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Ellie’s one-hundred-and-two when Phillip bothers her for the last time. This isn’t that story; this story is from a couple of years before that. This is a story of Ellie fucking up.
Phillip motherfucking Wittebane—killer of her brother-in-law who also has a decent argument as the killer of her big sister—is standing at her fucking door. Looking like a sad, wet cat with a bleeding, fucked-up nose. Somehow, more fucked up than before.
She doesn’t know who managed to punch him in the face back in the day—might have been Ari, she’s sure it’d go one of two ways if it’d been Arianna: either she’d be yelling it from table- and rooftops or she wouldn’t tell a soul, all depending on how it went down—but she can tell that they have a killer right hook. She hopes it was Arianna. She knows that Arianna’s good at punching.
Now, she doesn’t know who decided to continue her work.
(She hopes that Phillip’s been a trip to the afterlife and just barely managed to claw his way out to repent.)
Not just that, he’d fucking knocked.
The little shit had the balls to knock.
And then, when he notices that she’s looking at his nose, he has the balls to say: “It’s an old injury that’s made worse.”
“The fuck you want, Phillip?” she snarls, hoping that she’ll give off the general aura of: what I mean is that if you don’t leave me to die in peace, so help me Titan, I will make this day your motherfucking last. She doesn’t mention anything about her son. They don’t need to bring up Dell. She’s sure that Phillip knows, if he touches Dell, she’s going to kill him. Simple as that.
She doesn’t care whether she’s outmatched, she’s going to fucking kill him. She’s a Clawthorne. Even though she’s never been known for the same rage that consumed her sister, she’s still a Clawthorne. And she’s felt it, too. She’s felt the capillaries in her eyes bursting as she stabbed her fork into tender meat, as she thought about what she’d do if she got to be alone in a room with Phillip Wittebane and she had the kind of power that Arianna threw away.
She doesn’t care that she’s aging, she doesn’t care that she’s never held power like that—she’ll find a way. She’s nothing if not persistent. She’s nothing if not a hopeless, relentless optimist and hey, at least she’d be able to know that she’s done right by her sister. It’s a foolish thought. She knows she could never finish what Phillip started all those years ago, not if Arianna couldn’t.
Phillip’s eyes are bloodshot and wide as he speaks, and she notices that his pupils are shot to fuck. If he wasn’t Phillip, she’d assume that he was high off his ass or had depleted a tavern of their wine stores before finding the courage to face her. But he’s Phillip, and she doesn’t believe that he’s changed that much in the past five years—so, she’s left at a startling possibility.
Someone had the balls to poison Phillip (and probably beat his ass, too, unless he’d just eaten shit on soe stairs), and she’s sure that it wasn’t Arianna because her sister has been dead for five years. Something that sounds like a bone cracking goes off in the back of her mind, ricocheting dangerously close to bruising happy memories.
“I didn’t know that you lived here,” Phillip confesses, and she bites back her urge to scoff because he sounds genuinely lost—even though she’s sure that he knows exactly where she lives. She’s lived here for fifty years, and she intends to die here. “I was looking for aid, I will—”
He’s turning on his heel, swaying a little.
“Phillip,” she sighs, “No one in this fucking town is going to help you except me and that’s just because I’m a fucking idiot. So,” she breathes out, wondering whether her sister’s screaming at her from the great perhaps, “Get your fucking ass inside before I grow a brain or a backbone.”
And she even gestures to the door, and then to the hallway that she’s blocking with her body.
Truth be told, she’s not sure why she’s doing it—maybe it’s nostalgia, maybe it’s the knowledge that she can’t change the course of history anyways, maybe it’s because she knows that she’s not long for this world and she’s just fucking bored, maybe she wants to try and poison Phillip properly, maybe she’s going to try and do the impossible, maybe she’s trying to atone for something she’s not quite sure what is, maybe she’s possessed by Caleb, maybe she’s possessed by Arianna, maybe she’s doing what she’s always tried to do and turning the other cheek even though she knows she’s going to get slapped.
