Horun inclined his head, once, and left it at that. The torchlight lay along the white half of him, and he went on sitting there with his long bare feet crossed at the ankle, in no hurry to get up.

Andy held out his right hand and called the Moongem up out of his Inventory. It came into his palm: blue glass the length of the top joint of his finger, caged in gold filigree as fine as hair, lit from somewhere inside itself. The light lay on his skin and didn’t flicker. It took a transformation away whole, where his Coauthor Capstone could only soften one.

He thought of the Hollow Garden, and of Sandra in it, in the same garden as Sarah—a long barrel-chested body in the grass, and a laugh through her nose when he’d told her it was good to meet her. He had watched her help Sarah during Laura's birth, holding her hand. He had watched Riley hurt, and Sandra herself hurt, because they could not see each other. On the grass that day, with Myra and Marie there, she had said she wasn’t ready for Riley to see her like this.

He closed his fingers over the bead. Then he opened them, and sent it back.

Before he stood, he looked into the nursery one more time. Sarah’s mouth was still against the top of the baby’s head, and the lamp was still burning low beside the empty cradle, and Arabella was still at the door with her hands open at her sides, giving her the room.

He got to his feet, and settled the sword at his hip. Andy pulled the mantle straight across his shoulders, where it had gone crooked against the wall, and found the buckle of the sword belt and drew it in a notch. Beside him Horun was getting up off the floor, one hand flat on the stone, in a long unhurried unfolding that ended with him at his full height again—the torchlight on the white half of him. Andy settled the belt over Dawn’s sash, and something stiff crackled against his chest.

He stopped. It crackled again when he breathed.

There was paper in the breast pocket of his wedding jacket, under the mantle, where there had never been anything at all. He hadn’t felt it the whole time he’d been down here—not in the ruins, not at the lake, not sitting against the wall just now—and he felt it now, a small flat stiffness over his heart. He worked two fingers into the pocket and drew it out: a single sheet, folded small, soft at the creases, as if it had been folded and unfolded a great many times by someone who wanted to be careful with it. Yellow paper. Faint blue lines.

He opened it, and knew the handwriting before he had read a word. Pencil, pressed down so hard it had dented the paper, the letters cramped and hurried and leaning into one another. Laura’s. Laura’s at thirteen.

He had watched her with this in her lap. The Garden of Glass, the Fourth Challenge, every scene of it from the Master’s Throne, because watching was the whole of what that seat was for. A small hot bedroom in Warrenville with magazine pictures of horses and moons tacked up on the walls. A calendar stuck on October, the days X’d out through the twenty-eighth, and a star drawn in purple pen beside the thirty-first: Costume.

And Laura on the bed with her knees crossed and this sheet in her lap, reading it over and over with her lips moving, five days before the footbridge. Her thumb had smudged one line until it went to shadow. He looked, and there it was—a soft gray blur halfway down the page.

Laura had folded it corner to corner, so carefully her fingers shook, and pushed it under her mattress. Emi had been in that memory with her. Emi had sat on the edge of the bed and asked whether she was ever going to give it to her mother, and Laura had shaken her head. I had to say it. Even if nobody ever heard me.

Emi had told her she was the bravest person she knew. I’m not brave, Laura had said, wiping her eyes on the back of her hand. I’m just… loud. When her mother called up the stairs for dinner, Laura had gone down. And Emi had waited until she was gone, and pulled the letter out from under the mattress, and put it in her pocket, and carried it out of the glass.

Andy had watched all of that from the Throne. He had sat in that seat while the women he loved walked into each other’s worst memories and came out shaking, and he had watched every minute of it with his hands on the arms of the chair, and hadn’t been able to do a thing about any of it. He was getting used to that. The last time he had seen this sheet of paper, it had been in Emi’s hand.

“’Dear Mom,’” he read aloud.

His voice didn’t make it even that far without catching. He stood in the corridor with the sheet open in both hands and the torchlight coming through the back of it, so that the words showed faintly reversed through the paper, and for a moment he couldn’t read any further.

“It’s hers,” he said, to nobody. “It’s Laura’s.” He looked up. “Did you put this here?” he asked Horun. He lifted it a little. “In my pocket. Was that you?”

“No,” Horun said. He was looking at the letter, not at Andy. “I don’t know who did. I’m sorry. It was with you when you came into this place. That much I know.”

“How long has that been in there?” Andy said, mostly to himself.

Horun let it go by. Andy looked down at himself, at the jacket under the white mantle and the pocket he had taken it from, as if the cloth might tell him something. He put his fingers back into the pocket and felt along the seam of it. There was nothing else in there.

He thought of the jacket hanging in the Suite the morning of the wedding, pressed and waiting while he got the rest of himself ready, and of Emi walking out of the Garden of Glass with this in her pocket, and he couldn’t make the two meet anywhere. There was nothing between them that he knew about. But someone had carried it a long way, by a road he couldn’t see, and put it over his heart, and said nothing.

Nothing is ever lost for good. It only ends up somewhere. Horun had said that to him when he had first arrived down here, walking through a country of forgotten things, and Andy had taken it for the kind of thing people say. Horun was still looking at the letter, and he didn’t say it again.

“Okay,” Andy said. He found he didn’t need to know who, not yet. “Okay.”

He read it again, all the way through, slowly, the way she had. Under his fingertips he could feel where the pencil had gone in, every line of it raised on the back of the sheet like something meant to be read by touch, and the paper had gone soft as cloth along the folds. At the bottom, the *I love you* had been pressed down so hard the pencil had nearly gone through.

{letter signed "Laura"}

Dear Mom,

I love you so much it makes my chest hurt.

I heard the glass break downstairs. I heard you tell him you were sorry. You say sorry so much I’m afraid you’re going to apologize yourself into nothing, just so he stops looking at you.

