Page 107 of The Narrow

But Grace’s hand is still around my wrist. She floats in thewater before me, limned in strange light. For a moment we hang there—and then she begins to swim toward the surface in utter contradiction of the punishing current. I rise with her. I don’t have the strength to kick my legs, but it doesn’t seem to matter. A shred of light appears above. The moon.

Something snags my ankle. I jerk to a stop, kicking frantically against the thing that holds me—a hand, a pale arm. A thin white face, dark hair billowing in the water around it. Maeve. Her other hand wraps around my leg. For an instant, we stare at each other—the dying and the dead.

And then there are other hands. Clutching at her arms, her throat, wrapping rotten fingers around her mouth. The drowned drag her down. Begin to drag us down, too—

She lets go. Her grip relents, and the current and the drowned rip her away.

I’m rising through the water again, but my oxygen-starved brain has reached its limit. Bright spots appear in my vision, pulsing like alien jellyfish, and the flat circle of the moon vanishes. My grip on Grace’s arm weakens.

The last of my vision flickers—

Goes dark—

The hand around my wrist hauls me upward. I break the surface. I gasp, gulping in a desperate lungful of air, catching water with it. I choke as voices shout.

“I’ve got her! I’ve got her!” It’s Veronica’s voice, Veronica’s hand on my wrist, and Grace is gone. I cling to Veronica as the greedy water drags at me. Ruth throws herself down beside the bank, reaching out so far that Zoya has to grab her waist to steadyher. I manage to get my other hand around Veronica’s arm, and then Ruth gets hold of my shirt and pulls.

We topple onto the slick rocks of the bank as I gag and cough, expelling the Narrow from my body.

“Eden, talk to me,” Veronica says on her knees beside me.

I only cough again, tremors convulsing my body.

“Jesus, don’t make her talk, let her focus on breathing,” Ruth says, pissed off the way she gets when she’s scared, and I want to weep because I thought I would never hear her voice again.

“She’s okay. She’s okay,” Zoya is repeating, and her fingernails tease back the wet hair from my face as she makes soothing noises. Well back from the water, Delphine stands with her arms wrapped around her body, her expression lost. She looks at me as if I’m a stranger.

For just a moment, I think I see another girl standing on the shore. Then she’s gone, and she might have never been there at all.

Veronica grabs my hand and holds on tight.

With all my strength, I squeeze back.

36

THE DAY DELPHINEand her mother leave Atwood, the sun is shining in a perfectly blue sky. A black car idles in front of Abigail House as Madelyn Fournier supervises the driver moving suitcase after suitcase into the trunk. I stand a distance away, arms around myself to guard against the bitter wind.

Madelyn catches sight of me. Her face goes still, and she quickly looks away. She and I haven’t spoken since that night—since she and Oster came running down to the Narrow, having discovered our absence. I didn’t have the chance to talk to Delphine before Madelyn whisked her away. I haven’t been allowed to see her, but Oster assures me she is well. She shows no signs of her previous affliction.

I was carted off to the hospital to be bandaged up and x-rayed. No broken bones this time. Just bruises that turned half my body exciting shades of purple and some aspiration of the water that left me with a wracking cough for days afterward.

Delphine comes down the steps wearing jeans and a bright red sweater, something tucked under one arm. Her hair is pulled back with a black headband, her makeup spare but girlish. She looks well. But she doesn’t look like Del.

She’s already spotted me. She must have seen me from the window upstairs. She says a few quick words to her mother, then walks in my direction. I stiffen as she approaches, heart hammering.

I’ve wanted to go see her a hundred times, but Oster told me Madelyn wanted some time for things to “settle” before she saw me again. Whatever that means.

She stops a few feet shy of me, biting the corner of her lip. “Hey,” she says. Her voice sounds strange.

“Hi,” I manage, though it comes out more of a croak than a word. “How are you?”

She gives a one-shouldered shrug, looking off a few inches to my left instead of at me. “Okay, I guess. It’s weird, mostly. I don’t necessarily feel different, but I keep going to watch a show I like and suddenly I hate it, or my favorite food is justoff. Things that are habit feel uncomfortable and wrong. It’s not like I was someone else. I wasme. And I’m still me, but not the same me, and... Like I said, it’s weird. Are you...?”

“All better,” I say. “Just a few bruises left.” And a ragged hole in my heart. I search her face, not sure what I’m searching for.

“Thank you for what you did,” she says. “For trying to save me. Us. Her.” She gives a little breathy laugh. “I have no idea how to talk about any of this. Mom wants to act like none of it ever happened, and honestly, that might be easier. Move and start over and pretend to be normal.”

“You’re going back to New York?”

---