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VII

Charlotte buys herself a yellow Beetle.

She is tired of holding herself captive, bound to Boston, as if by keeping the water in her sight, she will know if danger comes across it. And so, she packs up, and points the car west, and drives.

Some people look up at the night sky and they feel small in a way that scares them.

But the sheer size of that wide-open sky, so full of stars, makes Charlotte feel small enough to disappear.

And that makes her feel safe.

She drives with the windows down, and fills her lungs, pushes the gas pedal to the floor and screams into the white noise of the rushing night. And for the first time in years, she doesn’t feel like she is running. She keeps her focus firmly on the road ahead.

Mile by mile, Charlotte feels herself come back to life.

It is the solitude that gets her in the end.

The need to feel something more than fear, fatigue.

Perhaps if she could rot a different way.

Become a cold and calculating hunter, like Sabine.

But Charlotte wasn’t made for it. Her heart is too hungry.

She doesn’t go in search of company, for what it’s worth. The girls find her. They’re the ones who come knocking at the door.

She simply lets them in.

In Nashville, there’s Grace, who spills out of a diner with a flock of friends after a midnight gig, and ends up taking Charlotte home instead.

In St. Louis, Renée catches her eye across a bar one night, sends over a drink.

In Chicago, Luce, who comes right up to her, bold as brass, and wants to dance, who leans her elbows on the Clark Street Bridge and announces that she’s not afraid to die. That the real curse would be to live forever.

A string of girls who hook their fingers in the loops of Charlotte’s jeans to draw her closer. Who welcome her into their homes, their hearts, their beds.

And for the first time in so many years, Charlotte spends her nights surrounded by the energy of youth, the cheerful zeal, warm bodies against hers.

She smiles, and laughs, and begins to thaw with hope, and wonders how she survived all those years alone.

Realizes what a fool she’s been, to waste the decades hiding instead of living.

How obvious it is, in retrospect.

Sabine did not need to follow her across the ocean. She only had to convince her that she could, so that she would feel hunted—haunted—by the specter of impending doom.

Sabine is not the one who has been haunting Charlotte these past years.

Charlotte has done all the haunting for her.

Now, at last, she decides that she is done.

And then, the girls begin to disappear.

The first time, she tells herself it’s nothing.

That Grace’s band picked up and went back on the road, and that is why she cannot get ahold of her, why no one answers when she calls. She was a free spirit, after all.

But then the second, Hannah, invites her on a date, and fails to show. No word before or after, no note or call.

And then the third one—Luce, fearless Luce, who stood beside her on the bridge and spoke of life as brief and beautiful—is pulled out of the river.

Charlotte sees the caution tape.

She finds the friends and family holding vigil.

And she knows.

She calls Ezra from a pay phone outside Union Station, voice shaking as she says, “It’s her.”

“Are you sure?” he asks over the sound of an acoustic guitar. “Cities are big places, Lottie. We’re not the only monsters out there. Sometimes bad things happen.”

She wants Ezra to be right, she really does.

But she goes back to the bridge that night. A makeshift memorial has grown around a pole, flowers and candles and notes, but she goes past it, onto the bridge itself, halfway across, to the spot where she and Luce had stood.

And that is where she sees it.

A single red rose, tied to the metal post.

Check.

Charlotte abandons the yellow bug.

She takes a flight out west—her first. She braves the glaring sun a moment, despite how sick it makes her feel, just to look out the curving window, watch the vast wide world slide past so far below. How quickly the plane moves, its giant stride carrying her away.

Never again, she tells herself as the plane lands in San Francisco.

Never again, she tells herself for weeks, then months, then years.

As the darkness folds over her again.

A life without a life.

Her lonely heart.

One night in Seattle, she walks past a rack of greeting cards.

Flimsy paper things, printed with trite little sayings. One catches her eye, in the section marked Condolences : a picture of a clock wrapping its arms gingerly around a girl, beneath the words Time Heals.

And Charlotte thinks, they’ve gotten it wrong.

Time doesn’t heal.

It just wears you down.

Tricks you into thinking, as the present slips into the past, that it will stay there.

Safely buried in your wake.