Daughter of Deep Silence (17 page)

L
ater that night, I wake with a start, gasping for air. I’d been dreaming about those last days on the life raft, when Libby was dying and I’d screamed at her over and over again to just hold on. For one more minute. And for another after that.

In the darkness of my bedroom, my heart roars, and for a confused moment, I wonder whether I’m still dreaming because I hear someone shouting Libby’s name. And then I realize it’s coming from outside.

It takes me longer than it should to remember:
Oh, wait, that’s me. I’m Libby
. And then I scramble from the bed. When I throw open the French doors and step out onto the balcony, the sound of scuffling intensifies.

“Libby!” the voice yells again, somewhat blurry sounding, followed by a grunt. I look down to find Grey trying to push his way toward the house, Shepherd shoving him back. Grey twists, rolling out of his grasp and points to my balcony. “There she is!” He waves wildly.

Shepherd looks up at me over his shoulder, his exasperation very evident. With one hand he makes a tipping motion over his mouth and I realize immediately what he’s trying to say.

Apparently, so does Grey because as I start across the room toward the stairs I hear him argue, “I’m not drunk,” followed by more grunts. Then there’s a loud
splash
and I take off running.

I make it outside to the patio just as Shepherd hauls himself up out of the pool. His T-shirt and shorts are both drenched and plastered against his body. Water runs in rivulets down his face, catching at his jaw. “I’m calling Morales,” he growls.

“Wait—don’t!” I grab his arm. “I’ll take care of it.”

He glances down at my hand, his muscles bunching under my touch. “How?”

“I’ll walk him home—give him time to sober up a little. He’s underage, calling the cops will just make things worse.”

Behind him, Grey slips trying to climb up the ladder and splashes back under.

Shepherd rolls his eyes. “I don’t know that I want you walking the beach with him alone at night. I’ll change and go with you.” He starts to pull away but I hold him tight.

“I’ll be fine,” I tell him.

“He’s dangerous,
Libby
.”

I bristle at the way he emphasizes the name. “I said I’ll take care of it.” I keep my voice even.

Shepherd lets out a long breath. “Whatever.” He throws his hands up and stalks toward the house.

When I turn to the pool I find Grey sitting on the top step, staring into the water. Where he’d been boisterous just moments before, now he seems contemplative and even a bit morose.

“Come on,” I tell him gently, nudging him with the side of my leg. “Let’s get you home.”

He squints up at me. For a long moment he just stares. Enough so that I nudge him with my leg again, hoping to get him moving.

“You look so much like her—like Frances—sometimes,” he murmurs.

Everything inside of me freezes. Painfully so. My senses flare to life, remnants from a time long past when humans were nothing but prey. The night comes alive all at once. The sharp ionized smell of the pool water. The striation of the ocean breeze as it sifts through my cotton nightgown. The
plonking
sound of water dripping from Grey’s fingertips, falling to the patio.

I search my brain for some sort of light retort, something that will cover the panic thundering through my veins. “Beer goggles are a wonderful thing, my friend,” I tell him, reaching to grab his elbow and pull him up. “I once had an entire pub of drunkards in Wales convinced I was the Duchess of Cambridge,” I add, steering Grey toward the boardwalk.

“Bourbon, not beer,” he corrects. “The finest I could swipe from Dad’s library.”

I move quickly to change the subject. “How’s your mother?”

His head falls back against his shoulders. “Still being observed by a team of highly qualified doctors.” He sighs. “I just couldn’t stay at that hospital anymore. With all the beeping and the machines and reporters and cameras . . .” He frowns. “It was too much like after the
Persephone
. Hence the bourbon.”

There’s nothing I can really say to this except, “I hope she’ll be okay.”

When we hit the beach, I turn to start toward his house, but he keeps going, straight toward the water.

“Oh no,” I say, jogging after him. “I think you’ve had enough swimming tonight.”

Ignoring me, he keeps walking until the waves reach his knees and then he stops. He just stands there, staring toward the horizon. The fabric of his wet button-down shirt molds along his shoulders and back, following the ridges and dips of muscles. His shorts sit low on his waist, heavy with water.

I take a few steps after him, holding up the hem of my nightgown with one hand so it won’t get wet. “Come on,” I tell him, trying to pull him toward shore. But he resists.

“I’ve never experienced that kind of darkness again.” His voice is soft, both wondrous and sad at the same time. “Do you remember it? Being adrift and how black everything was?”

My mouth goes dry and I clench the hem of my nightgown into a ball in my fist. “Yes,” I admit. “But there were stars too.” They were almost blinding the way they filled the sky.

“Not that second night,” he says.

Beneath my feet the sand shifts, pulled out by the tide. There’s a seductive lulling to it that makes it seem like time and consequences no longer exist. “The storm.”

From the corner of my eye I see him nod.

“It took so long to rain,” I continue. “Gathering all day until the hope of it became this kind of physical pain.”

Neither of us looks at the other.

I never realized how much pressure this story had built inside me. The
Persephone
has guided almost every waking moment of my life, hovering like a dark beast clinging to my shoulders. What a release it is to finally let the words escape. To share them with someone who knows and understands.

