The Day Before Forever (33 page)

The priest sighed, as if he had to do something tedious. He stood up with the knife still in his hands, pointing toward himself. And plunged it into himself.

My hand involuntarily shot out, and Henley caught it in his own.

The priest stood there, looking down at the knife still in his chest. He staggered, sitting back down on the chair. There was so much blood. His robes couldn't soak all of it up, and it dripped down the chair. His eyes were wide, as if in amazement at all the blood. As if he was in shock that he had done this to himself. But his lips were fixed into a smile.

Then I understood. His was the last death.

The priest hadn't argued when I'd told him we were the same. We were both immortals—and in his eyes, both aberrations in God's plan. He had killed all the Miss Hatfields before me. He thought he had killed me too. His last duty had been to kill himself, to purge the world of the unnatural.

Henley started to stand.

I placed a hand on his shoulder. “No.”

The right thing to do was to let him have his peace. He was already dying. There was no sense or compassion in showing him his death had borne no meaning.

TWENTY-THREE

THE PRIEST GULPED
his last breath and let it out in a last sigh. His body slumped forward, and his duty was finished. He disintegrated, and I watched his ashes softly cover the chair he had been sitting in.

Henley stood, unable to tear his eyes away from where the priest had sat. He helped me up.

“A-are you all right?”

He knew I wasn't all right. He knew we both weren't all right and wouldn't be for a while, but as the realization of what had happened sank in, all we could do was fall back on our usual questions and habits.

That was why I told him, “I'm okay.”

“Good. Good. I-I'm fine. Very fine.”

He had forgotten to let go of my hand, and I felt his tremors through his fingers.

We stood still for a moment, before I pulled him toward the
trapdoor in the floor. We couldn't stay in that room.

As we walked down the stairs I saw Alma was lying there, waiting for us by the foot of the stairs.

She had probably heard our voices in the attic and wanted to come up, but the first step had been too high for her short legs. She had probably been there the entire time.

“You were waiting for us, weren't you? You knew we'd come back.” When I crouched down to pet her, I realized the floor was wet.

I put my hand on her head, and she raised her eyes to look at me. Her eyes were tired. The light was going. There was gray in her fur again.

“I-I don't understand.”

Henley put his hand on my own.

Alma wheezed as she drew herself up onto her paws and slowly dragged herself away.

“No. No, she was immortal. She can't have aged. And so suddenly. She looks like she did before she drank from the lake. It's as if she was never immortal . . .”

I saw the backpack by the foot of the stairs. I had left it open when I put it down, and the small vial—the one Richard had given to me—was out and crushed on the floor. The wetness on the floor was from that. Alma must have worried it out of the backpack and broken it.
But why was she old again? It wasn't possible.

Richard had said the liquid in the vial was useless. He had said it was almost like water. It didn't do anything when consumed. It couldn't be poison.

“Richard was searching for immortality,” Henley said. “Is
it possible . . .”

That he found mortality instead?

“He found a cure for immortality,” Henley said. “Alma returned to the way she was before.”

The water was fast seeping through the floor cracks.

“We need to make a decision right now,” I said.

Henley understood exactly what I meant.

I took out the flask with the water from the Fountain of Youth, and looked at Henley.

“Whichever decision we make, we won't be able to undo it,” he said.

Endless time with the man I loved or one meaningful life with him instead. Living
in
the world or being above it all.

I was human. I wanted to feel and go through everything human. I didn't want a cheapened experience.

We both understood how important this decision was, and yet we were calm as we took our fingers and dipped them in the spilled water. We brought it to our lips. We were sure.

EPILOGUE

HENLEY AND I
kept the brownstone and lived in it for the rest of our days. Very little of our past lives remained, save for the sun-faded mark where the clock once hung in the kitchen. As the decades went by, we started forgetting details of the existences we had once led.

But occasionally, on rare days, one of the older neighbors—the woman walking her Chihuahua or the anthropology professor two doors down—would mention to me that there used to be a beautiful woman who lived in our house. They would tell me that she had lived alone and kept mostly to herself. She had seemed nice enough but always too distant.

