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The door to the confessional booth was pinpricked in silver shoots of light. It turned the air inside a dusky shade of blue, bottomless and chilly. Vivienne sat shivering in a paper-thin hospital gown, her knees crammed into her chest, her head haunted by the dregs of yet another dream—by what she’d torn out of it. She held her eyes tightly shut and tried not to think at all. Instead, she wept. It was a horrible, half-decayed sort of sound, more suited to a ghoul than to a girl.

She supposed that’s what she was.

When she was four years old, Philip had carted her and her mother along on a surprise trip to Las Vegas. She didn’t remember much of it, only colorful snatches: the golden lion, his mouth gaped open in a karat-fanged roar. The soaring fountains, wide jets of water lit blue, then red, then pink. The sting of cigar smoke. The frenzied ringing of slot machines. The bloodied face of a man on the gambling floor, his jacket rumpled and his hands raised in supplication as he pleaded with her stepfather.

On the third morning, Philip had woken her well before the sun. It was late March, their yard back home still iced over with slush, but out in the Nevada desert the temperature had already climbed to an insufferable heat. Sweating in her pajamas, she’d followed him outside to find that he’d rented a sleek red convertible for the day. Upstairs in the hotel room, her mother slept the morning away, little glass bottles scattered across her end table like confetti.

Vivienne hadn’t wanted to go anywhere without her mother—not so far from home, where everything felt as grainy as film and the air tasted like soot—but even in her very small age she already knew better than to question Philip. He’d buckled her into her booster seat and driven the two of them away from the glittering strip and out, out, out into the flat red desert.

She didn’t remember much of the drive. Only red, red, red, until finally he’d pulled over on the side of a flat, serpentine road. The desert had stretched on for miles and miles, red and rocky and endless, the bluffs stuffed with bladed grass.

Can you whistle? he’d asked. Like a bird?

A little , she’d said. Her nanny had showed her how. Miss Marley taught me.

We’re going to play a game , Philip said. I’m going to go off in the bluffs a bit. You watch the road. If you see anyone coming, you whistle. Just like Miss Marley taught you.

It hadn’t sounded like much of a game at all, but she’d known better than to say so.

Waiting for Philip to return to the convertible had turned out to be dull as dirt. No cars came or went. Nothing moved. Nothing breathed. Even the sky was still, the cloudless sear of blue baking the convertible’s leather interior.

Eventually, she’d caught sight of a desert cottontail. She hadn’t planned to follow it so far from the car, but the little white flag of the cottontail beckoned her farther and farther, until finally—with a hop—it was gone. She’d become steadily, horribly aware of endless sand, endless sky, and endless heat. The convertible was nowhere to be seen. Lost and frantic, she’d broken into a run. Her slippered feet caught on the lip of a rock and she’d fallen, toppling deep.

This part, she remembered clearly. The rush of air. The spine-juddering impact and the hard snap of bone. She’d landed in a hole, dark and cool, her skin scraped raw, the pale white sliver of her femur poking through. When she shrieked, the walls shrieked back. When she wept, the walls wailed with her.

And when night fell, the lights went out. Stars brighter than she’d ever seen winked dazzlingly to life in a narrow cleft far overhead, as though she’d been watching through a telescope. If her stepfather whistled for her, she’d been too far to hear it. She’d screamed and screamed. And then, in the breaths between sobs, she’d heard it: the insidious rattle of something coiled in the dark.

A voice, low and cold and slithering. Stop that crying , it said. Or I’ll stop it for you.

···

She didn’t like to think of that moment, or what followed—how the voice in the dark had sung her a lullaby, soft and sneering. How she drew comfort from it in those first fatal hours as she lay dying at the bottom of a gorge.

She didn’t like to remember how, when morning came, it crawled inside her and made itself a home along her bones. All these years later, she could still recall the feel of it twining down her throat, could still hear its hiss in the quiet.

I will mend you, little one, but there is a price.

The door to the reconciliation room clicked open and she sat up fast, panic clanging in the hollow of her chest. She was certain it must be Jesse—or else one of his peers—coming to retrieve her for surgery. Instead, through the dense netting she could just make out the lines of a broad, indiscernible figure taking a seat in the adjacent booth. The door snicked shut. A heavy silence settled over the room.

