Chapter 15: Ferry Night

"Then she has to bring them out," I said.

Jody looked up from the phone.

"She never brings them out. Not once in ten years."

"Then we make her."

Nobody asked how. I didn't know how.

I slept fourteen hours in the gray sweater and woke up starving for something that wasn't a protein bar.

And I knew what I had to do first.

Danny was at our kitchen table in Sunnyside when I came out of my own closet.

He had one foot up on a chair with a bag of frozen peas on it, and a textbook open that he wasn't reading.

He looked at the closet.

He looked at me.

"Okay," he said. "Okay. You came out of the closet."

"I know."

"The closet, Clary. Where the vacuum lives."

I sat down across from him.

"I don't plan weddings," I said.

I told him all of it.

The woman in white in the ER, on day three.

The gold pen.

The wish, and the two days after, and the doctor smiling in the hall.

Seven years of bows and lonely bankers, and the white house on the water, and my name in a book, on Halloween.

He didn't say anything for so long the peas dripped onto the table.

"You signed a contract," he said finally. "With a goddess. For me."

"Yes."

"And it didn't even work. It was the chemo."

"It was the chemo."

"So I did that." His voice cracked. "Me and a lot of poison and a nurse who sang eighties songs. Not her."

"You did that."

He put the peas down.

"You've been paying for something I did myself," he said. "For seven years. And you didn't tell me because you thought I'd feel bad."

"You'd have felt bad."

"I feel bad now!" He shoved his chair back. "I feel terrible! You sat in my hospital room and made a deal with the devil..."

Keep reading free with an account. Start I Accidentally Seduced Hades from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.