Like…
I shake my head. A guy with dark hair climbs out of the driver’s seat. I barely see him, either. I can’t stop looking at the ghost standing in my driveway, floating toward me. She slips her hand into his, like it can keep her from floating off into the grey sky, a circus balloon that disappears into the endless blue, burned up in the atmosphere without leaving a single trace that it ever existed.
Time stops. Then she’s a few paces off, just staring back at me.
“Royal,” she says. “You’re… Huge.”
“You’re alive.”
She takes a tentative step toward me, and the monster inside me rises toward the surface. He was there to catch the pieces of me that crumbled away when she was gone, when she wasn’t the glue that held together whatever pieces of sanity we shared. Without her, they fell endlessly until there was nothing left of the boy she knew. Little Royal is gone. There’s only me now, me and the monster that is still here, still collecting the pieces to hold for me when I can’t.
And now they’ve all escaped his clutches, an avalanche of who I was rushing to bury me alive.
I turn to the garage, but my car is inside, blocked by the huge van in the driveway. I keep turning, until I’ve almost made a full circle and I’m facing Harper. “Give me your keys.”
Without a word, she hands me her keys. I climb into the Escalade, back it down the side of the driveway until I’m past the van, all the way to the road. Then I turn onto it and drive away, away from my house and the girl I tried to kill and the girl I didn’t mean to kill. I won’t think about them, about the girl who said she loved me when that’s impossible, as impossible as the dead girl in my driveway, the specter of my life’s deepest regret, my darkest shame, my unforgivable sin.
I press down on the gas pedal until everything is a grey blur of dead trees and blank sky on either side of me, as if I can drive fast enough to turn back time, as if I can break through a barrier in time, in reality, and find myself on the bank of that river three years ago, when I lost her the first time. Then it might all make sense.
As I fly around a corner and shoot forward, the tires eating up the pavement, I think about what King said just a few days ago. That his biggest regret was not letting Crystal choose herself. Not letting her choose Devlin.
But she did choose him. She chose him, and she left, because she knew what would happen if she didn’t.
We’d kill him.
We would have killed him, not for any of us, but for Dad. He’s the one who hated the Darlings. He’s the one who set all this in motion.
That’s where it all started.
And that’s where it ends.
twenty-six
Crystal Darling
“What just happened?” I ask, my voice shaking as I try to wrap my head around the fact that my brother, my twin, still hates me. Even after three years, he hasn’t forgiven me for choosing Devlin. He wouldn’t let me touch him. He turned away when I went to hug him, to make amends in some way. I’ve pictured this moment a thousand times, ten thousand, but I never imagined it would hurt so much.
Sometimes, I even let myself picture him happy. Like Devlin when he saw Preston, I pictured Royal being so relieved to have me back that he forgot all that. He’d pick me up and spin me around, and we’d laugh and cry and hold onto each other for so long, both of us apologizing and saying how stupid we were.
Instead, I get this.
This stranger, a girl who tracked me halfway across the country to tell me Royal needed me, when it’s perfectly clear that he doesn’t.
“What just happened is called consequences,” Harper says in her usual slightly confrontational tone. “While you went off to live your fairytale life, Royal’s turned into a fucking monster who’s been terrorizing this town. We told you that already.”
“But… I didn’t think he’d still hate me,” I admit quietly.
“He doesn’t know how to love,” Harper says. “But he loves you in his fucked up way. That’s why he did all this—because the Darlings took you from him.”
Devlin slides his arm around my waist, drawing me against him. “Give him some space. I’m sure he’ll come around.”
“That actually went better than I expected,” Harper says. “Since you’re both still alive.”
A quiet squall sounds in the back seat of the van, and I turn, grateful to have something to keep me occupied and ground me in the present moment. This is familiar. It needs to be done now. There’s no time for panicking. Take care of the kids. They come first. They need me.
I can worry about about Royal later.
“Believe it or not, the rest of your brothers are worse,” Harper says. “But less likely to murder you, so there’s that.”