And then .

“It’s been eleven years since my last confession,” said Thomas Walsh.

She tensed against the bench—too afraid to move, to breathe, to blink. She heard the rustle of fabric as he sighed, settling back against the wall.

“This is the part where I list my transgressions,” he went on. “Do you want to hear all the ways I’ve sinned in the past eleven years?”

She shut her eyes. She wished she could see his face. She wished she could say something—anything—in response. He was alive. He was here . He’d come for her. After everything, he’d come after her. She thought she’d broken him. Thought she’d maimed him. Thought she’d torn his mind in two and left him there to die.

But he was here, and he was whole, and her elation was as incandescent as a sunrise.

“Should I start with the little sins?” he asked. “I could tell you about all the times I lied to my mom about doing community service, so she wouldn’t find out I was actually in detention. Or about that time in middle school when I was suspended for breaking Jayson Becker’s nose in the lunchroom. I could tell you I wasn’t sorry, even though they made me tell him I was. I thought he deserved it. I still do.”

She stayed quiet, quiet, quiet. It was all she knew how to do.

“I don’t know.” He shifted his weight, pretending to mull it over. “Maybe the little things don’t matter. Everyone lies. Everyone gets angry. Maybe I should start with something bigger.”

She listened, rapt. His name sat clenched between her teeth like a bullet. She wondered what would happen if she said it out loud. Just once, to let him know she was there.

He shifted again, seeming uneasy. “What if I told you I killed my father?”

His question seized hold of her like a fist. She rose onto her knees on the narrow bench and turned to face him in full. All she saw were those ugly wooden slats—hazy pinpricks of light haloing the broad shadow that was Thomas Walsh. She pressed a hand to the wall between them. The silence felt infinite.

“My parents never got along,” Thomas finally said. “That’s not my sin, but it’s an important part of the story. I used to lie awake at night and listen to them fight. He couldn’t handle the pressure, I don’t think. Mom has an autoimmune disease. It’s manageable, but incurable. I don’t know, I guess maybe he felt like he was being asked to do too much.”

The quiet swelled and then ebbed.

“I was eight years old when he left.” His voice had gone so quiet that she had to press her ear to the wooden laths to hear him. “I came home from school and saw his suitcase by the door and I got so fucking angry. I don’t know what I was thinking. I guess I wanted to teach him a lesson. I wanted him to know he couldn’t get away with it; he couldn’t walk away from us and never look back. So, when he wasn’t looking, I went outside and I climbed into the trunk.

“I figured he’d go to a hotel or something. He’d unload his car and find me and—I don’t know—realize he’d made a horrible mistake. Instead, he went to a bar. He sat there for hours, running up a tab. By the time the paramedics pulled me out of the car, I was half dead. They say it’s nothing short of a miracle that I survived.”

They’d said the same thing about Vivienne, as she sat in her cold hospital gown beneath the cold hospital lights, her vitals being taken by a team of doctors. A miracle—small and scared and soundless, her voice chewed to pieces by whatever sinister something had kept her company in the bloodred rock.

“He came back home,” Thomas said. “After that day, I mean. I guess, in a way, my plan worked. He unpacked his suitcase and went right back to going through the motions. He put on his tie. He went to work. He paid the bills. When the day was done, he went to the bar and ran up another tab.”

Thomas sucked in an unsteady swallow of air. “It was the guilt that killed him, in the end. Not because he’d tried to leave. Not because he didn’t want to be there. Because he’d almost killed his only son, and he still didn’t want to stay.”

Silence, again.

Finally, Thomas said, “You could have told me, Vivienne. I could have helped you.”

The sound of her name startled her into motion. She pried open the door to the booth and slid out into the chilly stone of the reconciliation room, with its exposed copper piping and church-fair furniture. The only light poured in sideways through a narrow tracery window.

With trembling hands, she wrenched open the adjacent door. Thomas sat wedged in the narrow compartment, his fingers laced between his knees, his knuckles dark with abrasions. The rest of him looked no better. One eye was swollen shut. A shallow gash at his temple had begun to bruise.

He stared up at her, and she stared back.

I dreamed about you last night , she signed.

He didn’t smile. “Yeah?”

It was horrible.

“Good.”

