Page 60 of Never Lost (The Unchained #3)

Then, lightly, she added, “Even falling in love with someone they told you not to. That’s light, too. Maybe the kind that travels the farthest.”

She passed the joint to Maeve, who inhaled inexpertly, coughing a little with good humor.

She had her knees pulled up into her chest, head partially resting on my shoulder, watching the moon waver on the surface of the pool in the peculiar reverie of someone inventing new worlds in her head pretty much all the time.

Honestly, in freedom, Maeve was killing it.

She was improving her English and studying furiously to get her high school equivalency degree so she could apply to university.

She was going for long hikes in the Saguaro National Park and boldly reading her vivid, fanciful poetry at open-mic nights, where I was her biggest fan.

Jobs for someone like her were hard to come by, but she was looking hard and cozying up in one of Ivy’s many spare rooms in the meantime.

Maeve was like a solar eclipse—it hurt for me to look at her, and yet I couldn’t not look.

It was hard to believe that after seven years apart, brother and sister could still have so many of the same quirks, but they did, starting with that cute little way ah sounded like ach in their accent.

Their habit of reaching for their hair when things got awkward.

The gears in their heads that never stopped turning, even for a second.

But most of all, it was the eyes—that sudden bold stare that always knocked me flat.

“He told me you used to make up your own constellations,” I said to Maeve, raising my head to the galaxies.

“Ah,” she said, though of course it came out like ach , complete with that adorable, guttural little noise at the end.

“You mean Sternenflüsterin ?” Maeve said, shifting in the hammock, resting on her elbow, golden irises sly and glimmering in the moonlight.

She pointed up to a cluster just above the horizon.

“She wasn’t made up. She was real. She’s right over there. ”

I laughed, but Maeve sobered. “That was part of my ending, too, you know. He was in it,” she said sadly, nuzzling her touch-starved cheek lightly against my shoulder. “But maybe he’ll be the… the epilogue,” she finished, proud to have come up with the right word.

I just stared up at the entire sky as if I could take it in all at once. “He will be.”

For Maeve, this was true. Siblings would always be siblings. They were for life.

But a love formed in secrecy, in darkness, amid torture and pain, held no such promises.

And maybe that was why it felt so much like fate to find—upon my arrival in Boston—Rebekah, who understood that more than anyone.

Before entering Café Jennet to meet my old friend, I stopped and stared for a minute at the stylized galloping horse over the door, two boxes for its head and body, four crooked lines for legs, and another line for the tail.

Freedom was what it symbolized. Rebekah told me that immediately, turning a tiny espresso cup around in her manicured hand.

At first, I was stunned by her black blazer and business-school-confidential auburn hair, styled straight and held back with a pearl clip.

Not in and of itself, but just because in this coffee shop, with its jumble of avant-garde art, anarchist newspapers, and fliers for offbeat music shows stuck haphazardly to corkboards, it was an anomaly.

There had to be an explanation. I was right, and upon my arrival, Rebekah launched right into it—with no prompting, no hugs, and to my shock, no demands for an apology.

“Everyone always wondered why my parents didn’t just wash their hands of me and sell me into slavery,” Rebekah said.

“The truth is, they threatened to. The only reason they didn’t is because they found this boarding school on the Maine coast designed for ‘cases’ like mine.

Rich girls who got in trouble with slave boys, basically, which explains why it felt more like prison.

Some of them told me they had even been pregnant, and well, there sure weren’t any babies around. ”

“This was all legal?”

Rebekah shrugged contemptuously.

“How?”

“They had our parents’ permission. And our parents were rich.”

I didn’t ask more. There was no need.

“Two years in that place and girls like me were declared ‘reformed.’ I got the college to accept me, though I had to fill out the dreaded ‘please explain’ section on the application. But I still had my parents to worry about. The only way I could get them to pay for my degree was by convincing them that I’d repented of my slatternly ways, declare that slavery is an effective, valuable, and necessary institution and that I would never again look at a slave boy as anything other than a particularly attractive and sturdy piece of furniture. ”

“But—” I leaned forward.

“It was all lies, of course. In reality, between classes, I hang out here with Basia and Laken, working behind the scenes with the Freedom Alliance and plotting to overthrow the government.”

