Page 24 of What Lies in the Woods

I punched the bridge of my nose, squeezing my eyes shut. “I guess. I’ve got to get my dad’s place in order. It’s…” But Mitch wasn’t my boyfriend anymore. He didn’t need to know. Didn’tgetto know. “Thanks, Mitch.”

“No problem. Happy to help.” He sounded strained. I wondered if this conversation would end up in one of his stories, what belabored layers of meaning each word would contain. It would all become a metaphor for the isolation of modern society and the impossibility of relationships, or something.

“I’ll talk to you later, Mitch.”

“Naomi—”

I pretended I hadn’t heard and hung up. I hated breakups. Ambiguous breakups were the worst of all. I preferred the explosive ones, which was why whenever a breakup seemed imminent I had a habit of getting into bed with someone. Lucky thing Cody was taken, or I might’ve made him the grenade chucked over my shoulder on the way out the door.

I started to toss my phone back onto the bedspread and stopped. The screen showed a missed call and a voicemail—from Liv. I frowned. Liv didn’t do voicemail.

I pressed play and put the phone to my ear. At first I thought she must have pocket-dialed me—I heard only rustling and breathing. Then she spoke. Her voice was strained. It sounded almost like it was fading in and out. “Naomi. I have to… I’m sorry. I need you to know that. I’m so, so sorry. I love you. I’m so sorry I lied.”

The message ended. I fumbled with the phone, calling her back. It rang through to voicemail. “Liv. What’s going on? Are you okay? Call me. I’m on my way.” I didn’t like the way she sounded. The message had come in late last night—around the time I was stumbling drunkenly through the woods.

I’m so sorry I lied. Not thatwehad lied. She wasn’t talking about Persephone. It was something else.

The last thing she’d said to me was a promise—our promise. To be here in the morning. If that was the lie…

She wouldn’t have hurt herself. Not again.

Fear seeped into me, slow and cold and unrelenting. “Damn it,” I muttered. I called Cass, but she didn’t pick up either. “Something’s up with Liv. I’m going to her place to check on her. Call me when you get this,” I said to her voicemail.

I got dressed hurriedly and hustled out the door. The sun, breaking through the clouds, hit me like it had a personal grudge.

“Morning.” Ethan Schreiber was standing a few feet away. He had a coffee cup in one hand, three fingers lifted in a wave.

“Are you stalking me?” I asked him.

“This is the only motel in town,” he said, pointing vaguely at the door two down from mine. “Everything all right?”

“Why wouldn’t it be?” I asked him.

“You look… Never mind,” he said, shaking his head. I strode to my car. “Nice to see you again,” he called after me. I slammed the door, cutting short his last word, and whipped out of the parking lot. I dialed Liv’s number again on the way. Once again, she didn’t answer.

The gate was closed and locked. I didn’t have the code and I didn’t want to panic Liv’s parents if it was nothing—it was probably nothing, I told myself, Liv hardly ever remembered to charge her phone, that was all—so I parked and hopped the fence on foot, jogging the rest of the way up toward the house.

I thought of it as Liv’s place, but it was her parents’ house, of course. They’d lived in the same house, set back among the trees, since they moved to Chester three decades ago. They’d remodeled along the way, expanding the tiny enchanted cottage they’d started with, adding energy-efficient windows and solar panels. Kimiko’s kitchen garden was a marvelous sight, bursting with kale and snap peas and pole beans, along with the few tomatoes she always coaxed along in the cool, overcast weather.

I’d lived on a diet of instant noodles, canned chili, and saltines mostof the time. Coming over to Liv’s place and picking fresh sugar snap peas off the vine had felt like its own kind of magic. Some days when Liv wasn’t up for company, Kimiko had let me join her out there, teaching me how to fertilize the plants, how to thin the carrots to give them room to grow. She would let me hold the tender seedlings cupped in my palms as she dug a hole for them, nestling them in where their roots could stretch.

Before you could plant a seedling, she would tell me, you had to harden it. It was used to the indoors, a consistent temperature and moisture and light. Little by little each day you had to set the seedlings outside, sheltered, first for only an hour, then two, slowly introducing them to wind and rain and sun and cold.

She’d said raising kids was a bit like that. You had to harden them, before they were ready to go out safely into the world. If you put them out too soon, all at once, the shock of it would wither them. They would never grow to full bloom.

Kimiko was in the garden now. She was on her knees with a sun hat on, using a little folding knife to deadhead the flowers in the beds at the edges of the garden. Her hair was gray and frizzy and her face lined with delicate wrinkles. The sight of her eased the panic in my chest. If something had happened, she wouldn’t be out here, calmly working.

The crunch of my footsteps on the gravel alerted her to my approach, and she looked up with eyes widened in surprise. “Naomi?” she said. “What are you doing in town?”

She could be a bit direct like that, but I’d never minded. “I’m here to see Liv,” I said, hands in my jacket pockets to hide their shaking. “She should be expecting me. More or less.”

“Oh. I see.” She frowned, then stood and waved at me to follow her inside.

There were nearly as many plants inside the Barnes house as outside. Kimiko preferred the garden, but her husband had never met a houseplant he didn’t love or a flower pot he didn’t want to fill. The house had an exuberant chaos to it—crowded, but nothing like my dad’s. Everything had its place here.

“I’m sorry to surprise you,” I said as I slipped off my shoes.

“No, don’t be sorry,” she said. She sounded distracted as she closed the door behind me. She cleaned her pruning knife carefully before folding it shut and setting it on the counter. “Can I make you some coffee while you wait?”

---