thirty-five.
From where she sat on Peaches’s yellow patch of bed the next morning, Marsden watched Nina’s proudest worker and knew they’d both changed.
She wasn’t supposed to be anything but happy to hear that Peaches was leaving. Peaches was Peaches. She’d always been abrasive, overly blunt, half enjoying Marsden’s discomfort over the years. She had a hard heart, and only Lucy had been able to break it down.
But Lucy was gone, and Marsden never thought she’d see Peaches the way she was now—smaller, faded, beaten, made strangely vulnerable with brittleness. This Peaches, if Marsden squinted in just the wrong way, could easily remind her of her mother.
“Are you headed to Seattle, then, or just wherever?” She plucked at the blue pillow she held in her lap. On the bed next to her knee was Peaches’s camera, returned.
Brom’s photo was in her pocket. She’d tucked it there before coming to Peaches’s room, thinking she would simply drop off the camera and then leave for Seconds. But then she saw Peaches packing, preparing to leave the boardinghouse and Glory. And because she didn’t tell Marsden to go away, Marsden had come inside and sat down, wanting to say goodbye but unsure how.
Also in her pocket was a letter addressed to Adam Lytton with a dollar bill inside, no return address. It was the name of the last man from the covert. She’d found it by flipping through the newspaper that morning. She would mail it that afternoon. One more absolution she would never earn.
Peaches fished in the depths of a worn duffel bag she’d placed on top of the bed. It seemed out of place with the rest of the room, and Marsden guessed it was the same bag she’d arrived in Glory with, hitching a ride into town with Lucy five years ago.
“Just wherever.” Peaches tucked sneakers into the duffel. “But first, I’m going to Florida. There’s someone there I have to see.”
“Lucy was from Florida.”
“Yes, I know.”
She heard cool danger in those words. “Would she want you going to see this person in Florida?”
Peaches smiled, but it was hard and miserable, her eyes too shiny; Marsden couldn’t help but think of Jude as he was when he first came to her. Standing at the fence to the covert, nothing but bleak anger in his eyes. Not the Jude who’d kissed her last night like he couldn’t get enough, but the Jude who’d already seen too much and no longer cared.
“Ooh, no, probably not.” Peaches’s wink felt perfunctory, part of an old performance that was hard to shake. “But she always knew I had a hard time backing down from a fight.”
“Who is it? Someone in her family?”
“There’s a reason why Lucy never talked about her past.”
“You know about it, though, don’t you?”
Peaches nodded. “It only took about three years of being friends for her to finally tell me. But I’d kind of already guessed, putting together all the little things she’d let slip.”
“She said when she got here, working for Nina seemed like her only option. So she couldn’t go home, even if she wanted to?”
“There were no legal reasons why she couldn’t go back. But she didn’t leave home on a whim, the way I did. Lucy left because she no longer felt safe.” Peaches carried over a plain jewelry box—like the duffel, it didn’t match the room, and Marsden wondered if it’d been a gift from a john—and began to go through it. Her painted nails caught on earrings and flashed through paste gems. “Just because someone is blood doesn’t mean they won’t hurt you.” Her voice was tired, desolate—Marsden heard the anguish of Lucy’s absence in it. “Sometimes someone being blood means they think it’s their right to hurt you.”
The image of Jude as a little kid, damaged. Her own mother, begging Marsden to save her. “Lucy was beaten?”
Peaches said nothing, only looked harder at her. “You’re sixteen now, right? And Wynn is eight?”
Marsden nodded.
“Well, Lucy was twelve and defenseless, and I guess I’m feeling the need to let a particular someone know exactly what happened to that little girl.”
“So they can feel guilty?” Her stomach churned with growing awareness of what might have happened. And she thought of Wynn, who trusted way too much. How she was the one who’d kept her that way.
“No, because guilt means getting to feel sorry, and they don’t get to have that. Straight-up shame is what I have in mind.”
“Don’t get hurt.” Don’t be hurt, Marsden wanted to say, wished could be true.
Peaches’s laugh was flat, entirely humorless. “I’ll be fine. And I might even be back—I’ve never hidden that I don’t hate my work. I’ll decide later, when this is done, when things might start feeling bearable again.” Her gaze sharpened, turned knowing. “Has Nina asked you to work for her yet?”
The blue pillow shrank down within the sudden clench of Marsden’s fingers. She said nothing. Couldn’t.
Peaches moved over to her bedside table, pulled open the drawer, and took out a small handgun.
Marsden sat up straighter. In Glory, guns—real guns, not just the toy ones Red and Coop carried with them—were about as common as bad debts and hangovers, and she saw her share of them in the covert, left behind by their owners. But she’d never held one, was always careful to leave them untouched. “Have you always kept a gun in there?”
Intense grief crossed Peaches’s face. “Lucy told me once that she thought she should get one, too, dealing with johns, but I convinced her not to. I was worried she wouldn’t know how to use it, or she’d get in trouble if something went wrong. But I think another, smaller part of me also worried she’d use it for another reason, one that had nothing to do with protecting herself.”
“She didn’t use a gun, though,” Marsden said quietly.
“I know. It doesn’t change how I wish that that small part of me hadn’t been so small.” Peaches inspected the gun more closely. “If you decide to surprise the hell out of me by accepting Nina’s offer, just know what you’re getting into. And remember, aim to maim and go for pain.”
“Seriously?”
“It’ll be enough to stop them, and in the end, they’ll probably still lose it. How very unfortunate.”
“Who you’re going to see in Florida—you’re not going to take the gun, are you?” The possibility had hit Marsden like a slap. Imagining Peaches holding that gun with Lucy in her eyes.
“No.” Peaches’s lips curled into a scowl. “Though I considered it, because it felt good to. But if she wouldn’t want me going in the first place, there’s no way I can convince myself that she’d be okay with me killing him.” She slid the gun back into the drawer, her shoulders seeming slumped with defeat. “And I only ever got it for work—it seems right that it stays here. I’ll have to let Nina know about it before I leave.”
Marsden slowly pulled Lucy’s necklace from around her neck and off over her head. “I took this when I found her. I know she’d want you to have it.”
Peaches reached out and took the thin silver chain. Her eyes narrowed. “You make it a regular habit to lift jewelry from bodies you find in the covert, Marsden Eldridge?”
“I didn’t want it getting lost.”
“That’s not really an answer to my question, is it?” But Peaches slipped the necklace over her head, smoothing down her auburn hair—it looked right on her, just as right as it’d looked on Lucy. Her eyes were wet. “She bought this when she thought she’d finally escaped the past and could stop blaming herself. But I guess you don’t really, not entirely. You can knit broken bones back together, but everyone knows they’re still not the same. And Lucy felt those breaks more than she didn’t. I should have been better about those times she didn’t. I should have helped her make them last longer.”
But Lucy had heard the call of the covert, Marsden knew, the one made powerful by the dark magic that ran in her family’s blood, that twisted Glory into what it was. And whatever guilt Lucy hadn’t been able to shake, it drew her to the land’s promise of being saved.
It made Marsden hate the covert all over again, for being not just a place of tragedy, but also one of trickery. She hated her name and blood for having written that story, the town for not fighting harder against reading it. She hated herself for still needing the covert anyway.