Maybe it’s all of it, all at once. Maybe she’s just a big stupid sentimental fucking idiot and she can’t slam her door on Phillip looking like a drowned rat because she remembers that he used to be twenty and confused at why someone would want to kiss another. Maybe it’s because they were kids together.
Phillip, for everything he is, knows not to look a gift-goat in the mouth for too long, or it’ll grow fangs the size of dinner plates and snack on your bone marrow. Or at least that’s what Arianna had said she was sixteen, but Ellie’s pretty sure that Arianna just desperately wanted her to leave the neighbour’s mountain moose-goats alone.
Phillip’s barely able to walk to her living room, so after a moment of internally screaming at herself, she loops one arm around his waist, throws the other around his shoulder as she forces his slack one to mirror her. “I’ve got you,” she tries to soothe as he stiffens, because as she’s already established, she’s the stupid one. Phillip’s a little shorter than her, but she’s kept herself extraordinarily fit, so she compensates and makes quick work of walking them to the couch that she unceremoniously drops Phillip against.
“You’re as graceful as your sister,” Phillip complains.
“My sister wouldn’t have opened the door,” Ellie answers.
“I don’t think you knew your sister as well as you’d have liked, then.”
Ellie doesn’t say anything to that, because she’s pretty sure that if she did, she’d punch Phillip in the face. And someone’s already beaten her to it. She promised Henry that she’d do her best to be better than her sister, and she knew he meant it with all of the love in his heart (more than Arianna and Ellie could ever boast of combined), he’d said it with affection but also the desperate plea for her to not punch people over nothing, or when they were already down.
She takes a deep breath.
“Do you know what poisoned you?” she questions.
“It’s not poison,” Phillip admits, and she quirks her brow, tilting her head as she regards him and takes note of just how flushed he is. It looks like he’s sweated through multiple layers of clothes by now, and she thinks it funny that he’s trying to lie to her after all these years. She’d thought they’d always agreed that they’d be honest with one another. So, she reminds him of this.
He screws up his face like he did when he was a boy and her or Arianna tricked him into eating something sour. She wonders if he’s doing it on purpose, to shore up what remains of her sympathy.
He pinches the bridge of his nose, gasps a little, like she’s twisting a knife.
She stands still, crosses her arms. She might be old, but she’s not helpless nor is she crippled by her age. If it comes down to a fight, she’s just got to kick the glyphs out of his hands. She’s sure he’s still an idiot who carries them in a little satchel on his hip, and the only reason that she can’t locate it is because of the heavy cloak he’s draped over his already excessive overcoat. It’s the start of spring. He’s not convincing her that he’s not poisoned and feverish.
“It’s a curse,” he finally confesses, looking pained, “It’s not poison, infection or injury. That’s why I didn’t want to seek you out. I promise,” he pants, “I didn’t know you lived here.”
“You did,” Ellie reprimands, “But I’ll believe that you might not have thought about it because you look like shit. You’re implying that you’d be more open to it being me if it was an injury? Why’s that?”
He doesn’t look like he wants to answer her.
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re trying to accomplish by travelling across the Isles,” Ellie threatens, “But I could, without a doubt, stop you from continuing it. Whether with a kitchen cleaver or simply bad word of mouth resulting in you being unable to find even a crappy inn to take you.”
She narrows her gaze, takes a wild fucking guess.
“Is it because you believe me the kind of incompetent and foolish whose husband dies of a preventable cause and you don’t want to be another notch on my bedpost—”
“No,” Phillip grits out, “You weren’t at fault for what happened to Ezra. I know that. It’s…”
He sighs.
“Your sister told me that she would never forgive me if I hurt you while under…”
Ellie takes a step back, and really takes Phillip in. He’s sprawled exactly where she dropped him, like he doesn’t have the strength to waste it on moving. He looks like his brother did, after surviving Phillip’s first murder attempt. She doesn’t say any of this. It’s not that she’s not furious. It’s that it was years ago, and Phillip’s fucking pathetic.
