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The sun beats mercilessly down on the back of Jacob’s neck. It’s a wretched thing that hasn’t bothered to shine the past three days through a persistent rainy haze, but the morning Jacob stands next to his sister and is told his father is dead, it blazes as bright as is in its power.
He stands on the edge of a hole, six feet long and not yet six feet deep. His boots are caked in mud up around the ankle; the sun may have forgotten easily enough, but the ground still remembers being soaked through. Every inch of Jacob’s body aches like he’s been beaten in a fight, but even standing still, he sways slightly on the balls of his feet, flexes his fingers around the handle of the shovel. He won’t give himself a moment’s rest, in case that moment locks his muscles tight and won’t let him finish his job.
And he only has the one. Even he can’t manage to screw it up.
He leaps back down. His knees take the impact harder than he means them to, a shock of pain reverberating up into his torso as he grits his teeth. He jams his shoulder into the muddy side of the pit to catch his breath and balance, then he’s back to work. The shovel stabs away, shoved in deeper by his heel when it refuses to cut into the mud like he wants. Disturbing the dirt is easy. Getting it up out of the hole has gotten harder and harder with every inch he sinks himself deeper.
If Jacob were burying himself, he’d say he’d done a fair enough job.
Father would probably say he should have finished it faster and gone inside to help Evie and George.
The idea of it makes Jacob feel ill. He doesn’t know how Evie can stomach looking at the body. He’ll have to, eventually, but the longer he can put it off, the longer he doesn’t have to know what their father looks like covered by the ugly veil of death. He’ll be like that always in Jacob’s mind if he has to see him now, he’ll have been like that for all the months he’s been hidden away in his bedchambers, a corpse all that Jacob can picture for the months and months he tried—They both tried.—to see his father and had been turned away.
A grave’s the only way Jacob knows how to make himself useful.
He has no idea how long he’s been digging, only when he’d started on the soft grass outside their family home, the sun had been barely over the horizon and still playing with the idea of clouds forming overhead. Now, it’s staring right down at Jacob, and his skin is burning mottled shades of red the longer he digs.
It’s an immodest property, but it’s also not wholly theirs. It’s always been the Brotherhood’s first, their family’s second, all the empty rooms kept fit for fellow Assassins to stay in. Jacob’s later childhood is marked by the comings and goings of men and women he barely knew. But the house, the little land its on, it’s in their father’s-
No, it’d be in Jacob’s name now, wouldn’t it?
Evie’ll hate that. It doesn’t matter to Jacob, what’s his is hers, and he doesn’t even want this tomb, so she can have every room of it if she desires. But he’s his father’s only son. The property will be his alone under English law, if not in the eyes of the Brotherhood or himself, and Evie’s going to hate that. He can hear her snapping at the injustice of it, marking invisible foes as she paces a trench in the floor. For the first time, Jacob cracks half a smile. It hurts. His dry lips break on it, and when he flicks his thick tongue out to the source of the pain, he tastes iron and dirt.
Who does he have to kill to give his sister what his father clearly would have wanted her to have more than Jacob?
He didn’t leave them instructions for his funeral. Briefly, before he started, Jacob wondered if their father would have preferred to be buried next to their mother.
And then, like he’d been punched in the throat, Jacob had lost his breath as he failed to remember where that was. They’d gone so many times with their grandmother, but they’d been so young and Jacob can’t remember, what grounds, what grave, even the shape of the headstone isn’t there anymore.
He feels like an idiot hours later. What was he doing, doubled over outside of their home and thinking about the wrong dead parent?
It didn’t matter where Father wanted to be buried. If he cared, he should have told them. He should have seen them once before he- Jacob gets to decide to bury him outside the house, where they won’t need anyone’s help to transport his body and where Jacob can do one fucking thing right.
Which had gone well enough until the first shovel had broken. The tip had snapped off under his boot as he wrestled it into the ground, and he’d had to scramble out of the pit he’d dug, scraping and scratching through the grass to pull himself out to go find another.
He’s caked in mud and sweat from head to toe. Maybe that’s another way he can avoid seeing their father. Evie, you don’t want me to view him when I smell worse than a corpse. He practices saying that under his breath over and over, until he can’t really remember what the sounds crossing his lips mean. His throat stings with each repetition. His tongue is clumsy, parched, and won’t get any relief so long as Jacob can deny it.
The shovel pounds the ground. Jacob hauls it up and down. Future gravedirt piles up outside the pit or falls across Jacob’s burnt shoulders in painful avalanches when he can’t raise his arms as high or as fast as he should be able to. He grits his teeth and digs.
His hands could be on fire, and he wouldn’t notice a difference, and he’d still dig.
He doesn’t feel the sun carve its path overhead. It all hurts the same.
