“I want to kiss you, too,” I say so quietly the sound of the rain sweeps it away. I close my eyes and lie there as the rain seeps down on us and dots my clothes and hair. Any craziness in me stills.

We remain that way until it stops raining outside, until the sun goes completely down, then he takes a deep breath and rolls to his side, lying next to me again. It’s dark, except for the fading fire. Night surrounds us and my insomnia wants to surrender. I try to let it, but even next to Ryland I can’t get my mind to a state where it’s okay to go to sleep. So we end up lying there for the entire night, underneath my blanket, not touching.

If I was smart, I’d let things stay that way forever. I’d never move until time really did standstill. But I can’t do it. When the sun comes up, I know it’s time to go home. Something’s telling me to go back there—to get some answers. To face what I ran from. Plus, there’s also a voice inside my head saying I can’t stay here forever, that I need to let it go—let Ryland go. I think it might be Lily, but it’s so faded that it’s hard to tell for sure.

“I have to go,” I finally say with a sigh as the sun shines down on us through the window. The rain has saturated the wood floor and my clothes. I’m dirty and smelly but I’ve never been so content in my own body.

Ryland doesn’t argue, getting to his feet with me and brushing the dirt from his damp jeans. He walks me to the door without saying a word, but as I’m getting ready to duck out he whispers, “I don’t think you should come here anymore.”

I turn to face him, hitching my thumb under the handle of my bag and hugging my blanket to my chest. “Why not?”

He swipes his fingers through his hair, slicking his hair back out of his eyes. “Because… I…” He lets out a frustrated sigh. “Because I just don’t think it’s healthy for you to come up here anymore—I’m not healthy for you.”

I get that Ryland must have his own problems, otherwise he wouldn’t be living up here, secluded from society, but I still need him. “But I don’t want to stop,” I say, wringing out my wet hair. “I like it up here with you, good for me or not.”

“If you want to keep coming up here, then you can,” he says miserably. “But I just don’t think it’s good.”

I explore his eyes for signs he’s gotten sick of me, but all I see is the comfort and tranquility. “What do you want me to do?”

He gives me a torn look. “You know it’s not about what I want. It’s about what you want.”

“I’ll see you in a few days,” I tell him, stepping out of the cabin and into the dewy grass.

The sadness in his eyes deepens as he watches me walk away. “If that’s what you want.”

“That’s what I want,” I say then hurry away through the grass, feeling my peace slip away with every step I take.

Chapter 25

Maddie

My mom about loses it when I get home, especially when I won’t tell her where I was. I let her get her anger out and when she tells me to go to my room, I confront her about what the detective said about me being drugged that night.

“I have no idea why he’d say that,” she says in shock with her hand pressed to her heart. We’re in the living room, the alarm light blinking red, telling me it’s set and I’m trapped once again. “I would never, ever just let someone hurt you and get away with it. I already told you that I want to protect you.”

“So you didn’t know I was drugged?” I ask, letting my backpack fall to floor as I drop down into a chair, tired to the point that I might collapse. “And you’ve been trying to track down the person that hit me, right?”

She doesn’t miss a beat. “Of course. I’m your mother. I want that man caught as much as anyone else.”

“Who said it was a man?” I dig my fingers into the armrest until my knuckles turn white. “I never said anything about a man and from what I understand, the driver was gone before anyone showed up.” I pause. “But I think what I really want to know is why I was out in the road to begin with. What was I running away from, mother? A hospital maybe?” She has to know that I know since she had to have seen the article on my computer that day.

Her eyes narrow as she lowers herself into the chair across from me and folds her arms. “Why would I ever put you in a hospital? You were in the hospital afterward but that’s it.”

“Then why was I out in the middle of nowhere?”

She shrugs, rolling her tongue in her mouth and examining her nails. I can nearly envision lunging out of my chair and tackling her to the ground, wrapping my fingers around her neck, making her tell me her secrets. “That’s what no one really knows.”

“Except me,” I say. “If I could remember.”

