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“If that were true, I’d follow Ryder into the bottle right now.”

“Bottle? What bottle?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“You don’t scare me with your weird talk,” she said.

“I don’t want to scare you. I came up here to bash your head in, but I see now that even that wouldn’t make any difference.”

“Ha. You’ll call me again.”

“Really? And where would I call, Kiera? Would I have to call England? Is Richard ever coming back, or has he left your imagination for good?”

Her lips trembled.

“You couldn’t find anyone to love you in reality, so you made someone up.”

“Liar!” she screamed.

“You told your mother all those fantasies and sent me those ridiculous e-mails. Remember? Remember how you snuck him into your room easily because it was on the first floor? Your dorm mates told me you’ve always been up here.”

“They’re lying. Everyone’s lying because they’re jealous. They’re jealous!”

She was still screaming when I closed the door behind me.

I looked at her sign again.

Keep out.

Her tragedy was that she never let anyone in—not her mother, not her father, really, and maybe worst of all, not her little sister, who must have tried so hard to open the door.

Epilogue

I didn’t see Kiera for the remainder of the school year.

Not long after I left her dorm, she had what Jordan described to her friends as a nervous breakdown. She didn’t want to get into the technical diagnosis involving an anxiety-depressive disorder. She couldn’t remain at the college. Jordan made Donald handle the situation. He found a good clinic in Oregon, far enough away to help him pretend she was simply at another school.

I did graduate as the valedictorian. I didn’t expect to see Donald there, but when I got up to speak, I saw him way in the back of the audience, standing as unobtrusively as he could. Since the night he had come into my bedroom drunk, we rarely saw each other, and when we did, his gaze always shifted quickly from mine. He fumbled with an awkward apology that I thought was more a demand of Jordan’s than his own desire. I listened and just said, “Okay.”

What else was there to say? Anything more would have led to more discussion and maybe his belief that I was forgiving enough for him really to reenter my life. I didn’t want that.

He didn’t put up any resistance to Jordan’s legally adopting me, not that he could have. She went through the divorce, getting just about everything she wanted in the settlement. She didn’t want to remain at the estate, but she made it seem as if that was her compromise. She found a beautiful home in Beverly Hills. Of course, it was far more modest, but almost anything else in California would be.

Her graduation gift to me was that she and I would travel to London for sightseeing and then on to Paris and the south of France. I had decided to remain in Los Angeles and chose to attend Occidental. I wanted to remain close to Mama’s grave and visit it from time to time. I also overcame my aversion to the places on the beach where she and I had slept and sold our arts and crafts.

A few times, I went to the beach where Ryder and I had spent part of an afternoon. I sat about where I thought we had sat and just looked out at the ocean and watched the terns and pelicans. It reminded me of Mrs. Caro’s description of the sweet silence. It took time, of course, time and all the distractions Jordan provided for me, but slowly, hope seeped back into me.

Maybe in that way, I was doing what I dreamed Ryder predicted.

Maybe I was going into his precious bottle.

And maybe, as he said, we were on his ship sailing to a place where no one could harm us again.

After all, wasn’t that what we all dreamed we would find?

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