“You look so much like her,” they would say.

“Such a shame she was so alone,” I would say.

And they would tell me I was fortunate that I couldn't imagine such a lonely life.

Our conversation would end with that. They would help me
up the steps of my house, kiss me on the cheek, and go back to their house. I would wave, and they would wave.

I would come home to Henley, who would be waiting by the fire in the parlor.

“Rebecca?”

My footsteps made the wood floors creak in familiar ways.

“Yes?”

A gust of wind came in through the door with me. It knocked down one of the cards that lined the mantel.

“I was thinking minestrone soup for dinner tonight. Would that be all right?”

He knew I would eat anything for dinner, but he asked every day.

“That would be wonderful.” I walked to the mantel and picked up the card on the floor. It had fallen open, and the messy handwritten words seemed to fall out onto the floor.

Thank you so much for the mixer. It will make a great addition to our new kitchen. (I can't believe we've finally found a place to settle down!) I will have to make you brownies as soon as we unpack and officially move in, after the honeymoon. I'm so glad both of you were able to make it to the wedding!

I didn't know why I was reading the card when I already had it memorized by heart. It was the first thank-you card I had ever received, after all.

Closing the card, I set it up on its place on the mantel.

Alanna and Peter Santelli-Newton
was embossed on the
front in silver script.

“Now come sit by me so I can take in what a beautiful sight you are.”

Henley always wheeled his chair into the parlor, next to the armchair that was my seat. Since he invariably complained of the cold, I would put a blanket around his legs and pull thick socks on his feet before sitting down next to him. He hadn't worn shoes in years.

I would sit next to him by the fire, and he would tell me my eyes hadn't changed. I missed Henley's blue eyes, but I could feel them on me, past Richard's hazel ones. Henley saw me through them.

As the years went by, the world grew gradually darker for me. We didn't leave the house much, and Margot came in to carry groceries and help us with food.

“Granny?”

“I'm in here, Margot. The parlor,” I said.

She sounded so mature, coming home from college. She almost sounded like her mother.

“I bet your mother's pleased to have you back for the summer,” I said.

“You know Mom. She likes keeping me close. She calls every other day when I'm in California.”

I had called every other day for the first year when her mother started college too.

“I brought some apples and strawberries from the farmers' market,” she said.

“Strawberry season already?”

I extended my hand, and Margot was there to meet me. I felt
a few strawberries drop into my cupped hand. Their seeds gently scratched my palm.

“They're plump and a beautiful red, Gran.”

“Is that so?”

She took them from me. “Let me wash them first.”

Margot's footsteps were soft as she exited the room.

“She's looking more like you every day,” Henley said.

As the world grew dark, I saw Henley more clearly. He was young again. His blue eyes shone. He had this way he pushed his dark hair back when it flopped into his eyes. And also the way he would roll his eyes, but then extend his hand to me a moment later.

I felt Henley's hand cradle my own. It was the same thing he did every day, but somehow it felt warmer—more comforting. His thumb stroked the back of my hand once, before the world fell away. It wasn't the visual world that fell away—no, that had gone long before—but my tangible senses and the connecting emotions. They dissipated into nothing. The last thing to go was the feeling of Henley's hand on my own.

Was this death?
If so, death felt like traveling in time. I felt the world slip away and welcomed the stillness. It shrouded me in silence and held me.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I WOULD LIKE
to thank Maggie Hanbury and Robin Straus. You are every author's dream agents. A huge thank-you to my editor, Kelsey Horton, not only for supplying many books on my to-read list, but for her actual editing.

Thank you to Jill Amack, Jon Howard, and the Epic Reads Impulse team at HarperCollins for all their hard work on this book. There's only so much an author can do alone.

Rhean, I don't know where I would be without your guidance. You have taught me so much over the years.

Katie, your life advice is the reason I've survived these last nineteen years. Mark, I still believe socks with sandals are an abomination. Christian, there is no one with whom I would rather girl talk.

To my parents—so many thank-yous have already been said, but I know it'll never come close to being enough. In my opinion, so far, so good on the parenting. But then again, I might be a
bit biased.