He blinks. His vision’s blurred. His eyes sting. He has trouble unwrapping his hand from the handle of the shovel, but he drags it under his brow. He gets dirt in his eye, and it stings even worse. He goes back to digging with a squint, labored breaths ringing in his ears and making his head beat painfully from the noise. Pressure keeps building, in his skull, in his chest, in his muscles, but he forces his body to be useful instead.
He doesn’t hear Evie approach over the deafening strikes of the shovel.
He does feel her, though. Just the barest relief of her shadow falling across his body and protecting him from the sun. It takes Jacob a few jerky tries to stop himself from digging. He sucks in a breath as his muscles cramp in response to slowing.
“I can’t hear you,” Evie says, and Jacob realizes he’d mumbled his prepared response from earlier. He doesn’t think he can make sense of it himself, and he’s the one saying it.
It felt so clever before.
“I’m-“ He rasps. He can’t turn his head up to look at her. His neck has turned to steel, locking him hunched over the shovel like an old woman. “I’m not done, Evie.”
He expects her to leave him. Just let him do one thing right. She can be mad at him for not helping with anything else, or for fleeing from the room rather than following her and George to their father’s deathbed, or for inheriting a house he doesn’t want, or- Just let him do one thing right, so he knows he can. So she knows he can.
Evie steps her way around the grave to him. She kneels down; he can hear her settling on the disturbed grass and putting something else down beside her. He doesn’t know what she’s doing until her hand lands on his head. Evie’s hand passes briefly over his sweat-drenched hair, a touch that coaxes a weak noise out of Jacob that he doesn’t want anyone to hear, not even her. She doesn’t acknowledge it; she knows him that well. She tangles her fingers in his hair and tugs his head back. Jacob grunts a little protest.
She has to lean into the pit to put a cup to his lips. Jacob drinks. The water flows soothingly down his throat.
“You’re going to fall in,” he croaks as she pulls back to fill it again with her pitcher. He half wishes she’d hand down the whole thing, but he’s certain he’d drop it, if his tired hands even managed to grab it in the first place.
“Then I’ll land on top of you and break my fall,” Evie says. She cups the back of his head against as she offers him more water.
Evie’s hands smell too sweetly of soap. If Jacob lets himself remember where they’ve been, he’ll retch the water back up.
He nearly does anyway, swallowing too fast and sending water down the wrong pipe. He flinches away from Evie, each hacking cough rattling his limbs with pain. Evie reaches out for him again, but her fingers land on his burnt shoulder and Jacob wheezes under the sudden burst of pain. Evie draws back immediately.
He catches his breath. It feels like even his bones hurt now from being jostled about.
He turns his gaze up to his sister, a difficult task. He wants to reach up out of the pit, pat her arm and reassure her he’s alright. His hands resist unwrapping from the shovel.
Evie’s puffy eyes are so red-rimmed that they’re almost purple. She’s been pulling at her braids; he can tell from the loosened crown of them lying over her head. His fingers cramp when he thinks of redoing them for her.
When they’d come together this morning, they’d intended to force Father to see them. They’d dressed as the adults they were, as the Assassins they’d earned the right to call themselves, and Jacob had been so sure that he couldn’t deny them both.
It had turned out their father always would get his way in the end.
Now, Jacob’s stripped down to his trousers, more clothed in muck than the armor he wishes he was still in. Evie’s lost hers as well, but whatever she’s changed into isn’t hers. It must be something of Jacob’s from the way it hangs on her.
He tries to imagine Evie confined to a proper mourner’s dress for a year and can’t even picture it.
“Let me see your hands,” Evie says, holding one of her own out to him. The soap scent curls close to his nostrils and makes him nauseous.
“No.”
“Jacob-“ Her irritation stings too much when he’s this raw.
“Let me finish digging!” he snaps. A deep frown sets into Evie’s features. She’s on her feet a moment later, and when even her shadow has disappeared from view, Jacob falters. “Wait,” he whispers, “wait, wait, Evie, come back.” He can’t pull himself out of the grave to follow her. He wants to heave, to get some sickness of grief out of him and bury it here too.
Jacob hunches over the shovel again. He forces his arms to move. It’s like bending stone. He gasps for breath. If he can’t move, he can’t dig, and he has to dig, he has to be able to do something. Sweat trickles down his face and does its best job at hiding what else Jacob chokes on as he shakes in his father’s grave.
And then there’s a thump. Jacob is too tired to jolt properly, but he cranes his neck against the pain to look behind him in time for the next, much louder thud of Evie dropping into the hole with him and kicking her own shovel up into her hands.
For a moment, she stands there like she’s expecting a fight, boots braced.
Like Jacob could even give her one right now.
Part of him still wants to. It’s his responsibility, it’s the only one he can hold himself to, and Evie’s done enough out of his sight. It’s been hours, and she’ll have done everything Jacob couldn’t and more besides. If spirits linger on, then she knows how to treat them.
Who is he fooling, though? He can barely lift his shovel anymore. He needs her.
