Her arms shook, and he knew she was sore and bruised from swinging the ax, from the fragments of House that rained down on her for God knows how long while she tried to get to him and, later, his mother.
Holding on to her, he told her what he could remember: that he thought police arrived only a minute or so after the strange silence hit. That they’d initially handcuffed Dhaval and Vani, questioned Gavin, but despite their skepticism, there wasn’t much doubt that something truly supernatural had happened. The house was virtually crumbling. Furniture was embedded in walls, in trees outside. Fires had started in tiny discrete pockets. And, most horribly, there was his badly malnourished mother whom no one had seen in nearly seventeen years. Apparently, Gavin had been so terrified when he’d seen her under the police lights that he had been unable to stop screaming for several minutes.
The town, the state, and soon the entire world would know what had happened last night at the Patchwork House.
Gavin didn’t think he had more tears, but he did after all. He had tears and bewildered words and more grief than he knew what to do with.
Delilah held him, careful not to jostle his casted arm, speaking quietly about their life together after this, the love she felt for him and what they’d managed to do together. He knew she was right: This was how it had to happen, if not yesterday than at some point in the future, because whatever was in House—whatever had raised him, loved him, sequestered him, and eventually tortured him—had also locked his mother up his entire life, simply so that it could keep Gavin all to itself.
But even now it was hard to forget a time when it wasn’t so very terrible.
Gavin pressed his lips to her neck, screwing his eyes closed. The air felt completely empty, unburdened from the weight of the spirits that had tracked him his whole life. Past this moment of shock, and anguish, with her arms around his neck, he could truly breathe for the first time in what felt like forever.
? ? ?
Delilah curled into his side, running a warm hand over his ribs and up his neck, into his hair. Beneath them, the blankets bunched on the mats they’d put on the floor of the music room. They hardly ever had time alone lately, but here in their secret fortress, when the clock hovered between two and three in the morning, and where they were so close together Delilah’s warm bare skin slid over his every time she breathed, he could forget the frenzy of the past two weeks.
“Puget Sound,” she said, kissing his chin.
He looked down into her wide blue eyes. “Why there and not Northwestern? Or Harvard?”
They had their pick, after all. After the Silence, as Gavin and Delilah thought of it—or after the Falling of Patchwork House, as everyone else did—they were the darlings of the world’s media. Even with the blistering attention of the press, there were some perks. Donations, for one. A full ride to any college, for another. And the new, warm concern of a million strangers. Gavin had gone from having no parents to having a planet full of them, including one birth mother who would be released from the hospital in a matter of days.
He saw her every day, spent hours sitting by her bed and reading her books, playing her music, telling stories of things he did when he’d left the house and she couldn’t hear him moving around. The house had let her watch him sleep; let her listen when he practiced Piano. It had brought her out, in a trance, when it needed a signature, a parent to send away the school official, Social Services, and once, the police. But her memories were fragmented and—worse—her guilt was consuming. Gavin worked frantically to reassure her in his time with her that his life had been good.
He had been cherished, actually.
Every day she seemed to believe him a little more; she’d seen it with her own eyes, after all. Yesterday she’d even smiled.
At length, Delilah admitted, “I think I want to be near water.”
It seemed to be such a specific request, but he could understand it. Nothing could be more different from the landlocked suburbia of Morton than an archipelago of islands and water going on forever.