Throughout the years, it’s not that she’s been desperately looking for a moment where it’s obvious that Phillip regrets it: but she knows him. She’s known him for many years. She knows what she’s seen.
“The influence of the curse,” she finishes for him, remembering that a lifetime ago, Arianna had been clawed in the face by Phillip in something else’s body, and had forbidden her from leaving flowers at his bedside out of fear for what he would do to her that she couldn’t counter.
At the time, Arianna had still been indomitable. And it’d been terrifying to think of her as anything but. At the time, Ellie had still been concerned about Phillip. Maybe she still is. Maybe it’s all old emotions. There’s a lot of maybe. And it’s still terrifying to think of Arianna as anything but undefeated, even though she’s dead.
There’s a lot of maybes.
Maybe it’s because her sister’s been dead for four years and no one knew her like Ellie and Phillip did. Maybe it’s because Phillip knew sides of her that Ellie never did.
Too many fucking maybes.
Ellie leans back against her heels.
“Well,” she decides, thinking about the fact that she’d heard nothing of a curse that’s apparently strong enough to slap Phillip on his ass even after all these years, “I guess that’s one promise you did keep, hm?”
They sit in silence for a couple of minutes, Phillip making space for Ellie on the couch without her ever having to ask.
“Do you remember anything about Arianna and Caleb’s wedding?” he asks.
“I remember more than you do.”
He pinches the bridge of his nose. It looks like it hurts. And not just because it’s fucked up. Because he’s fucked up. He’s done it twice now, and the only person who did it that much before was Arianna. She wonders if he picked it up from her. She wonders if she’s supposed to be pissed off about that, if he did.
“I remember the broad strokes.”
“Did the wine taste like shit?”
“It did.”
Phillip curls onto his side.
“Is there anything that I can do for you or are we just going to pretend to get along for as long as it takes for it to pass?”
“If you don’t mind,” he grits out, and she notices how shivers are running through his whole body, and how he’s skinnier than she remembers when she rests her hand against his side (because she doesn’t entirely trust that he’s not poisoned or stabbed and trying to cover that up because of some bullshit pride that’ll kill him), and then his forehead (to check for fever), “That’s exactly what would help. I just needed to get out of the rain and the range of bandits.”
“Are they really bandits or just people who are tired of your dumbass preaching?”
“Elizabat, plea—”
“Don’t fucking call me that. You know I never used that name. If you want anything at all from me, let alone mercy, you’re not going to use that fucking name. Use the one I chose.”
“Ellie, please.”
“Fine.”
“Okay.”
And so, she sits. Her sister’s dead and her husband’s dead for longer, and her son’s moved out. It’s just her and Phillip. It’s not that she doesn’t have friends or admirers, she founded a whole new system to protect people from broken homes. There’s a lot of people who’d show up at her place with a pie if they thought she was unwell, and she knows that her funeral will be well-attended, but she’s the kind of icy where everyone knows that they’re not welcome to drop by for a social visit unless invited.
And she knows that only three people at her funeral will actually be able to claim that they knew her as a person and not just the kind of concept that’s tossed into history books to make it seem like goodness can spring for bad.
She’s not interested in cultivating new relationships. She’s got enough for one lifetime. She’s got her son, his beautiful wife, his wonderful kids, she’s got tending to her sister and brother-in-law’s grave, she’s got leaving flowers at her husband’s and making sure that the graveyard knows that despite adoring him, she doesn’t want to be buried next to him. She’s got to leave time for putting her blood to work, too.
So, she just breathes out and sits. Looks at the wall, sometimes at Phillip, notices how he’s panting, rests her hand against his forehead sometimes, marvels at the fact that he’s letting her do all of this, even though it’s practically nothing. But he’d always been like Arianna in that way.
“Do you think that you could eat something if I bothered to cook it?”
And Phillip laughs, like it’s an old joke.
