Page 73 of Our Crooked Hearts
She moved her head restlessly. “We don’t know that. We don’tknowwhat Astrid would’ve done. We didn’tseeMarion die.”
“We didn’t have to.”
“I replay it in my head, all the time, and I…”
“Stop.”I dropped my head onto my knees. “I replay it all the time, too. The only way out of that circle was to kill her. It was the only way out of the messshemade, that she refused to even try to clean up. Sometimes I think a knife would’ve been kinder. The way I did it…” I twisted my head to look into my best friend’s sorrowful eyes. “It probably wasn’t quick.”
I pictured it sometimes. If the fall didn’t kill her, Astrid would’ve kept her alive until she found a way to unbind them. Maybe she tortured Marion first. Maybe she left her to wander whatever half-world I’d banished her to until she suffered and faded and perished, like a girl in an old ballad.
But there was no death I could imagine for her that was worse than the alternative: that she’d actuallysurvived.
“Honestly, Fee.” Suddenly I couldn’t speak above a whisper. “I couldn’t bear it if she were alive. It would be unbearable. Tothink of her alive, and trapped, and, and,kept,by Astrid. Alone. Ican’t.She’s flesh and blood, Fee. Shecan’thave survived it.”
I looked at her for confirmation of what I knew to be true, needed to be true. For absolution. She took a shaky breath.
“Marion is dead,” she said. Gazing across the water proud as a figurehead, her voice so stern you would’ve thought she was the one convincing me.
I breathed in, the succubus weight of guilt finally easing. “She’s dead.”
We watched the gulls rise and fall, cartwheeling through the air and nipping at the waves. Fee whispered a prayer for Marion, and neither of us speculated aloud on whether she’d died in a place that prayer could reach.
