Page 60 of Animal Tamer
“It's done,” Rowe says.
Nobody asks for details. Nova reaches up from the armchair and squeezes Jules's wrist. Teddy nods once.
“Thank you,” Rowe says to the room. His voice catches. “For staying with her.”
“She stayed with us,” Jules says. “She's ours now. We voted.”
Rowe's mouth does the almost-smile. Then his eyes come back to me, and everything else in the trailer stops mattering.
“Walk with me?”
I fold the blanket over the couch, say goodbye to the girls and the Fed, and then I'm out in the brisk late-night air with him.
We don't talk on the way. He walks closer than his old careful foot, close enough that the heat of his arm reaches mine through two layers of cotton. The carnival is dead quiet around us.
Inside his trailer, the lamp is still on from this afternoon. Rowe shuts the door. Leans back against it.
“Dr. Vance killed himself tonight,” he says matter-of-factly. “That's what the town will know by the middle of the week. His practice was failing. His wife left. He'd been drinking. He went out to his barn with his father's shotgun.” He watches my face while he says it. “There's nothing at the clinic. Nothing that leads to you. The scalpel, the—all of it. Gone.”
I sit down on the bench because my knees stop holding me upright, and I wait for it. I've been waiting all night—the horror, the guilt, whatever a good person is supposed to produce on demand.
What comes instead is an image of Paige opening the clinic on Monday. Safe. Making coffee in a building where nothing is waiting for her.
“Okay,” I hear myself say.
“Okay?”
“I keep checking.” I press my palm flat against my sternum. “For the bad feeling. It's like tonguing the spot where a tooth used to be. There's just… a space.” I look up at him. “Is that what it's like for you? The space?”
Something moves behind his eyes. He crosses to the chair and sits, forearms on his knees.
“Wren,” he begins, voice grave. “We need to talk.”
“I know.”
“I mean, really talk. All of it. And when I'm done—” He stops for a moment, looking at his forearms like he can see the scars through his shirt. “When I'm done, you have tomake a choice. And I need you to know before I start that I'm not going to make the choice easy, because I've been trying for days to imagine leaving this town without you, and I can't do it. I don't think I'm going to be able to let you go.”
I blink at him. The words feel equal parts warm and terrifying.
“Let me go,” I repeat. “That's an interesting phrase, Rowe. Are you planning to cage me? Like one of your animals?”
He doesn't flinch. He just looks at me with those sad gray eyes.
“My animals choose to be with me,” he says. “Every one of them. Caesar could clear that enclosure fence in one jump. He knows it. I know it. He stays because the carnival is his home.” He drags a breath in. “That's what I want. Not a cage. A choice. But you can't choose without knowing what you'd be choosing, so...” His hands lace together. Unlace. “I'm going to tell you where I come from.”
“Okay.”
“It's ugly,” he warns me.
“I've palpated a prolapsed cow uterus at two in the morning in freezing rain,” I say dryly. “Try me.”
The joke is a lifeline, and he takes it—almost cracking a smile—and then he begins.
“I was born in a compound. A commune. A cult. It called itself the Sanctum of Ash.” He takes a deep breath, his fingers clenching and unclenching. “The men who ran it called themselves the Prophets. There were women there who—we were bred, Wren. That's the word for it. No birth certificates. No last names. Dormitories full of children who didn't legally exist, which meant nothing that happened to us existed either.”
I go very still on the bench, hardly daring to breathe.
“They preached purity through pain. Punishment was the whole religion. And some of them—” His thumb finds a scar through his sleeve. “Some of them had appetites the religion was built to feed. There was a Prophet who chose me. When I was small. Small enough that I didn't have words for what he was doing until years in.”