“I’ve waited eighty years to hear that. Yes, please. Arianna’s cooking is downright caustic. I miss actual good Clawthorne food.” And she hates him for talking like they’re friends, but she still pushes her ass off the couch with not even an exaggerated grunt, because she’s like her sister in that way: she likes having something to do instead of just sitting around and thinking.
She rests her hand against her hip. “Okay, asshole,” she says, “But if you touch a single thing here, or do a single thing that’s going to piss me off or—”
“You’ll prove whose little sister you are?”
She winks. And she hates herself for it.
Phillip stays blissfully silent when she makes soup. He doesn’t even sound like he’s suffering. It makes her wonder whether he’d been putting on a show on purpose and is now ransacking her house. She walks back into the living room and sees him, still on the couch, still exactly how she left him, his legs curled up to make a space for her, with his arm thrown over his eyes.
“I can blow out the candles if you’d like me to?” she asks, and when he doesn’t say anything, she doesn’t do anything, either. He doesn’t deserve her needlessly doting on him. She ignores that she’s making him the same soup her mother had made them when someone was sick, one of the vanishingly few kind memories of her or that house.
Then, when she’s almost done, he speaks.
“Arianna’s really dead, huh?” Phillip sounds uncharacteristically small, like he doesn’t believe what he’s saying. Like it’s not as obvious as the hole in the ground that she put her sister in. But she supposes, when she lifts the veil of red that clouds her vision when she turns to regard Phillip, that Arianna had always kind of seemed like she’d just continue flipping off mortality.
But Ellie also knows that had you asked Arianna, she’d have said that she’d been dead since she was twenty-eight. Arianna didn’t want to have to survive everything that she survived. Ellie, even though it’s hard to level the complicated legacy that her sister sacked her with, likes to think that she genuinely wanted to be good. And that at not one solid point, but multiple smaller specks of time—she was.
She didn’t want to be bad or end up unwell—she just, to steal the words of Caleb and Phillip’s world, she walked the border between Heaven and Hell. And somewhere along that line, she stumbled and fell.
Arianna was there for her when she lost Ezra. Held her, cooked when she couldn’t get herself out of bed, hummed as she did so, Dell never, ever saw the side of Arianna that made her feared. If he knew anything of her bad, it was the fact that he always pictured her at a door with a suitcase in her hand. She took care of Dell even though his grandmother wouldn’t shut up about Arianna coddling her, and she taught Ellie that she should never be afraid to say shit with her chest.
And sure, the leaving wasn’t great—of course, it wasn’t! Especially not when Ellie’s sitting on the edge of the bed in the middle of the night, her head in her hands and remembering that Dell had been her sister’s and he looks more like her every day. And Caleb.
Oh, sweet, gentle, poor Caleb. It’s a wound when she sees Dell hoisting his sons onto his arms with an easy smile, but it’s a wound she welcomes.
(Dell hadn’t been Ezra’s, and after his death: it became obvious. Even in his mannerisms, he was Arianna and Caleb’s. Her sister had sacked her with a brood parasite and Ellie couldn’t ever find the right words to thank her for it, to apologise for taking motherhood from Arianna—even though Arianna would have sworn up and down that she didn’t want it. Arianna was always such a fucking liar.)
Caleb would have been happy if he could see it. Caleb might even have been able to convince Arianna to stop grumbling about her hatred for Phillip for exactly long enough to realise that she’d actually done something pretty worthwhile with her life just by being in it.
Arianna always had this belief that she wasn’t good for anything other than dominating. Steamrolling whatever needed steamrolling, overpowering whatever needed overpowering. Ellie doesn’t think that she ever really knew what it meant to be content with just existing and it’s one of her greatest regrets—that she couldn’t have shown her, that is.
Her sister hadn’t just been a widow with a chip on her shoulder, but she wasn’t a misunderstood, tragic heroine who didn’t have any hand in her own undoing, either. Arianna’s the kind of person that is just generally very hard to fit into the black and white of good and bad.
