Millhaven

She'd been on tour for three weeks before Millhaven.

Three weeks of hotel rooms that all looked the same and signing tables that all felt the same and interviewers who all asked the same three questions in slightly different orders. How does it feel to have survived. Did writing the book help you process what happened. What would you say to other survivors.

She had answers for all of them. She'd developed the answers over the course of the first week and refined them over the second and by the third week she could deliver them with the particular smoothness of something that had been said enough times to lose its edges. Not dishonest. Just worn in. The way anything gets worn in if you use it enough.

The book was called Survivors Guide. It had been her editor's title suggestion and she'd accepted it because she couldn't think of anything better and because it was accurate in a flat literal way that she found she didn't mind. It was a guide. She had survived. There it was.

It had been on the bestseller list for six weeks. Her editor had called her about this with a warmth and excitement that Indigo had tried to match and mostly managed. Her publicist — a woman named Claire who communicated primarily through very long emails and very short texts — had sent a bottle of something expensive to Indigo's apartment which Indigo had put in a cupboard and not opened.

She was glad the book existed. She was glad people were reading it. She was glad that the thing she'd spent two years writing in the early mornings before work and the late nights after it had turned into something real that sat on shelves and got reviewed and apparently helped people in ways that her editor forwarded to her occasionally in emails she read once and saved without responding to.

She was also very tired.

The drive into Millhaven happened on a Friday afternoon in late October and Indigo watched it arrive through the passenger window of Claire's rental car with the specific feeling of someone approaching something they'd agreed to in theory and were now having to deal with in practice.

She'd known Millhaven was on the tour schedule. She'd seen it in the itinerary three months ago — the town, the bookstore, the two night stay, the signing on Sunday morning. She'd looked at it for a long time and then looked at the next stop on the list and the one after that and told herself it was fine. It was seven miles from Vicrock. Seven miles was nothing. She'd been further from it than that for years and it hadn't mattered. Geography wasn't the thing.

She'd told herself that and she'd believed it approximately sixty percent of the time.

"You've gone quiet," Claire said from the driver's seat.

"I'm always quiet."

"You've gone quieter than your usual quiet."

"You sound like someone I used to know," Indigo said.

Claire looked at her briefly and then looked back at the road. Claire had the particular tact of someone who had worked in publishing for fifteen years and had learned that authors had complicated relationships with their own material and that the correct response to most things was to let it exist without commenting on it.

"The bookstore is called Page and Spine," Claire said. "The owner is a woman named Greta. She's been very excited about the signing. She did the window display herself apparently."

"Great," Indigo said.

"The hotel is the Millhaven Inn. It's small but the reviews are good."

"Great," Indigo said again.

She was looking at the road ahead. At the town beginning to appear around them — the particular geography of a small upstate New York town in late October, the trees along the main street still holding some of their colour, the shop fronts with their Halloween decorations, the particular stillness of a place that had a pace to it and wasn't going to change that pace for anyone.

She'd been here once before. Not inside the town — just through it, on the road, seven years ago in her mum's car going home from the hospital after Vicrock. She'd been in the back seat with a foil blanket still around her shoulders and she'd looked out the window at Millhaven going past and not registered any of it. Just another town. Just something outside a window she wasn't looking through.

She registered it now.

The hotel was on the main street. Small, clean, the kind of place that had been running for thirty years under the same family and had the specific character of somewhere that knew exactly what it was and had made peace with that. The woman at the front desk — whose name tag said PAT — gave Indigo a room key and a laminated card with the breakfast hours on it and said enjoy your stay with the genuine warmth of someone who meant it.

Indigo took the room key and the laminated card and said thank you.

Her room was on the second floor. Small, warm, a window that looked out over the main street. She stood at the window for a moment and looked at the street below — the shops, the pavement, the people going about their Friday afternoon — and breathed.

Fine. It was fine. It was a main street in a small town and it looked like every other main street in every other small town and there was nothing here that wasn't ordinary and she was fine.