“Well, you can’t. Trust me. Preston’s tried a lot and you know as well as anyone that you can’t,” she says, then glances over my muddy, filthy clothes and hair. “Now go change. You look like you crawled out of a dumpster. And tomorrow you’re going to see Preston. It’s been too long and I’m not going to let you skip anymore appointments—I’m not going to let you regress back to the girl who woke up confused in the hospital.”

“I don’t want to see him anymore.”

“Well, you are.”

“I’m an adult, mother. I can make my own choices.”

“No you can’t.” She rises to her feet and adjusts her floral dress. “Trust me, you cannot make your own choices—you never have been able to. And when you try, you end up in the middle of the road, half dead.” It’s the last thing she says before she walks out of the room.

You need to get some answers, Lily whispers. Stop being such a pushover and make her tell you. Or let me do it. Just make her tell you. Think about the girl in the cabin and how you made her bleed. Either be that girl or be me.

Aren’t we sort of the same?

Not at this moment.

I start to picture ways to make this possible. Tie my mother up. Handcuff her and torture her. And just like that, the craziness is back. And the peace I found with Ryland is gone.

* * *

Late that night, the screaming in my head starts up again. It’s more powerful and deafening than it ever has been. After lying in bed for what seems like forever, staring at my ceiling, I make a choice, on my own. I tear off all the buttons on my clothes. Every single one, then I put them in a box. When I’m done, I have my very own button collection again. And even though it’s not quite the same, it still helps me calm down and silence the screaming, something it’s done in the past when I was locked up. I try to put some of the stuff I’ve figured out together as I run my fingers through them, scooping up handfuls and letting them go. I was locked up once, not counting in the hospital, if that theory is true. Once with a boy who I’m guessing is Evan and a girl, that’s either my Lily or my sister. Evan and I counted buttons to distract ourselves, hence the button collection now and the calming effect it has over me. But in the memories, the buttons came from something dark and morbid. And the fire I keep seeing… that had to be the fire the detective was talking about. The real question is, if I have been locked up, once, twice, however many times, why is my mother refusing to tell me? Does she really think that ignoring the problem will allow me to forget? Does she really think it’ll help me never remember the horrible memories I can feel about to come forward?

“Is that why I created you?” I wonder. “To help me deal with whatever happened to me? Is that when you surfaced?”

“Who said you created me?” Lily replies.

I sigh, scooping up handful of buttons. “Who else could?”

“Life. Your environment. Things done to you. Lily.”

I freeze. “My sister? Do you remember her?”

“No, but you seem to.”

I drop the buttons in the box. “I think I was locked up once because I was crazy, but that was when I was older… the younger memories, the ones with the girl and the boy…. I’m not sure what was going on there… And who the man was, the one I’m so afraid of in the memories? The one that calls me a whore. The one that was in my house… the one I hallucinate sometimes…”

“For each person I kill,” he says as he cuts a button off the blouse. “I keep one of these. It helps me keep track.”

I feel like I’m dying in the corner, hugging myself so tightly I swear I’m going to crush my own bones. “Why do you do it?” I whisper in horror, pretending like there isn’t blood all around me, death, pain. That I didn’t see the worst side of life moments ago.

He tosses the knife aside and it lands beside my feet. Then he holds up the button between his fingers, examining it in the light, his dark eyes filling with elation. “Because these people are wicked, Maddie. Bad. Just like you.”

“Yes, she is,” a woman whispers from somewhere. “And it’s time to make her pay too.”

I jolt from the memory and fall out of the bed, landing on my back. It knocks the wind out of me, but the pain is small in comparison to the pain I felt in the memory. I was locked up once, by a killer, someone who killed bad people and who thought I was bad too. And there was a woman there… her voice… I’ve heard it before.

I’m trying to push my brain further, to put the pieces together when I see a face appear in my window and the sound of something scratching on the glass.

“Shit.” I jump but then hesitate, wondering if it was the man who broke in that night, who knows about Lily, who maybe had once locked me up and killed people in front of me. Perhaps he tried to kill me once, too and now he’s doing it again. Maybe that’s what I was running away from that night.