Page 25 of In an Absent Dream

“Do you know what you’re choosing?”

Lundy nodded. “I do.”

“Your father came here before you. He chose differently. If you stay, he’ll know what happened. Fair value will be given. Your choice repays his.” Because the Market had paid into her, hadn’t it? Had fed and sheltered and taught her. By leaving—even if she was allowed to do so—she would take that value with her.

But she had never asked them to make her an investment. She had just gone where the doorway took her. “I have to tell them,” she said. “I have to . . . maybe they won’t understand. Maybe they can’t. But I have to try, or else everything I’ve ever said to them becomes a lie, and I can’t live with that.” Her father would understand. Her mother, her siblings . . . they never would. They would keep looking at a hole where a girl should have been, and wondering.

If she was choosing this—and shewaschoosing this—she needed to do it without debts, and without regrets. Anything else would be unfair.

Moon burst into tears. Lundy held her tight, relishing the fact that she had arms to hold a friend, and her eyes were already on the horizon.

She left at sunset. The clothes on her back were too small, and her skin felt too bare. She was no longer accustomed to shoes; she walked barefoot away from the Market stalls, walked until she found the door that had borne her from her childhood home into the home of her heart, and touched the wood.

“I’m sure,” she whispered, and stepped through.

The passage seemed smaller, the cross-stitched rules on the walls shabby and faded. She read them as she walked, until she reached the door and let herself out, into a world that stank of car exhaust and poisoned water. Lundy coughed, and kept coughing as she struggled to orient herself.

When she turned, the tree was gone. That was no real surprise. She felt no real concern. The Goblin Market would come back for her when it was time, and she would return to her true home for the last time. She took another breath. This time, it barely burned her throat at all.

It had been so long since she had been here that she no longer remembered the way. Her feet were another story. She closed her eyes and let them lead her, following their sure and steady tread down the path to the sidewalk, down the sidewalk to the street, one turn at a time until she was standing in front of an ordinary, half-familiar house. The car in the drive was unfamiliar, but the bike lying in the yard was her brother’s, older now, rusted, recognizable. She blinked. Her brother should have been far too old for that bike. How—

Her sister. Of course. It had been so long, and Diana had always been so much younger, that she had almost forgotten her in the chaos of boarding schools and miraculous escapes and flying away. Diana would be nine years old now, barely older than Lundy herself had been the first time she’d seen a door that bid her to be sure. Old enough for bicycles. Old enough to have forgotten her older sister.

The same age Mockery had been when she died.

Lundy stepped onto the porch, feeling more out of place than she ever had before. She took a deep breath. She knocked.

She waited.

Footsteps approached on the other side of the door. Lundy tugged at the hem of her too-tight shirt, wishing she could make it larger. Large enough to cover her, large as a cloak of feathers. It wasn’t so long ago that she would have been able to fly away. It wasn’t too late. This had been a bad idea. She could turn, she could run, she could—

The door opened. Her father appeared, haloed by the living room light. Lundy froze, struck silent by the enormity of the moment. They stared at each other, parent and child united for the first, and possibly only, time.

“You came home,” he whispered.

The words were a blow. She reeled, shook her head, and replied, “I cameback. Home is not here.”

“Are you sure?”

So much came down to surety. She lifted her chin, looking her father squarely in the eyes, and said, “I was sure even before you sent me away.”

They only had so long before her mother came to see what was going on, why the door was open, letting the night air in. Her father stood his ground, looking at her and saying, “It was for your own good, and I could send you away again. I’m your father. I have rights.”

“Sending me away would not be giving me fair value.”

He flinched: her words had struck home. But he rallied, shooting back, “Running away has not given this family fair value. Your mother cries herself to sleep every night.Everynight. She’s done it for the last two years.”

“Then we bear the debt together.” Lundy hesitated. “How do I repay my share?”

“You stay.”

“No.” She shook her head. “That’s asking me to bear the whole thing by myself, to say what you did wasn’t a part of it at all. Maybe you could have convinced me to be happy here, if you’d bothered to try, but you didn’t. I was lost and I was grieving and you sent me away. I reject your bargain, even as you’re trying to reject fair value. Do better.”

He stopped, his breath catching, and seemed to look at her, reallylookat her, for the first time. Finally, in a voice as rough and dry as burning paper, he said, “One year. You stay for one year. After the year ends, if you choose to go, I won’t stop you. But for that year, you live here. You treat this as your home. You aren’t passing through, you aren’t killing time. You belong. I won’t send you away: you won’t run. Do we have an agreement?”

There was a trick there, a trap; there had to be. Lundy tried to see his words from all angles, looking for danger. She was tired and everything around her was terrible and strange; she couldn’t find it. Finally, grudgingly, she nodded.

“We do,” she said.

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