She looked at the bookstore across the street. Page and Spine. The window display — she could see it from here, the pyramid of books, her own face on the cover repeated thirty-odd times in the glass. She looked at her own face looking back at her and felt the particular strangeness of being a public person, of having turned the thing that happened to her into something that sat in shop windows.

She turned away from the window.

She sat on the edge of the bed and took out her phone and called Maddie.

Maddie Greyball picked up on the third ring with the energy of someone who had been in the middle of something and had decided Indigo was worth interrupting it for.

"How's the tour," Maddie said.

"Fine."

"That's your fine that means not fine."

"It's my fine that means fine."

"Indigo."

"I'm in Millhaven," Indigo said.

A pause. Maddie knew about Millhaven. She knew about Vicrock. She knew most things about Indigo's history in the way of someone who had come into Indigo's life after all of it and had been told the story in pieces over the years, each piece landing differently depending on when and how it was told.

"How close is that to—"

"Seven miles," Indigo said.

"Right." Another pause. "Are you okay."

"Yes."

"Are you actually okay or are you—"

"I'm actually okay," Indigo said. "I'm just — I'm here and it's fine and I wanted to call someone."

"Okay," Maddie said. "I'm here."

"I know."

"Do you want to talk about it or do you want to talk about something else entirely."

"Something else entirely," Indigo said immediately.

So Maddie talked about something else entirely — a situation at her job that had been developing for two weeks and had reached a new level of absurdity that morning, the details of which she delivered with the particular narrative gift of someone who understood that a story well told was one of the best things one person could offer another. Indigo sat on the edge of the hotel bed and listened and felt the tension in her shoulders do something fractional but real.

She was still on the phone when her other phone — the one she used for tour business, a second phone that Claire had insisted on and Indigo had resisted and eventually accepted — buzzed on the bed beside her.

She looked at the screen. A number she didn't recognise. A Millhaven area code.

"I have to go," she told Maddie. "Call me later?"

"Always," Maddie said.

She switched calls.

"Ms Derby?" A voice she didn't know. Male, official, the particular cadence of someone delivering news in a professional capacity. "This is Officer Reeves with the Millhaven Police Department. I apologise for calling on a Friday evening. We got your number from your publicist."

Indigo stood up from the bed.

"What happened," she said.

The police station was four blocks from the hotel. She walked it in the early evening dark, hands in her jacket pockets, the main street of Millhaven doing its Friday evening thing around her — people going into the diner, a group of teenagers outside the pharmacy, the orange glow of the streetlamps coming on one by one as the light went.

She'd been told, on the phone, the basic facts. A teenage boy. A horror attraction on the edge of town. Missing initially and then not missing anymore in the way that missing sometimes resolved and not missing sometimes didn't.

She'd been told his name.

She'd been told he was seventeen.

She'd been told he had been identified as someone known to her.

She walked the four blocks to the police station and kept her breathing even and her face doing the thing she'd learned to make her face do over years of delivering and receiving terrible information. Not shut down — just managed. Present but not consumed.

She could fall apart later. She was very good at scheduling that.

Officer Reeves was in his forties, broad, with the particular quality of a small town cop who had been doing the job long enough to have seen most things and had stopped being surprised by most of them without becoming indifferent to any of them. He shook her hand when she came in and directed her to a chair across from his desk and sat down across from her with a folder that he didn't open immediately.

"Thank you for coming in," he said.

"You said you found Matthew," Indigo said.

Officer Reeves looked at her. "Yes."

"Where."

He told her. The parking lot at the side of the Fright Fest warehouse. The emergency exit. What had been found.

He didn't go into detail about what had been found. She didn't ask him to. She'd been through enough of these conversations from enough directions to know when detail was being withheld and when the withholding was an act of consideration rather than obstruction.

She sat and listened and kept her hands still in her lap.