“Yep,” Ellie finally says, “Arianna is really, properly dead this time and it doesn’t feel real even to me. And I watched her die.”
And because she’s Arianna’s little sister, she can’t help but be cruel about it. So, she narrows her eyes and speaks low, soft and slow. “That makes two of us. Both of us watched our sibling die. And I’m afraid that I played a part in hers, too.”
“You—”
“Don’t pretend you don’t know how my sister finally bit it,” she snarls, “I saw you snooping around. It’s not a lie that she died of infection. She stepped in front of the wrong thing, and she reaped the consequences.”
Arianna wouldn’t be capable of this, she thinks, as she ladles soup into a bowl in front of Phillip. Arianna and Phillip would have been skittering around on the floor, slamming random household objects into random parts of each other’s bodies within five minutes. But Arianna had confessed to her, once, in the middle of the night as they lay in bed together, that she’d had multiple chances to kill Phillip and had found herself unable.
“Arianna… Arianna laid on her back and talked about the stars after Caleb almost got eaten by that slitherbeast. She told me that she did it just to try and make me feel better—”
“Yeah,” Ellie interrupts, laughing a little, “I know you’re looking for me to agree with you that she didn’t do it to make you feel better, but shit, man, she probably did. She used to do the exact same thing with me and Henry when our parents were especially nasty. I think she picked it up from Henry, actually.”
The memories used to hurt. Now, they ache—and she likes it, because the ache reminds her that it happened; that her siblings both lived and that they both lived lives worthy of remembrance. She continues, uncaring of whether Phillip deserves to be the one to carry the burden of memory with her because the words spill from her lips like a river that’s finally broken through a dam, “She’d make up all sorts of wild shit, I’m sure she never actually knew that much about the stars but…”
Ellie can, if she strains herself, can still feel her sister’s strong hand against her shoulder.
“It made me feel better. For years.”
She helps him sit up, instructs him to eat it slowly, even though she knows he’s going to wolf it down if he hasn’t changed from the boy she grew up with. Maybe that’s why she’s here. She’s still trying to find an answer to that question. She’s trying to find a reason that she can justify in front of her sister’s grave. Maybe it’s because they were kids together.
“I don’t know why you’re here,” she says as she watches him eat, “But I know that you’re a fucking liar. You knew it was me. You couldn’t have not known it was me.”
“I didn’t think of it. I didn’t think about whose door I was knocking on, only that I was knocking on a door.”
“That’s bullshit,” she growls, “I know you. You think about everything. Even stupid shit. I’m sure that you were an overthinker before you could walk in a straight line.”
She’s not an idiot. She knows as soon as she thinks about it that it’s a bad fucking idea. But here’s the thing: her sister’s dead, so there’s no one left to chastise her for her stupid sentimentality. And there’s something bubbling in her chest that’s walking the line between wrath and fondness, and she looks at the bottle of perfectly aged apple blood that her sister had died before getting to enjoy.
And she thinks about how it’s been haunting her for four years because she hasn’t known what the fuck to do with it that’s not going to make her cry about that she should have been the one to go first but she always knew that she never would be.
And she thinks that if anyone’s worthy of sharing it with her, no matter how much it pains her to admit it: that someone would be Phillip.
So, she pulls it out, and she walks in with it, and she drops to the side of the couch, leans against it and locks the bottle between her thighs as she uncorks it.
“You wouldn’t think that you’re an old hag, Ellie.”
She laughs. “I’m not. You’re the only old hag here.”
Phillip tuts. “We’re the same age.”
And then he’s looking at the bottle.
“You didn’t bring glasses?”
“Are you too good to share swigs?”
Phillip takes a moment.
“No.”
She takes the first one, long and hearty. And then she hands the bottle up to him.
“Can I ask you,” he questions between slugs because he’s never been good at chugging, “What the fuck is this and why?”
She laughs again. “My sister bought it before she died, and I felt weird drinking it, and now I don’t feel weird about drinking and now we’re drinking it.”
