Page 100 of The Narrow

The moonlight makes the surface pale. Sly and unassuming, it slithers between the rocks. I know its falseness, its vast and hungry heart. I walk to the edge. I can feel them down below—the rest of the drowned. The Narrow lets nothing go. It’s kept us all, losing ourselves piece by piece until there’s nothing left but the raw scream of our last panicked moments. We have nothing to hold on to but each other, and we claw and bite and tear, an endless threshing below the water. But Grace and I, we had each other. And with her in my arms, the others couldn’t claim me, and neither could the Narrow.

It will be that way again. We’ll drift within the maelstrom, and we’ll persist.

Once Grace is here.

33

I KNOW THEY’REcoming before I see their silhouetted forms among the trees, groping their way through the night toward where we wait. Zoya’s expression is precariously balanced between relief that she’s no longer alone with me and anxiety at what comes next. Eden frets for her; with a wild grin, I wait to meet my beloved.

She steps out of the trees, into the moonlight. Red hair, pale face, a wide, serious mouth. For a moment I can’t remember which of them I’m seeing, Delphine or Grace, can’t remember which one is dead and which is the living girl. Both souls inside of me are wracked with love and longing.

Del walks forward, steps tentatively. She hasn’t been beneath the sky and the stars in so long. Her body has forgotten how to move in wide-open spaces.

“Eden?” she says. Veronica has kept her word, hasn’t told her.She draws close to me as the others hang back, their anxiety like a mosquito’s buzzing.

“There you are,” I say, my voice choked with wonder.

“What happened last night?” she asks.

I step toward her. “Don’t you remember?” I ask. Eden’s voice is lighter than my own, more sweetness than smoke, and the words tumble strangely from my lips.

Confusion sketches a line between her brows. “What do you mean? You were going to see Maeve.”

I halt. Last night. Eden’s last night, not mine. The timelines are all tangled. “I’m sorry. It’s hard to keep things straight. When you said last night, I thought you meant...”

“It worked,” she breathes. “You’re...”

“Me,” I tell her, a quicksilver smile breaking fleetingly across my lips. “It’s me.”

“And Eden?” she asks, still uncertain, and something snakes through my gut, slimy as an eel. I am standing in front of her, flesh and blood, and it’s another girl’s name on her pretty lips.

“She’s here,” I allow. “But right now, it’s me.”

“Maeve,” she says, and there it is at last.

I sink through the air between us and come to rest only when my fingertips find the soft skin of her throat, her pulse trembling beneath the surface.

“It’s me,” I say again, and tears streak down my cheeks. “I found you, Grace.”

She lets out a quiet sound, neither joy nor sorrow, and I press my brow to hers. Our breath stirs the air between us. Alive, alive,both of us alive and here in the bright tomorrow we never got to claim.

“I missed you,” she whispers, eyes shut.

“I couldn’t find you. I searched and searched, but you weren’t there,” I say.

Her lip quivers. “I remember you,” she whispers. “But only in bits and pieces. I know that I loved you. But I’m not that same girl. I’m someone else. Someone new. I don’t want to go back there. Even for you. There has to be a way to help you, without... without that.” Her eyes are full of feeling and sorrow. And she’s right. She’s not Grace, not really. Grace has been subsumed in this stranger.

This stranger who is standing outside, standing by the river, bearing my touch without drowning. She’s not dying. She’s whole. Or close to it, at least. “How are you not drowning?” I ask her.

“Once I knew what I was, I almost drowned again, but I found my way out. By being Del,” she says. “The water pulls at me, but now that I know why, now that I know who I am—both parts of me—I can keep myself here.”

I see it: the long road stretching out ahead of her. Not as Grace, not as Delphine, but as this new girl. Del. She has a future. She can survive this.

I can’t.

“You could do the same,” Del says. “It’s what Eden wanted. But you have to surrender to each other.”

“I can’t,” I say. I won’t give myself up to cling pathetically to a life that isn’t mine. Even if I tried, it wouldn’t work. I don’t have Grace’s compassion. Her ability to yield. I would always be fighting for space within Eden.

---