Page 19 of To the Grave

I thought about Jace, about the fact that he’d never celebrate another birthday. That I’d never even gotten to celebrate a single one with him.

Knock it the fuck off, princess.

I sniffed. “You have presents?”

Wolf smiled. “We do.”

I drew in a breath. “Well I don’t. I need to go shopping.”

“You don’t have to go shopping, doll. We have you. We don’t need anything else.”

I reached for the door. “That’s sweet, but if we’re celebrating birthdays, we’re celebrating birthdays.”

I got out of the car and realized Wolf had turned off the car.

“You’re going to sit here and watch me shop, aren’t you?”

They answered at the same time. “Yes.”

Chapter 15

Daisy

Ihad no idea where we were going until Otis turned onto a long winding drive flanked by old-fashioned streetlamps.

I knew this road.

“We’re going to the Seneca Inn!”

Otis grinned. “We figured you wouldn’t want to be too far away from home.”

It wasn’t something I’d articulated even to myself, but he was right: I felt Jace around the house, around the overgrown gardens and wild grass, the old cemetery and the cliff where water spilled into the falls.

“It’s perfect,” I said.

The gravel drive wound through huge stands of old trees in their full autumnal glory, the Corvette’s tires crunching over gravel and dead leaves. We spilled out onto a circular driveway with a free-form rock sculpture at its center. Beyond it, the historic Seneca Inn glowed from within like a house in a storybook.

Otis pulled to a stop in front of the valet and popped the trunk.

“I haven’t been here since I was a kid,” I said, getting out of the car and looking up at the old stone mansion.

My mom had brought Ruth and me here for tea on our birthdays when we’d been little. Back then, the place had felt like a palace. Now I saw that it was a large stone house, meticulously restored, and I took in the original windows (wavy glass — my favorite), restored stone, and multiple chimneys indicating several fireplaces that would have been used to keep the place warm before central heating.

“Me either,” Otis said.

“I’ve never been here,” Wolf said, looking up at the place. “I should bring my mom.”

The valet pulled our bags and Wolf’s guitar from the car and we went inside, past a quaint but luxurious lobby and into the on-site restaurant called the Greenery. It was bright during the day — the only time I’d ever been — but now the lights had been dimmed, the paneled walls and candlelight on the tables casting the large room in a cozy glow.

I knew it was situated on the Blackwell River — upstream from the house — because in the summer the glass doors were left open. They were closed now, probably because it was too cold, and the restaurant felt warm and insulated, the tables draped with white linen and fine silver.

We were led to a quiet table in the back and proceeded to dine on a feast of French onion soup draped in gooey cheese, warm goat-cheese cakes over tender greens, juicy steak tartar with thin crispy fries, and roasted duck served with apple coulis made from local apples.

I sank into the experience, my body growing more relaxed as one hour slid into two and the server opened a second bottle of red wine. Wolf, Otis, and I talked about our childhoods, about what we remembered from being kids. All the times I had tea at the Greenery with my mom and Ruth (Blake had hated itthere), Wolf’s picnics with his mom during their long walks in the woods, Otis’ big noisy Sunday dinners, his sisters bickering nonstop and his parents laughing it off.

For the first time we talked about Blake without the specter of what he’d done, what he’d wanted to do to me. Maybe it was easier to split our memories of him into two pieces: the Blake fueled by dark impulses and the other Blake, the one who was funny and wild, whose smile lit up a room.

Before I’d moved in with the Beasts, I’d been living with my dad and Ruth, both of them so full of grief about Blake’s murder that we’d hardly talked about him. Then, after the Beasts had told me why they’d killed him, it had hurtmetoo much to talk about him. I couldn’t even think about him without wondering about the whys.

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