“Whatever this is, I don’t want anything to do with any of it.”
“Neither do I.”
He hands her back the bottle. She drinks.
“I always thought that Arianna was the only one of you who pulled shit like this. I thought you got angry when she pulled shit like this.”
Ellie rolls her eyes, even though he’s not wrong. But he’s also very, very wrong. Because even though she tried to make Arianna get her shit together, that didn’t mean that Ellie had to have her shit together to say that. She just had to look at Arianna and realise that Arianna absolutely did not have her shit together. Sure, Ellie was the one who turned out to be successful in the traditional sense. Ellie was the one who supposedly rose above their upbringing while Arianna pickled herself in her misery.
But the only people who say that are people who don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. People who don’t know shit about Arianna or Ellie, and people who don’t know shit about surviving abuse. Ellie had her bad habits, just like Arianna did. Arianna just got away with it because she was outwardly troubled. She was the drug addict sister; she was the sister who ran away and broke down in foreign ports. She was the one who couldn’t hold down a job and claimed that it was out of choice.
“You don’t know shit about me.”
Phillip clicks his tongue in a way that seizes her as being annoyingly familiar to Arianna and Caleb and Dell. “I guess I don’t.”
“I always thought you were the boring one, too,” Ellie argues back, “Even when you’d fucking gouged out his eye, Caleb was down to host parties. And Arianna was the one who had to talk him out of it. And you and I both know that she didn’t just do that out of concern for his health because Arianna—”
Phillip finishes her sentence. “Arianna fucking hated most other people.”
And they both laugh.
Because it’s true.
Because Arianna really fucking hated most other people. Ellie could probably count the amount of people she genuinely cared for on less than two hands.
“I talked to her about it.”
“What?”
“The hating other people. It was one of those conversations where she showed up having a mental breakdown and trying to kill me. She told me that she admired Ezra, and that she admired how deeply you loved each other. I thought you’d like to know, if she never told you.”
If you’re smarter than Phillip, you know that Ellie isn’t the kind of widow who wants to talk about being a widow. In fact, she wants to do everything to talk about not being a widow. She doesn’t think that the world deserves to hold her husband when they wouldn’t care for him when he was alive. She especially doesn’t think that Phillip deserves Ezra’s name in his mouth. Suddenly, she’s seized by an urge to lean backwards and rip it out of him. Maybe take a few teeth with her.
But she doesn’t. Because, like countless times before, she’s reminded that she’s not her sister. Instead, she just seethes.
“Do know,” she snarls, “Had Arianna still possessed her power, Ezra would not have died when he did. And I’m having a very hard time talking about him, looking at you, and knowing that you’re the reason that things weren’t different—”
“I didn’t force your sister to give up her magic,” Phillip counters, “In fact, I would have preferred if she didn’t—”
“You backed her into a corner,” Ellie growls, wondering whether she looks more like Arianna when she’s pissed off. Based on how Phillip stiffens, she thinks she does.
And then they don’t say anything to each other for a long while, but Ellie knows that they’re both listening to the other breathe.
A sister is a mirror.
A sister is a cruel handprint against your cheek. A sister is a steadying grip on your shoulder when you’re falling apart. A sister is a lot of things. Arianna was a lot of things. When Ellie was younger, she became obsessed with writing how they were different: because even though she knew she looked up to Arianna, she was also terrified of turning out exactly like her.
Arianna is bolder than I by a long shot.
Arianna is a raging bisexual and way, way more promiscuous than I.
Arianna likes drinking straight liquor and wearing tight clothes.
Arianna doesn’t let anyone see her cry.
The reasoning changed over the years, as did they. They strayed closer together, they fell further apart. Their sisterhood ebbed like the tides, but always came home.
She thinks that all sisters are like that, because sisters have a unique relationship to say it kindly. Arianna was the person who’d known her for her whole life, she was the person that Ellie couldn’t imagine herself without: men came and went, but Arianna stayed true and solid, even though Ezra had been more devoted to her. Arianna was the person who loved her and stood by her no matter what, but she was also the person who knew exactly where to twist the knife to take her to the floor.