“You were rescued the next day,” I add.

“You still had five days left.”

I drop the hem of my nightgown and it floats around my knees for a moment before sinking under. It’s a relief to cross my arms over my chest. To dig my fingers into the muscles until I feel bone.

“
How much do you remember, Libby?
” he whispers.

“Nothing.” I say it automatically. My lips numb. The lying too easy.

He turns to me, grabs my arms, and pulls until I’m facing him. “But you remember the darkness. And the storm.” There’s a violent need to his voice that causes my breath to catch. “You
do
remember.”

He must sense my alarm because he immediately lets go, his face twisted in anguish. His breathing shakes as he shoves a hand through his hair, trying to regain control.

“Let’s go,” I tell him, starting for the shore. But his next words stop me.

“I just can’t stop thinking about Frances.”

I
shouldn’t ask. I know I shouldn’t. I don’t need to know. Frances isn’t important to my plan. But at her name on Grey’s lips, the girl inside me roars to life, kicking and screaming. Needing to hear what this boy has to say about her.

Reminding me that I’m the one who stole her life and she at least deserves this.

And so I turn back. Arms tightly crossed. Nightgown hem drifting like a translucent jellyfish around my shins. I don’t have to say anything for Grey to continue.

“Frances was just so . . .” He presses his lips together, at a loss for words. “Everything. She was everything.”

My heart squeezes, pain and euphoria fighting inside me.

“You know what’s funny?” He lets out a small laugh. “You were actually the one I noticed first. Even back then you had this”—he waves a hand through the air—“flash about you. Frances kind of disappeared behind that.”

I press my fingers to my forehead, letting out a breath of air as though I’ve been punched in the gut. It’s true, even
I’d
seen that back then. But that doesn’t make it easier to hear.

He pauses, suddenly realizing what he’s insinuated about me. About Libby. “Not that I thought you tried to outshine her on purpose,” he backpedals.

“No,” I murmur. “I loved Frances.” And whether these are the words of Libby or of Frances I do not know. But I do know that they are somehow true either way.

I tell myself that I should go back inside. That I don’t need to be hearing this. But then Grey adds, “
Me too
,” in words so soft they almost don’t exist, and I know that I will stay. That I am desperate for his every word.

“I’m pretty sure Frances figured out pretty quickly that I was interested in you,” he says, another whisper of a laugh. “I was trying to find a way to get closer to you by the pool. You were oblivious, of course. And I was this awkward kid.”

The memories crawl up my throat and I have to bite my lip to keep them from spilling out. Grey wore this red-and-blue bathing suit, and I couldn’t stop staring at the line of skin just above the lip of his waistband. It was only visible when he stretched and something about glimpsing it felt so intensely intimate to me. So wrong in a deliciously right way.

“I tried getting in line behind you at the bar but a lady spilled her soda all over me and I had to help her clean it up. I tried to get a deck chair next to y’all but this huge family claimed them all first. There was
nothing
I could do.” He shakes his head, remembering. “I don’t know at what point Frances noticed me.”

From the beginning
, I want to tell him.

“But she started giving me this look. And you’d think I’d have gotten embarrassed because here was this girl watching me strike out with her friend again and again, but it was almost like she was rooting for me.”

Because there was no way I ever thought I stood a chance. Not against Libby.

He grins, his mind so deep in the memory I doubt he even remembers I’m standing here. “And then I realized that I didn’t even care about you anymore. I was just doing whatever it took for Frances to give me that look again. God, I probably spent hours going after you just so Frances would smile at me.”

My knees go weak and it takes every effort to remain standing as the sand shifts beneath me.
Hours
. All that time it killed me to watch Grey going after Libby, wishing it were me.

All that time I wondered whether I was just the consolation prize once he finally got it through his head that Libby wasn’t interested.

It was me he was after all along.

“And then you got up to do something . . .” He frowns.

“Get a towel,” I fill in for him. Because I remember the exact moment Libby walked across the deck to the towel stand, intending to hit on the guy who worked there.

Grey looked across the deck at me then.

“And Frances pointed, letting me know where you’d gone. But I wasn’t interested in you.”

He came straight toward me, eyes never looking anywhere else. And I was dying.

“I took the chair next to her.” He laughs. “Your seat, actually.”

And he introduced himself.

“I was so nervous all of the sudden. That she’d think I was some kind of freak because she’d seen me strike out so much.”

I thought he was going to ask me about Libby. Get her name. Wait for her to come back so he could talk to her.

“And then I realized that I didn’t know how to ask her out. We were on a ship!” He laughs. “There was nowhere to go, nothing to do.”

So we just started talking.

“So we just started talking. You were caught up somewhere else and it was just Frances and me.”

For almost an hour. Just us.

“If she’d have let me, I’d have spent every second from then on with her.”

I was afraid he’d get tired of me. Figure out how boring I was compared to Libby.

He pauses and I realize that my breaths are coming in pants.

“And I was . . . God,” He presses his palms against his forehead. “I think I was already falling in love.” His voice cracks.

