Page 2 of The Staircase in the Woods

“Jesus, you didn’t check your email.”

“What? No.” He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands before popping her onto speaker. “It’s still…early.”

“It’s tena.m.”

“Like I said, early.”

He flicked to his email.

Nothing new had come in.

“There’s no—” he started to say.

“It’s to us. To the—to all of us.” There was a beat before she said: “The Covenant.”

The Covenant.As if that was even a thing anymore. That, a bone long broken, left unhealed. Hell, when was the last time he had heard from her? Three years now? Four? Right. He’d last heard from Lore right at the start of COVID—she thought maybe it would be the thing that got them all talking again. They did one Zoom call, all of them, and that was the end of it.

He was about to say,Nope, no email,but then,ding:one appeared.

“It’s from Nick,” he said, as if she didn’t already know.

Blinking more sleep crust from his eyes, Owen squinted at the email, scanning it—

It didn’t take long to see.

Hell, Nick put it in the first line.

“Holy shit,” Owen said.

“Yeah.”

“Fuck.”

His heart, which had been racing, now felt like—well, like it had stopped. As if it had died in his chest. Maybe it wasn’t even there anymore, had fallen down some elevator shaft deep within him, gone forever, never to be seen again, beyond rescue.

Just like Matty—

No.

Don’t do that.

Don’t go there.

“I need a minute,” Owen said.

“Sure. Yeah. Cool. But not too long.”

—

He thought he’d call her back in five minutes.

Maybe ten.

But he sat there on the bed for an hour.

He read and reread the email. It felt unreal. It felt impossible. Owen kept reading it, thinking that the text would change suddenly, that it would delete itself or dissolve like the residue of a lost dream.

But the email remained.

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