Chapter 20: Silver Lake

We came to Silver Lake at dusk, and the first thing I smelled was smoke.

Cormac drove.

Bram sat in the back beside me, and neither of them had spoken in an hour.

The road ended at a gravel lot above the shore.

I got out and looked at the water for the first time in eight years.

It was flat and gray and the color of pewter.

The old dock reached out into it on rotten pilings, and at the end of the dock a small fire was burning.

Someone was standing beside it.

She was small, with pale hair, wearing my gray cardigan.

She was feeding the fire from a stack of leather books.

"She's burning the albums," Cormac said, very low.

"Wait," Bram said.

"She's burning them on the dock."

"Wait. Let her talk."

We went down the shore path in the dusk with the gravel loud under our boots.

The boards groaned when we stepped onto the dock.

Felicity didn't turn around.

"I knew you'd come," she said.

Her voice was soft and tired, the voice everyone knew.

"I knew you'd find the albums gone and figure it out.

I just wanted a little time with him first."

"Felicity," Cormac said.

"I miss him so much, Cormac."

She lifted a photograph out of the stack.

Her thumb stroked it.

"You never knew how much. You never asked."

"Put it down."

"You never wanted to know what I lost, either. Only what you did."

"Felicity."

She dropped the photograph into the fire.

It curled, and I saw a flash of two faces in it, a sandy-haired boy laughing with his arm around a pale girl.

Cormac saw it too.

He crossed the planks in a rush and plunged his hand into the coals.

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