His voice was steady. Too steady. It was at odds with the tense way he held himself, a quiet fury crackling around him like electricity.

“You could have told me,” he said again. “Don’t you trust me?”

I don’t trust anyone.

His smile was cold. “Are you sure about that? Because from where I’m standing, it seems like you’re putting a whole lot of trust in your shady ex-boyfriend.”

Wariness zipped up her spine. Is that why you’re so upset?

“Do I seem upset to you?”

Yes.

His laugh came out caustic. “I don’t know, Vivienne. Maybe it’s because you’re about to let an asshole with half a medical degree stick a scalpel in you.”

It’s none of your business what I do or don’t do.

“The hell it is.”

And there it was. She felt a swell of righteous anger. He had no right. No right. She hadn’t asked for his help. She didn’t need him to step in and take control—to make her feel ashamed of the ways in which she chose to rescue herself.

He’d been hired to get in her way, and he was playing his role beautifully. She couldn’t allow it. She couldn’t let him sit there and spoil all her carefully laid plans.

And so, she said the cruelest thing she could think of .

Do you know what I think? I think you’re exactly like your father.

“Don’t change the subject,” he said, refusing to take the bait. “We’re not talking about me.”

But we were.

“Vivienne—”

There was a warning in his tone, low and dangerous. She didn’t heed it. He spent his life shackled to a job he hated to provide for a family he resented. How are you any different?

“Vivienne, stop.”

She didn’t. She kept going. Not even nineteen, and you’re already trapped.

His knuckles gave an audible pop. Wedged in the thin rectangle of the booth, he was all edges, hard and sharp and white with rage.

“You’re such a fucking princess,” he finally said. It came out scathing, but she knew it wasn’t the meanest thing he could have said. Not by a mile. “You think I don’t know what you’re doing?”

I’m being honest.

“No, you’re trying to push me away.”

You need someone to push you. You could be anything. Instead, you’re here with me, wasting all your potential on a dead-end summer job because you feel like you owe it to your family.

The flash of anger in his eyes sent her rearing instinctively back. He unfolded himself from the booth, drawing to his full height in front of her.

“Don’t do that,” he said fiercely. “Don’t rewrite history. This is more than a job to me, and you know it.”

She took an unsteady step backward. He followed, refusing to let her flee.

“It’s my turn to tell you what I think,” he said. “I think this—whatever’s between us—is starting to feel like more to you, too. That’s why you’re so afraid.”

She bristled. I’m not afraid.

“You’re shaking,” he said.

It was true. She was trembling like a leaf. Tears fractured her vision. She blinked them back, determined not to let them fall.

“You don’t want me to see you,” he said. “But I see you, Vivienne.” No one had ever sounded more confident. No one had ever sounded more doomed. “ I see you , and I came for you, anyway. I’ll always come for you. That’s what I’ve been trying to make you understand. You don’t have to do this alone.”

She blinked up at him, surprised. You’re not here to stop me?

“I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t consider it,” he said. “But no. I’m not.”

The first of the tears fell. And fell and fell. It was as though a dam had broken. She wept unprettily, her teeth chattering, her breath coming in shallow gasps. Thomas caught a tear on the pad of his thumb, tipping her face toward his.

“I hate it when you cry,” he said softly.

She reached for him without thinking, grabbing two trembling fistfuls of his T-shirt and folding herself into him. His arms curved immediately around her. His chest was a brick wall, warm and solid and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d been embraced this way. His heart knocked against her hands, as hard and fast as a drumbeat.

And then, beneath it—emanating out from somewhere far lower and much darker—there came the sound of real drums. Slow. Steady. Anticipatory. The percussion pulsed through the stone, shuddered the floor underfoot. And then, far up in the cathedral’s towering spire, the bells began to ring. A cold, clarion call that beckoned her out.

“Let me come with you,” said Thomas, when they’d pulled apart.

You can’t , she signed. I’m going where you can’t follow.

His smile was grim. “Don’t underestimate me.”

At the door, she wavered on the threshold, fear rendering her motionless. When she peered back at Thomas, she found him unmoved, the look in his eyes enough to snap her resolve in two.

Will you do something for me? she asked.

“Anything.”

If this goes wrong, promise me you won’t let them put me back in the ground.