Even though Arianna’s been dead for long enough that the townspeople stopped sending casseroles and condolences, Ellie still says that she has a sister, even though the other half of the equation is buried.
Ellie tilts her head up to look at the sunlight making tiger-stripes across her ceiling.
“She was my sister. You know, the thing about sisters, Phillip. Sisters tell each other everything.”
The ceiling darkens.
“Arianna told me about them.”
“What?”
“Arianna told me about the grimwalkers.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to understand.” Phillip tries to sound uncaring and sure, but it’s a bad fit on him.
She can hear the quiver in his voice, and she’s pretty sure she knows why. She knows that Arianna lost her shit at him when she found out, because Arianna went on the greatest (read: horrifying) bender of her life and Ellie had to pick her up six islands away by bailing her out of jail. Ever since Arianna died, even the moments of Ellie being nothing but rage at constantly having to pick her older sister off the floor are tinged with fondness. She’d do a lot of unspeakable things to pick Arianna up off the floor one last time, for memory’s sake.
Phillip forgets that she knows him, too.
“I didn’t say I wanted to understand.”
Ellie plays with a loose strand of her hair. “Do you remember when you threatened me for burying my sister? When you asked me why I’d done it even though I knew that you wouldn’t have allowed it?”
“Yes, of course. Of course, I do. You put yourself at great personal risk for her. In a way, it was admirable. But in the foolish way. I still wonder how you of all people dared to do it.”
She chuckles into her hand. “That’s because you don’t know as much about me as you’d like to think. I thought the same when you killed your brother. It came as a shock to me because I couldn’t have seen you do it, no matter how pissy you might have been. I spent years lying about it, trying to find some way to have seen it coming. I had to admit that I just didn’t know you like I thought I did and that you had nerve that I didn’t believe you capable of.”
“That doesn’t answer it, you know. It doesn’t answer why you willingly put yourself at that kind of risk.”
“Alright,” Ellie drawls, feeling the liquor inside of her swaying and cursing Arianna: she’d always had the better tolerance of the two. “I’ll explain it simply, then. She’s my sister. And therefore, she’s one half of me. And I did it because of that. Because she is my sister.”
“She was your sister.”
She grits her teeth. “Yes.”
Sometimes, she wonders how Phillip can be so fucking dense.
Phillip doesn’t deserve anything else of hers, but she can’t stop herself. Maybe it’s because he’s the only one she thinks knows how to speak her language at this point. Everyone else who’d learned it is dead. Not even her son knows how to speak it, because he’s not her son. He’s not of her blood. Neither is Phillip, but he’s partaken in enough of it to know the taste. Ellie would never do that to Dell. So, she speaks. And he doesn’t interrupt her. In fact, this is a statement in and of itself.
The fact is: Phillip lets her.
“I have a complicated history with my sister, you’re right,” she starts, “And the unquestionable devotion I have for her now might seem strange to you. But her and I went through Hell holding hands, and I could never fault her for that. Her voice was the most familiar sound to me, she made my childhood bearable at the cost of her own and she knew me before I even knew my own name. That means something. That means a whole lot to me. And now she’s not here anymore, and it means that I’m the one who has to hold her memory safe. She’s the only person I’d race to catch a ship for.”
She pulls herself up, straightens herself from where she’d fallen.
“I have a question for you, Phillip,” Ellie says, hands in her lap, feeling so very small, “Did Caleb die alone?”
She knows the answer. She knows as much of the answer that Arianna managed to piece together in her lifetime, because her sister wasn’t there and if anything killed Arianna Clawthorne: it was that. It was that she was running, and Caleb was dying in a field and she was running away.
And Phillip doesn’t say anything.
Phillip turns his face in towards the couch and weeps.
After a moment, Ellie pulls herself up with a groan and walks out of the living room. When she wakes up in the morning, Phillip’s been smart enough to take his leave.