"His girlfriend found his phone," Officer Reeves said. "She's the one who called it in. She's—" He paused. "She's been here for the last couple of hours. We've been trying to reach her parents."

"Her name," Indigo said.

"Hannah Forzone."

Indigo looked at him. "Daphne's daughter."

Officer Reeves looked back at her. "You know the Forzones."

"She's my aunt," Indigo said. "Daphne is. I haven't—" She stopped. "I haven't seen them in a long time. Is Hannah—"

"She's okay," he said. "Shaken. She's in the family room down the hall."

Indigo sat with that for a moment. Hannah Forzone. Daphne's daughter. Her cousin who she had not seen since Hannah was approximately eight years old at a family occasion she could only partially remember. Her cousin who had just watched her boyfriend go into a horror maze and not come out.

"Can I see her," Indigo said.

The family room was small and painted in the particular shade of inoffensive beige that family rooms in police stations were always painted in. There was a sofa and two chairs and a table with a box of tissues on it and a window with blinds half closed against the dark outside.

Hannah Forzone was sitting on the sofa with her knees pulled up and her arms around them and her chin resting on top of them in the way of someone who had arranged themselves into the smallest possible shape and was staying there. She was wearing a dark green jacket with the sleeves pushed up. She was sixteen and she looked it — not in a childish way but in the specific way of someone who was exactly the age they were, no older, no younger, every year of it visible in the particular unfinished quality of her face.

She looked up when Indigo came in.

Indigo looked back at her.

She'd expected — she wasn't sure what she'd expected. A stranger, mostly. Someone she shared blood with but not history, not experience, not anything that would make this easier or harder than it would be with anyone else.

What she hadn't expected was the specific quality of Hannah's eyes. The way they moved across Indigo's face with the focused attention of someone taking inventory. Not the glazed shock of someone still processing what had happened. Something more alert than that. Something that reminded Indigo, uncomfortably and immediately, of Anastasia sitting at a kitchen table in Bushwick with two cups of coffee already poured.

The cataloguing thing. The thing that meant someone was paying attention when everyone else had given themselves permission not to.

"You're Indigo," Hannah said.

"Yeah," Indigo said. "I'm Indigo."

Hannah looked at her for a long moment.

"Mum talks about you sometimes," she said. "She says you never visit."

"I know," Indigo said. "I'm sorry."

Hannah looked at the window. The half-closed blinds. The dark outside them.

"He went in because I told him to," she said. "Matthew. I told him to go in and he went in and—" She stopped. The sentence didn't finish. She seemed to decide that was okay.

Indigo sat down in the chair across from her.

"I know," she said quietly.

"You don't know," Hannah said. Not aggressive. Just correcting.

"No," Indigo said. "You're right. I don't."

Hannah looked at her again. Something shifted slightly in her face — the particular micro-adjustment of someone who had expected to be argued with and hadn't been.

They sat in the beige family room in the Millhaven police station and the box of tissues sat on the table between them and neither of them touched it and outside the blinds Millhaven went on being Millhaven on a Friday night.

"They won't tell me what they found," Hannah said eventually. "The police. They keep saying it's an active investigation and they'll have more information soon and—" She stopped again. "He's dead isn't he."

Indigo looked at her.

"Yes," she said. Because Hannah wasn't asking a question. She was asking for confirmation of something she already knew and the least Indigo could do was give it to her straight.

Hannah nodded. Small and precise. She looked at her own hands on her knees.

"Okay," she said. Very quietly. "Okay."

They sat there.

Daphne Forzone arrived at the police station at eight forty seven pm.

Indigo heard her before she saw her — the sound of someone moving through the building with the particular energy of a parent who has been told their child is at a police station and has covered the distance between wherever they were and here as fast as physically possible.

The family room door opened.

