Page 98 of We Are the Match

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Time slows down, and then does not exist, and Erin falls.

Backward.

Slowly.

Erin, gentle Erin. Erin, who has cared for me for years. My Erin.

The sound her body makes as it strikes the sea reverberates through me, and I lurch backward, my body slamming into the wood rail of the boat. We tilt in the water for one wild, unsalvageable moment—

And then the boat capsizes and we are all in the sea, Paris and I and the knife and the body that used to be my friend.

Erin and Mama and Tommy are all around me, beautiful, broken, bleeding.

The sea is blood, thick and choking, and ten years ago is today and everyone I love is dying around me and it will never never never stop.

Never.

Not until I join them.

Chapter 35

Paris

I killed her.

Erin killed my sisters—Erin andLenakilled my sisters.

The shock of it is colder than the sea I have been tossed into. Colder than the first night on the street, concrete hard beneath my shoulder blades before I learned to sleep on my side, to let the least amount of my body encounter the cold ground.

I fight my way upward, choking on icy salt water.

And then, at last, a stillness as I breach the surface.

En morte libertas.

Helen is floating, the tide pulling her away from me.

Tommy is not here to swim toward her, to keep her safe while the rest of us bleed. He is not here to call her back to herself, so I must do it.

I am a poor substitute, my voice rough where his would be gentle, but I call her name.

“Helen,” I say. “My Helen.”

Helen’s body goes slack, her eyes toward the sky as if she can see nothing and no one.

The boat is capsized, our plan blown apart, everything I thought I knew flipped on its head. Because Erin,Eris, was a bomb-maker. My sister, and a bomb-maker.

My sister, and she helped to kill so many of us.

At least Helen is alive, and Erin can use us as pawns no more.

I pull Helen onto the capsized speedboat—little bigger than a fishing boat, really—and then I strike out for land I can just barely see.

Troy.

We will arrive in splinters, leaving blood behind us.

The husband Helen killed.

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