I practically spat up my hazelnut latte all over the table.

“Relax, I’m kidding,” said Rebekah. “Sort of.” For the first time, her old smile crinkled the corners of her eyes in a wistfully familiar way, the kind that reminded me how, as children, we used to explore the wash near the country club, searching for jackrabbits and lost balls while pretending, just for the afternoon, to outrun our privilege and become plucky orphans of the storm.

Rebekah was the same person she had been then, really. It was just that now she’d been through hell and had her social consciousness completely and utterly transformed.

So relatable.

“But your parents must suspect?—”

“Nothing. They suspect nothing, and I plan to keep it that way. My family name and Mom’s connections at the business school make it easy to keep it on the down-low.

Hell, I’ve even converted some of the people I’ve met over there.

Solicited some donations.” She put down her coffee and turned to me.

“How are you financing your education, by the way?”

I told her.

“Seriously? And you have no extra money other than the scholarship? Where are you even living?”

My response made Rebekah’s expression take on the consistency of sour soy milk.

“All right, you’re coming with me,” she said, throwing on an elegant light fall coat and herding me toward the nearest subway stop.

“I have a spare room. My parents pay for the apartment, so I don’t need the rent money, but I’d like the company.

It’s just that the company needs to be someone who won’t report me for sedition.

I have a good feeling about you. I suppose you’re looking for a job, too? ”

I nodded pathetically, the unexpected kindness making my eyes well up already.

“I think I might have something for you. How are you at espresso?”

I nodded again quickly, hoping there would be absolutely no follow-up questions.

“Why are you helping me, even after… everything?” I asked softly as I tried to follow Rebekah through the gate, fumbling inelegantly with my fare card.

“I didn’t even get a chance to apologize for being a spineless, complacent wimp back then.

Or tell you what I—” I swallowed. I knew I’d have to share my story, too, even though I wished I had Maeve’s gift for weaving narratives so it wouldn’t feel like extracting two rows of teeth with no anesthetic.

“You don’t have to,” Rebekah said, turning back and expertly swiping me through the turnstile with an extra card from her wallet.

“Huh? So then you know what happened?—”

“Oh, I don’t know the details, don’t worry.

But things get around fast in our community.

Basia keeps her ear to the ground. She knows Erica Muller and had a passing familiarity with Max Langer.

He and the mine made the news, of course, but we filled in the rest from her. That’s why I knew I could trust you.”

Amid the bustle of the station, I slumped on the hard wooden seat, unconvinced. “But I didn’t even—why did you?—”

“Because people can change, Lou,” Rebekah said over the roar of the approaching Green Line train and the mellifluous voice ushering us onto it. “I did, so it’s fair to assume you did, too. Isn’t that wild?”

“It is kind of wild.”

“Right?”

“What… What happened to him?” I asked against my better judgment, crowding onto the half-full car and sliding onto the hard plastic seat next to Rebekah.

I clutched the pole as the train jerked into motion, taking us closer to Rebekah’s townhouse in Brighton.

I glanced warily at the passengers on either side of me, hoping they couldn’t overhear.

“I mean, we all knew he went to the mines. But did he?—”

“You don’t have to look so nervous,” Rebekah said. “I don’t mind talking about it. These things should be talked about.”

These things. Like they were a case study out of a sociology textbook instead of a love story. But maybe that’s how she had to train herself to look at it in order to move on.

Move on. Move on. Move on. Even the very train wheels beneath me seemed to be murmuring it as they spirited me away down the tracks.

“I didn’t even look,” Rebekah confessed. “I didn’t want to know, and what could I do, anyway? If my parents found out I was searching for him, we could lose what little we still had to cling to. Plus, I had my sisters to think about.”

“But—” I closed my eyes.

“The mines are a death sentence, Lou. You know that.”

Of course I knew. And I knew that with just one less stroke of luck—without Max Langer—that was how my own story— our story—would have ended, too. Good God, we owed that man a lot. And I hoped that wherever he was—on earth or otherwise—he had some good tequila.

“Did you love him?” I finally asked because let’s face it, that’s what I really wanted to know.