Lauren DeStefano - Sever

“I don’t think cancer was something you could catch,” I tell her.

“That’s my point,” she says.

We must be making too much noise, because Reed bangs on the ceiling.

Cecily huffs and sits on the bed next to me. After a few seconds she puts her arm around my shoulders and stares at her stomach. At four months along she’s already looking tired and swollen. Her cheeks and fingertips are flushed. Her face and hair are damp from where she’s splashed herself with cold water, something she does after a bout of nausea.

“Have you been sick a lot?” I ask her.

“It’s not so bad,” she says softly. “Linden takes care of me.”

I’m worried about her. I wonder if it has even occurred to her or to Linden that she hardly had a rest between pregnancies. Vaughn surely knows how unsafe this is, and he allowed it, which worries me even more. I’m scared that she’ll enter that dark hall, descend the stairs, and be forever in Vaughn’s clutches. I think she’s scared too, because she doesn’t move. I don’t know how much time passes before Linden comes looking for her.

“Ready to go?” He stands in the doorway, mostly in shadow.

“I’m staying the night,” she says.

They have some sort of conversation with their eyes. A husband-and-wife thing—something I could never quite get the hang of. Cecily wins, because Linden picks up the diaper bag and says, “I’ll be back for you in the morning, first thing.”

A few minutes later, through the window, we watch the limo drive out of sight.

The mattress is lumpy and hard, and Cecily, who is back to snoring the way she did in her later trimesters, spends the night thrashing and turning. She kicks me so many times that I eventually take a pillow and settle on the floor. But every position on the hard wood aggravates the recovering gash in my thigh. In my dreams, it bleeds and seeps through the floorboards, and Reed pounds on the ceiling because blood is raining down on his work. The engine on the table comes to life. It pulses and breathes.

In the darkness Cecily whispers my name. At first I think it’s part of my dream, but she persists, increasing in frequency and intensity until I say, “What?”

“Why are you on the floor?” I can just make out her face and arm leaning over the mattress, tangle of hair coming over one shoulder.

“You were kicking,” I say.

“I’m sorry. Come back up. I promise I won’t anymore.”

She makes room for me, and I cram in beside her. Her skin is sticky and hot. “You shouldn’t wear socks to bed,” I tell her. “They keep heat in. Last time you were pregnant, you always got feverish at night.”

Her legs move under the blanket as she kicks her socks off. It takes her a while to get comfortable, and I can tell she’s trying not to disturb me, so I don’t complain as I’m knocked around the mattress. Eventually she settles on her side, facing me.

“Did you get sick earlier, when you went to use the bathroom?” I ask.

“Don’t tell Linden,” she says, yawning. “He’s squeamish about that stuff. He worries.”

That’s to be expected after what happened with Rose’s pregnancy. But it’s not as though I can tell her that. And soon I find, despite my worries, that I’m exhausted enough to fall asleep.

Just as I’m beginning to dream, she says, “I think about those other girls in the van with us. The ones who were killed.”

My dreams fade away from me, and I wish desperately that they’d return. Even a nightmare would be welcome over that memory. It’s not something my sister wives and I ever talked about, the odd and horrific thing that bonded us to one another. I especially wouldn’t expect to hear about it from Cecily, who has always wanted to be the happy housewife.

“I just wanted you to know that,” she says. “I’m not a monster.”

I turn my head to look at her. “Of course you aren’t.”

“You called me one,” she says. “The day you ran away.”

“I was upset,” I say, pushing the sweaty hair from her face. “But what happened to Jenna isn’t your fault.”

She draws a shaky breath, closes her eyes for a long moment. “Yes, it is.”

Here is where I expect her to cry, but she doesn’t. She only looks at me. And it strikes me again how much she’s grown in my absence. Maybe she had no choice. There were no sister wives to console her, the father-in-law she trusted had only been using her, and it’s not as though she could explain any of this to her husband.

I struggle for words of comfort, but nothing feels sincere enough. And no matter what I say, Jenna is still gone, and so are the other girls that were Gathered, and the girl Silas and I found lying in a ditch. Cecily still won’t live to see Bowen grow, and my brother has spiraled out of control in his grief, and I’m no closer to finding him than I was last year.

I am entirely powerless.

“The whole time we were married, I treated you like you were too small to understand what was happening to us,” I say. “But I felt small too. I couldn’t control the way things were any more than you could.”

“You looked so confident,” she says. “I envied you from the day we were married. I’ve decided I’m going to be more like you.” She says it with conviction. “I’m going to be stronger.”

The last thing I am is strong.

“Get some sleep,” I whisper.

“Rhine?”

“What?”

“I told Linden to believe you. I told him it’s true that Housemaster Vaughn is doing awful things downstairs.”

I feel hope. Linden might not have any reason to believe me, but he’ll listen to Cecily. Even if it’s just to humor her so she doesn’t go hysterical on him. “You did?”

“He wouldn’t listen at first,” she says. “It was while you were in the hospital. But I begged him to go and see for himself.”

“Did he?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says. “But—when he came back, he said there was nothing down there. A few of Housemaster Vaughn’s chemicals and things, lots of machines and attendants working on them, but no bodies. No Deirdre. He says you must have been hallucinating, or making it all up.”

Hope swims away, leaving me with less than nothing. “But you saw those things too,” I press. “Did you tell him that?”

Now she’s the one brushing her fingers through my hair, trying to console me. “I only saw what was happening to you,” she says. “I wish I’d seen more. I wish I’d seen Deirdre, or Rose’s domestic, what was her—”

“Lydia,” I say.

“Right. Lydia. I wish I could prove it.” She’s talking to me in that hushed, cooing tone usually reserved for her son. Trying to lull me to sleep, or compliance.

And then I realize why.

“You don’t believe me,” I say.

“Oh, Rhine, Housemaster Vaughn did such terrible things to you. You were so delirious, and so sick. Maybe there’s a chance some of it—”

“It was real,” I say, sitting up. “It was all real.”

She sits upright herself, facing me in the darkness. She’s frowning. “There was nothing down there, Rhine.”

“He hid them, then,” I say. “The bodies. The domestics. If Gabriel were here, he’d tell you the same thing.”

Cecily straightens her posture, hopeful. She wants to believe me. “Did he tell you there were bodies down there?”

“Not exactly,” I say.

“What did he tell you?”

My stomach sinks. I collapse back onto the pillow, defeated. “Not much,” I admit. He was so high on opiates at first, and then it was one problem after the next, really. “He didn’t have a chance.”

Cecily lies beside me, rubs my arm reassuringly. We both go silent. I struggle to cope with the fact that I am the only one who saw what Vaughn kept in the basement. But even worse than that, I want to believe what Linden and Cecily do, that none of it really happened. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe Deirdre really did get sold to another house when I left, and Adair and Lydia too. Maybe they’re comfortable and safe, and I’d conjured Deirdre up to cope with the loneliness as I lay strapped to that bed. She visited me often.