Page 13 of The Reveal
I spend it hauling all the iron I got at the scrapyard up to the attic and pretend I don’t notice Briar’s door open a crack each time I go out to my truck, as if she’s peeking out but doesn’t want to be seen.
We didn’t sign up to be friends. I don’t need to pay any attention to what anyone here is doing as long as it doesn’t bother me or anyone else—and someone watching me walk in and out of the house doesn’t bother me.
The threshold for that is significantly different than it was three years ago.
So is everything else. I never considered myself particularly good with my hands back then. That’s another gift of necessity. There are no other hands to do the job, so mine had to learn. The good news is, I don’t care if the results of my handiwork are pretty.
I fix the iron bars across my windows, leaving spaces so I can still shoot. Anything that tries to come inside will have to work for it. I don’t try to convince myself that a few bars could keep whole werewolves out if they want in, but it might slow them down a bit. Just long enough for me to get a weapon. That’s all I need.
I hope.
It’s getting dark as I finish, but I jog down the stairs toward Gran’s room, once again a little too keenly aware of the fact it’s not just the two of us any longer. I expect them all to come bursting into the kitchen, or to hear them in there, but everything is quiet.
I find Gran still in her chair but, more surprisingly, still awake.
“Are you hungry?” I ask her, not that it matters. She will sometimes say no and eat her dinner anyway.
“Not likesheis,” Gran tells me, and nods toward the window.
I hear a crow squawk and wonder if she’s made a little friend. A little, creepy, carrion-eating friend.
I help her up, get her neatened up, and then we shuffle out to the kitchen together. I take the precaution of barring the back door, just to keep us safe from any tenant incursions. I seat her at the little table there, and she looks up at me balefully. “My home has been ransacked.”
I blink, then remember that she’s still resistant to the fact I cleared out all the crap in this place. She hasn’t met the tenants yet. Those complaints are yet to come.
“We just cleaned up a little,” I reply, keeping my voice as cheerful as possible.
I put together a supper for her of easily digestible things, which is simple enough because such things tend to come in cans, and cans are where it’s at these days. Supply chains ruptured almost immediately. Since then, there have been all kinds of enterprising black-market options, but the trouble is, the black market costs money. Or higher-level bartering that I’m not prepared to enter into with the people involved.
Not everyone is Samuel Ruiz, determined to build community. Some people out here think that communities are pointless, and it’s better to thin out the herd so as not to have to compete for resources. Those are the kinds of people that Franklin Hendry uses to do his dirty work.
I would rather live on BPAs and sodium. I sit down with Gran and watch as she sullenly eats a slice of canned peach.
She frowns at me. “You should eat, Lilianne. You’re going to need your strength.”
“I’m already strong.” I don’t correct her. I don’t tell her I’m not my mother. Sometimes I wonder if it’s not just that she’s confused these days but filled with wishful thinking.
Wishful thinking I understand.
After she eats, I clean up, unbar the back door, then take her in for her nightly routine. I run her a bath and tend to her nails, hands, and feet. She reads her books for a while and tries to get me to look at her cards with her. I decline. Then I tuck her into bed.
I don’t know if she likes my company. I don’t know if she likes anything. But these are the sorts of questions it’s better not to ask, so I never do.
We are who we’ve got. That’s all there is to it.
Once she’s asleep, I secure her door, check all the locks and windows, and then head back up the stairs. It’s dark outside, but from the second floor I can see lights around all the doors and the boards on the windows in that line of cottages out there. For a moment, I’m sure I can hear the creaking of floorboards as they move around, like each cottage is a tattletale.
Up in my attic, under the eaves, I take a shower and find myself overly aware of howshortmy hair is.
I used to have long hair. When Augie and I were young, we were both pretty shaggy. We were also a gleaming bright blond, but I cut all mine off not long after my parents disappeared.
I’m sure there’s no emotional through line there.
These days it’s more gold than white-blond, and there’s some red in there too, and the only reason I’m even thinking about something so random now is because of all thehairon display, thanks to my new tenants.
Maybe Samuel would like me more if I had long, silky hair like Savi. Or Maddox’s wild waves that flow everywhere like they have a mind of their own. Or even that long, thick black hair stuck under Briar’s hat.
This is the girliest line of thought I’ve had in years.