Daphne Forzone was fifty one and looked like someone who had been fifty one for about twenty minutes and was still adjusting to it. She had Hannah's eyes — or Hannah had hers — the same focused quality, the same inventory-taking attention. She was still in her work clothes, a jacket over a blouse, the particular disarray of someone who had left somewhere in a hurry and hadn't had time to think about what they were wearing.

She looked at Hannah first. Hannah stood up and Daphne crossed the room and put her arms around her and Hannah let her and for a moment the room was just that — a mother and a daughter in a beige family room, the particular relief and grief of finding someone you love where you'd been told they'd be.

Then Daphne looked over Hannah's shoulder and saw Indigo.

She went very still.

"Indigo," she said.

"Hi Aunt Daphne," Indigo said.

Daphne looked at her for a long moment. The particular look of someone doing rapid calculations — surprise, recognition, the processing of what it meant that Indigo Derby was in this specific room in this specific town on this specific night.

"The book tour," she said.

"Yes."

"You're here for the book tour."

"Yes."

Daphne held Hannah tighter for a moment. She looked at Indigo over her daughter's shoulder with an expression Indigo recognised and had been receiving versions of for seven years — the particular combination of sympathy and wariness of someone who understood that being near Indigo Derby sometimes had a cost.

She didn't say that. She was too controlled for that and it wouldn't have been fair and she probably knew both of those things.

"Tom's parking the car," she said instead. "He'll be in in a minute."

"Okay," Indigo said.

They looked at each other across the room.

"It's good to see you," Daphne said. And then, because she was Daphne and because she meant it: "Even like this."

"Yeah," Indigo said. "You too."

Tom Forzone came in two minutes later, slightly out of breath, and did the same thing Daphne had done — saw Hannah, went to her, held on. Then looked up and saw Indigo and did a version of the same calculation his wife had done, arriving at a similar conclusion with slightly less control over his expression.

"Hell of a time to visit," he said.

"Tom," Daphne said.

"I'm just saying."

"I know what you're saying."

"It's fine," Indigo said. "He's not wrong."

Tom looked at her. He was a big man, broad, with the particular solidity of someone who had spent his life doing physical work and had the build to show for it. He had a kind face underneath the shock and the worry. She'd forgotten that about him. She'd forgotten most things about the Forzones except the outlines.

"You staying in town?" he said.

"Through Sunday," she said. "The hotel on the main street."

He nodded. He looked at Hannah. He looked at Indigo again.

"Come to dinner tomorrow," he said. "If you want. Daphne makes—"

"Tom," Daphne said again, more gently this time.

"I'm just saying she should come to dinner. She's family." He looked at Indigo. "You're family. Come to dinner."

Indigo looked at him. At this man she barely knew who was standing in a police station family room on a Friday night having just been told his daughter's boyfriend was dead and was inviting her to dinner because she was family and that was what you did with family.

"Okay," she said. "Thank you."

She walked back to the hotel at ten o'clock.

The main street was quieter now, the Friday evening crowd thinning out, the shops mostly closed, the diner still lit and busy behind its windows. She walked with her hands in her pockets and her eyes doing what they always did — moving, checking, the low level monitoring that never fully switched off.

She stopped outside Page and Spine.

The window display. The pyramid of books. Her face on the cover thirty-something times. She looked at it in the way she'd looked at it from the hotel window earlier, with the particular strangeness of public personhood.

Then she saw the envelope.

Taped to the inside of the glass. She hadn't been able to see the detail of it from the hotel window — just the shape of it. Up close it was unmistakeable. Plain white envelope. Taped carefully, deliberately, at eye height in the centre of the window.

Dark at the edges. Darker in the middle. The particular dark of something wet that had dried.

She stood on the pavement outside Page and Spine at ten o'clock on a Friday night in Millhaven and looked at the envelope taped to the inside of the bookstore window and felt the thing she'd been keeping at a manageable distance since she'd seen the Millhaven stop on the tour schedule three months ago arrive properly.

Not fear. She knew what fear felt like and this wasn't quite it. This was something colder and more specific. The particular feeling of recognition. Of knowing.

