Page 84 of The Library of Borrowed Hearts

Ravenna blinked down at me. Somewhere along the line, she appeared to have forgotten the tea, but I didn’t mind. Coffee was and always would be my vice of choice. You could thank my father for that.

“No, dear,” she said kindly. “That’s my son’s. Noodle. He loves to read.”

I cast my eyes in Zach’s direction, begging him to save me, but he was only watching the interaction with a flat press of his lips. It was clear he didn’t think much of this woman, whatever he felt about the rest of the family.

“No, I mean Iacquiredit,” I explained. “For the publisher. I was only a coeditor on it, since graphic novels aren’t my purview, but the moment it crossed my desk, I knew I had to have it. Action with a bit of horror? Flawed heroes you can’t help but root for? Yes, please. I’ve been championing this series from the start.”

To the woman’s credit, it didn’t take her long to put the pieces together. She flipped the book over and scanned the acknowledgments page. “Wait. You mean you’re—”

“No way,” a voice cried as a boy came bursting through the front door, pushing Zach unceremoniously aside. He hobbled along on a cast, his hair denoting him yet another member of this family. I put his age at around ten or eleven—a few years too young for our projected readership, but I’d been eyeballs deep in H. P. Lovecraft around that same age, so who was I to judge?

“I’ve read all theNightwavebooks three times,” he announced to me in a voice that bordered on the reverent. “Is there going to be another one soon? Is Ygrit really dead or just pretending? Do you know if they find the Rapier of Wit in time for the final battle?”

I laughed and held up my hands. “Slow down there, young man. One at a time.”

“Sorry,” he said, his eyes suddenly sweeping down and staying there. “I just really like the books.”

I was about to answer his questions in the order they were shot at me, but another figure appeared in the doorway behind him. It belonged to a pretty, harassed-looking girl I assumed was Chloe, since she barely noticed anything but her brother.

“Noodle, for the last time, it’s awalkingcast, not arunning-at-full-speed cast. Honestly, I’m starting to think that Theo has more sense than you—oh.” She stopped short as soon as she saw me. She also recognized me with a speed that was unsettling. “Oh!” she said again, her eyes growing wide.

Since I’d never loved the thought of being predictable, I couldn’t decide whether or not to take her reaction as a compliment, but it didn’t matter. As soon as an old man entered on her heels, I lost all sense of everything but him.

He was tall and broad-shouldered despite his advanced age, his posture perfectly erect. A full head of snowy white hair brushed the ceiling of the small house, and his clothes, despite being a touch rustic, were well fitted to his strong frame. In fact, if someone had asked me to lay odds, I’d have said he still possessed the strength to fell a whole forest full of trees.

But he also looked beaten. And tired. And so much like the boy I once knew that my heart left my chest.

Especially once he noticed me.

“Jasper, don’t—” the girl began, but it was too late. He started to go down like one of those forest trees, every muscle in him collapsing at once.

Every one of my own muscles collapsed with him. I couldn’t move—couldn’t even react—as he dashed a hand out to grip the doorway. Not that it did him any good. He missed by such a large margin that only Zach’s quick thinking and even quicker movements saved him from crumpling into a heap on the floor.

31

CATHERINE

The pages ofWuthering Heightswere thick and luscious in a way that no longer exists in publishing unless you spring for a special edition hardback. They were also crisp and virtually untouched despite the fact that I’d left the book on the cabin bookshelf for Jasper to find.

“You were supposed to read this,” I accused as I sat next to his bedside. He had yet to wake up from the faint that had sent him tumbling into Zach’s arms, but his breathing was steady and he kept muttering in his sleep, so I assumed he’d just collapsed like one of those fainting goats and wasn’t ready to face me yet.

The room where I sat over his bedside wasn’t his own; Zach was a strong kid, but even he could only manage to drag a man this size as far as the boys’ bedroom in the Sampson house. It reminded me a lot of Bates’s room growing up. He and I rarely had much money in those early days, since employment opportunities for an undereducated woman in the sixties left much to be desired, but he’d been a collector of all things nature. Rocks, leaves, the long-desiccated corpses of various beetles—if it was filthy and normally found outdoors, he found a way to keep it. Even a hastily painted-over scar on one of the walls felt familiar. Bateshad once tried to light a campfire in the middle of his room so we could have an impromptu weenie roast.

I let the book fall open to a section about halfway through. Chloe had been carrying the copy in her bag, and even though I could tell she was burning to ask me all manner of questions—and to keep the book for herself—she’d willingly handed it over.

“‘You said I killed you—haunt me then!’”I read aloud from the pages.“‘The murdereddohaunt their murderers, I believe; I know that ghostshavewandered the earth. Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! Onlydonot leave me in this abyss where I can not find you!’”

A sigh escaped me at the passage, especially once I saw what I’d written in the margins.

Youcanlive without your life, J, and you can live without your soul. Youhaveto. For my sake as well as yours, I’m begging you to try.

“Can you believe we were ever this dramatic?” I asked as I ran my fingers over the words. I was pretty sure I could still make out the splotches where my tears had dropped, but that might have been memory turning me sentimental. “I sometimes see kids today, falling head over heels in love and acting as though they’re the first ones to ever feel that way, and wish I could get that passion back. Then I recall the agony of those first few years and change my mind. I don’t know about you, but I had a rough go of it there for a while. I can’t tell you how many times I thought about coming back here to find you.”

I might have done it, too, only the radar base closed its doors a few months after I left. My father had been devastated to lose his position, but my mother was more than ready to move on to greener pastures. As soon as they packed up the house and moved to their next posting—in Philadelphia, if I remember correctly—Colville was essentially erasedfrom their memories.

Not mine, though. It forever lived inside me as the place where I’d learned to stand on my own two feet, even if I’d only managed it because I’d been propped up by the two extra feet I was growing inside me.

“How was I supposed to know you’d leave this book on the shelf for sixty years and refuse to touch it?” I continued with a soft tsk. “It was meant to comfort you, you old fool. I was giving you a ghost to chase so you could live up to your full Heathcliff potential, and you wasted it.”