Please don’t disappear. I know you’re scared—I’m scared too—but you can’t let him make you small. You have to remember who you were before this house got so loud.

I am writing this to promise you that we aren’t going to be stuck here forever. I’m going to study harder than anyone else, and I’m going to become a scientist, and the second I am strong enough, I am going to take you away from here. We are going to go somewhere where the only sounds are quiet ones, and where you never have to shake when you hear a car pull into the driveway.

I am going to save us. Just hold on until I’m big enough to do it.

I love you,

{endletter}

There was no blame in it anywhere. He went back over it looking for some—there wasn’t a line. A thirteen-year-old in a loud house had sat down with a pencil and written her mother not a complaint, but a promise, and then hidden it under a mattress because she didn’t think her mother would read it. She wouldn’t read it. She never reads anything I give her. He had heard her say that, from the Throne, in a flat little voice with a hitch behind it.

So her mother never had.

He thought of the terrace, about a week ago: the sea, the white arc of the islands, and Laura with both her knees drawn up and the baby book open across her laps, its blue ribbon lifting in the wind. She had been reading Sarah’s letters to him—the one from when Laura was three days old, I have held you. You are real—and in the middle of it she had stopped and told him the last thing she ever said to her mother. I told her I hated her. I was thirteen and I meant it and then I drowned and that was it. That was the last thing she ever got from me. She had written this first, five days before, and pushed it under a mattress and never given it to her. And then she had said the other thing instead, and gone into the river.

He had pulled both of her into him on that terrace and held on, and told her Sarah was still in there, fighting. And Laura had said into his shoulders, in a small voice, She can’t hear me tell her I’m sorry. The two of them, in two different rooms of their lives, each trying to tell the other she was sorry, and neither one able to hear it.

His thumb had come to rest on the smudge. He left it there.

He thought of Sarah in her rocker by the window, the slow motion that never stopped, her lips moving. My baby girl, my baby girl, I’m sorry, sweet girl. Over and over, sixteen years of it. You say sorry so much.

He had grown up on the other side of a fence from that voice, and he had hardly ever heard it say anything at all. The few times he had, it was apologizing. Tonight he had heard it apologize to his own mother at her front door—a five-week-old baby in her arms, and Greg shouting her name from next door.

And he thought of what Riley had told him, after their last visit to the cottage. She had waited until Laura was out of earshot, and said it in the kind of low voice Riley kept for things she didn’t want to have to say twice—the one thing Laura hadn’t noticed. Laura had been holding her mother’s hands and talking to her, the way she always did, and when she said she was scared, that she didn’t want to go, Sarah’s hand had gone rigid in hers and pulled away.

“She thinks Laura hated her,” Andy realized, and he knew he was right. He didn’t know how, but he was. “And she thinks her Wish doomed Laura.”

Horun had turned a little where he stood, toward Andy, and he was listening.

“That’s why she stays where she is.” Andy’s eyes had not left the page. “She thinks Laura hated her, and that she was a bad mother to her, and she wasn’t wrong that Laura said it. Laura did say it. It was the last thing, even if it wasn't true.” He drew a breath that didn’t go all the way down. “So whatever Laura says to her now—every time she sits down in front of that chair and holds her hands and tells her she loves her—Sarah hears pity. She hears somebody being kind to her. Maybe she even believes Laura’s forgiven her. Maybe she does. And she still can’t stop thinking she failed her. That her Wish led Laura to her death.” He looked up at last. “When Laura said she didn’t want to go, Sarah let go of her. Like she didn’t think she had any right to hold on.”

He held the letter out a little, not to give it to Horun, only so it was there in the light between them. “This is Laura at thirteen,” he said. “Before she ever said it. Before there was anything to forgive. She loved her. She was going to be a scientist and come back for her and get her out of that house. She was planning it.” His voice broke on the last word, and he let it. “She never thought what Sarah thinks. Not for one day.”

He shook his head slowly, and looked back down at the pencil and the soft gray smudge. “And Sarah’s been sitting in that chair for sixteen years,” he said, “saying she’s sorry to a kid who wrote her this.”

He couldn’t say anything after that for a while. He stood in the white light with the sheet in both hands, and breathed, and Horun stood with him and did not ask him for anything.

I had to say it. Even if nobody ever heard me.

Somebody was going to hear it. He would see to that. It was Laura’s letter, and he would give it back to Laura in the end, if she wanted it. But she had written it to her mother, and her mother had never once had it in her hands. That came first. Laura could have it after, read and folded and handed back, with her mother’s fingerprints on it beside her own.

Then he folded it along its old creases, corner to corner, the way she had, and put it back in the breast pocket of his jacket, over his heart, and drew the mantle closed over it. Horun’s eyes followed the folded sheet all the way into the pocket, and stayed there a moment after it was gone, as if he were making sure of where it had been put.

Andy had something to carry each way now. The truth about the Wish, for Laura, from her mother. And Laura’s letter, for Sarah. He could see the cottage already, the gold window light and the rocker in it, and himself down on one knee beside the chair the way Laura always knelt, unfolding a yellow sheet and putting it into a pair of hands that held on to the chair arms as if letting go of anything would be the end of her. He didn’t know whether Sarah would let him put it in her hands, or whether she could still read a page at all, or what it would do to her if she could.

“The Gate comes first,” Horun said.

“I know.” Andy laid his hand flat over the pocket, and took it away again. “The Gate first.”

Horun turned and went on down the corridor, into the older light. Andy followed. He reached for Laura once as he walked, without meaning to. She was still there, right here and impossibly far, still afraid at the very top of it, and she didn’t know a word of any of this yet.

For the first dozen steps he kept a hand over the pocket, where the paper sat stiff against his chest and crackled when he breathed.