She took her phone out and found the number in her contacts. The one she'd kept for seven years under the name don't let it be him.

She pressed call.

He answered on the second ring.

"It's me," she said. "I'm in Millhaven. I need you to listen to me."

A pause.

"Ms Derby," the detective said carefully. "Are you safe."

She looked at the window. At the envelope. At her own face looking back at her from thirty-two copies of a book she'd written about surviving something that apparently wasn't finished with her yet.

"No," she said.

She hadn't been safe for a very long time.

She didn't sleep that night.

She lay in the hotel bed and looked at the ceiling and listened to Millhaven settle into its late night quiet outside the window and thought about Matthew Grader who was seventeen and had gone into a horror maze because his girlfriend told him to and hadn't come out.

She thought about Hannah's face in the family room. The inventory-taking eyes. The okay she'd said when Indigo confirmed what she already knew — small and precise and completely controlled in the way of someone who had decided that falling apart was going to have to wait.

She thought about the envelope on the bookstore window.

She thought about the detective, who had listened to everything she'd said and had been quiet for a long time afterward and had then said I need you to come in tomorrow morning and she had said I will and they had both understood what wasn't being said which was that this was no longer a conversation about whether Jacob Cain was alive.

It was a conversation about what came next.

She stared at the ceiling.

She thought about the book. Survivors Guide. Thirty two copies in the window of a shop on the main street of a town seven miles from Vicrock. She thought about writing it — the two years of early mornings and late nights, the particular discipline of turning something that had happened to her body and her mind into something that could exist on a page. The way some chapters had come easily and some hadn't come at all and the way the last chapter — the epilogue, the morning in her mum's kitchen, the radio on low — had taken six weeks to write and fifteen minutes to read.

She thought about what it meant that he'd read it.

Because he had. She knew that with the same certainty she knew the envelope on the window was real. He had been somewhere for seven years — healing, waiting, doing whatever Jacob Cain did in the spaces between — and he had read her book. Every word she'd written about him. Every chapter she'd built on the assumption of his death.

She thought about that.

She thought about what it cost to write a book about surviving someone and then have that someone tape an envelope to your bookstore window.

Outside the window Millhaven was quiet. Just the occasional car, the distant sound of something, the ordinary sounds of a small town at one in the morning going about the business of being asleep.

She breathed.

In. Out.

She didn't sleep. But she breathed, and she thought, and by the time the sky outside the window began to go from black to grey she had arrived at something that wasn't a plan exactly but was the shape of one.

She was in Millhaven. He was in Millhaven. Hannah Forzone was in Millhaven with her parents and her guilt and the inventory-taking eyes that reminded Indigo of someone she missed every day.

Something was going to happen here.

She couldn't stop that. She'd stopped being able to stop things from happening a long time ago.

What she could do — what she'd always been able to do, what Vicrock and New York and the burning forest had taught her in the most direct and costly way possible — was decide what she did when it happened.

She watched the sky get lighter outside the window.

She got up.

She made coffee from the small machine on the desk and she stood at the window with the cup in her hands and she looked at the main street of Millhaven coming slowly to life in the early morning grey.

The bookstore across the street. The window. The pyramid of books, her face repeated, the envelope that the police had come and taken last night with gloved hands and careful expressions.

She looked at the street. At the ordinary Saturday morning beginning to happen in it. Dog walkers. A delivery van. The diner opening its door and the smell of something warm coming out of it that she could almost catch through the hotel window.

She thought about Matthew Grader who was seventeen and hadn't deserved any of it.

She thought about Hannah who was sixteen and was going to have to carry the weight of that dare for the rest of her life.

She thought about Jacob Cain somewhere in this town. In these streets. Moving through them the way he moved through everywhere — with the patience of something that had decided the outcome already and was just waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.

She drank her coffee.

She got dressed.

She went out to meet whatever was coming.