He looks over at me then. And under the stars, in the darkness there’s a part of me that screams for him to see me.
Really
see me. To look past the trappings of Libby that I’ve wrapped around myself and see Frances.

He’d done it once before—seen past Libby’s glamour to find Frances hiding in the shadows. He should be able to do it again.

My chin trembles and I bite my cheeks. The longer he says nothing, the more hope thickens inside me. Like the day cast adrift waiting for rain to come. The painful anticipation of it.

Because if anyone ever loved Frances, if anyone could rescue her and pull her back to the surface after drowning for all these years, it’s Greyson Wells.

And I would walk away from it all right now if he asked me. All the carefully laid plans, the perfectly arranged pieces nudged into place. I’d rip free this Libby mask and cast it back into the ocean where she died all those years ago.

Grey leans closer and the girl inside my head screams that all he has to do is look. How can he be this close and not see? With the sound of the waves and the smell of the salt water—just as it was the first time on the
Persephone
.

His eyes twitch, and I see him mentally asking the question. His breath pauses. Because he knows—something in him remembers this.

Me.

Us.

“
I just need someone else who remembers her
,” he whispers.

Yes!
the girl inside me screams.
I’m right here!

And then he blinks. Wiping it all away. The doubt and hesitation. Replacing it with pain and memories.

Frances hovers, just under my skin, shattering again. Like the moment Libby gave up—leaving me alone with nothing but the ocean.

I swallow, again and again, as tears burn at my throat.

“How did she die?” Grey finally asks.

“Painfully.” I hurl the word, dagger sharp, because I’m angry. And hurt. That even
he’s
fooled by my act. This is as far as I’ve ever allowed Frances to surface, yet still she’s invisible to the one person who should know better.

If Grey can’t see it, then there really is nothing left of who I used to be. It’s a staggeringly painful realization. And I understand, then, how Libby could have given up in that raft.

Because I can feel Frances letting go inside me. Slipping under. Letting the weight of memories fill her lungs.

Grey’s face crumbles. “Oh God.” He presses a hand over his eyes as he doubles over, falling to his knees in the surf.

For a moment I stand over him, watching the way that he’s broken.

Knowing that I’m broken in the same way.

My stomach roils at what I say next—at my capacity for cruelty. At my need to hurt him.

But it’s the only way I know to save myself. Truth and revenge, my only lifelines.

I let myself slip until I’m kneeling next to him, the waves dancing around my ribs. I place my arms around him. Comforting him.

“There’s nothing you could have done.” I say the words softly, knowing the aching brutality of them.

Because there
was
something he could have done to save her. He could have told the truth.

And he must know this. If he hadn’t lied about the rogue wave, they would have kept searching. They would have found us before Libby died.

He slams a fist against the surface, again and again. “No! There was something! I could have told them . . .”

And it’s like the moment the storm clouds broke on that third day—the first drops of water that hit against our upturned faces.

Just as then, I hold my breath waiting. For the deluge of truth.

But he shakes his head, growling. Choking it all back.

“What could you have told them, Grey?” I prod.

He looks at me, and it’s as if he’s asking me to hold something inside of him together that I can’t reach. He pushes to his feet, stumbling against the incoming tide. I stand, start after him. “I’ll walk you home,” I offer, but he holds up a hand, keeping me at bay.

“No.” His eyes rake across my body. The water’s turned my nightgown sheer and it clings to me, making me appear almost naked. He clenches his jaw. “You should get inside.” And then he turns and runs. Leaving me standing alone in the darkness.

For a long time I don’t move, staring out into the blackness of the infinite ocean. Wondering what would happen if I just started walking and never stopped. If I’d ever be able to find my parents. If I could crawl inside the wreckage of the sunken
Persephone
where I belong.

How is it that I survived and Libby didn’t? How was I somehow deemed worthy and she was not? I think about Grey and how reckless I’ve been with these stolen years. All of this time and the truth is still buried. Those responsible have never paid.

But
I
have. Every day, every minute and second, I’ve born the brunt of the
Persephone
. It is my purpose. My definition. In many ways, it is my savior. The very thing that should have killed me has kept me alive with a singular goal.

And every time my heart screams for Grey, that resolve wavers. He’s meant to be a means to an end but instead he has somehow become my greatest weakness.

I’d expected the near death of his mother to make him want to reach out. Trauma always has a way of accelerating relationships, creating intimacy where none existed before. Just look at me and Libby. That week together on the life raft we shared
everything
.

That’s one of the reasons I’d put Grey’s mother at risk and then saved her—to throw him and me together. To make him feel indebted to me. But I hadn’t expected it to work on me as well. I hadn’t intended that it would cause me to want to cling to him.

If he’d asked I would have told him the truth tonight
. This certainty is appalling to me. Even more than that, it is unacceptable.

How could I even think of turning my back on the hundreds of dead—my own parents—for the promise of a soft kiss? For the chance at a sympathetic ear? For a heart that beats at the same volume as my own?

Especially when it’s been proven that those kisses are lies.

Everything about Grey is a lie.

Inside, Frances objects.
Grey hurts too
, she insists.

“Good,” I whisper to the ocean. He should hurt.

They all should.