And if he could think clearly without every thought feeling like dynamite going off inside his head, and if he could move at all without wanting to scream, and if he was everything he should be, smarter and stronger and a better man, he’d know how to tell her that.
Instead, Jacob nods mutely. He turns around and pretends like he can still make any progress on his end while listening to Evie start to dig.
There’s not enough room for the both of them in here. It’s only meant for one man.
Evie bumps him with her elbow, with her shovel handle, with her shoulder. He can’t tell how much of it is on purpose.
If Jacob wanted, he could pretend they’re children again. That Evie’s gotten a notion in her head about a world inside the world that they could reach if they just dug deep enough, full of forbidden treasures and the remains of ancient Assassins who would have found it first. That Jacob’s in the game because Evie gets the most incredible gleam in her eyes when she’s excited and because he wants nothing more than to waste time playing in the mud rather than training. He shuts his eyes, and there they are, running around half-naked and dirty until… until their father finds out and comes to admonish them.
Good thing he always had, Jacob supposes, staring down at the mud clumped around his ankles. Look how far they’d make it without him.
Evie digs at the same pace he could, hollowing out the bottom of the grave Jacob started. She doesn’t tell him to leave despite how little he can contribute anymore. She sidles around him, picking up the slack on all sides. He can’t tell the difference between her freckles and specks of grime littering her face. The sun’s no kinder to her; she’s turning pinker by the minute.
“Should’ve brought a veil,” Jacob jokes.
Evie’s mouth twitches. It’s enough of a smile for him.
The hole is plenty deep already. He’s not sure how they know, but there’s a moment, with Evie’s shovel in the dirt, where she stops.
There’s almost a foot of dirt above both their heads. Jacob spent nearly a decade waiting to inherit his father’s height. In the end, Evie got an extra centimeter or two depending on how tall they both strain themselves to be when back to back, and Father still towered over them both.
Evie looks up from her buried shovel to Jacob. He tries to blink his vision clear and fails. He nods.
She releases the shovel. It sticks in the ground for a moment and then lists to the side, picking up speed until it falls forgotten on the ground.
“Now,” she says, sounding even more exhausted than before, “can I please see your hands?”
It’s a struggle to unwrap them from the shovel’s handle. Evie has to pry them free. Jacob hisses as something burns and tears across his palms. Evie turns his hands over. Friction has left his hands cracked and red with sores, the only skin spared bruised purple from the tightness of his grip on the handle. The worst damage is the blisters burst across his palms, caked in dirt and blood and pus. Jacob and her both grimace at the same time. It probably smells as awful as it looks, but it’s hard to tell.
Evie’s touch is the only thing that doesn’t hurt. She turns his hands gently, resting them in the cradle of her palm so that Jacob doesn’t have to hold them up himself. Whatever faces she makes, she doesn’t mention the fact that even with her help, his arms are shaking from the minute effort of offering himself for inspection, and she doesn’t complain about the mess Jacob’s made of himself.
Of course she doesn’t. She’s dressed her father’s dead body today.
Next to that, at least Jacob’s still bleeding.
“You could have taken a break,” Evie says. “No one asked you to do this, Jacob.”
No one stopped me. “It didn’t kill me,” he says, “and it’s done.” Evie wraps her fingers lightly around his wrist and presses them to his pulse point.
“I hope you lose both your hands from an infection,” she whispers, her jaw clenched tight with frustration, but her fingers don’t move.
“An Assassin with no hands?” Jacob says. “Now, there’s one for the history books.”
Evie lets go suddenly to put a hand on the back of his neck. She needs to pull him into her; he can’t go on his own.
Lord, she smells as awful as he does now, all gravedirt and sweat. Jacob buries his face in her neck and braces his arms around her, careful not to rub his blistered hands anywhere. Evie’s hands burn hot against his sunburned shoulders, but he bears it for her.
“You’re all I have in the world now.”
“Sorry,” Jacob mumbles. Evie’s hand tightens on the back of his neck.
“Jacob, do you think there’s anyone else I’d choose?” It’s the hurt in her voice that catches him. Jacob wishes he could hug her better, but he settles for rubbing his face into the crook of her shoulder like a cat.
“No,” he says, tries to raise his voice to pride and play, “no, there’s no one better, dear sister.”
She squeezes the back of his neck before she releases him.
“Want to clean up the mess I made?” Jacob offers. Evie sighs.
Getting out is a struggle of its own. Evie manages to jump and scramble her way up the side, and Jacob can hear her panting above him as she gets over the edge. He looks down at his hands, dreading his own attempt, before she reappears, both hands reaching for him. She grabs his outstretched elbows instead of his injured hands. Jacob can’t get himself back out without her, and even then, he nearly slips back in before Evie flails forward and grabs him by the trousers to keep hauling him up. Jacob wriggles ungracefully onto the grass to lay there with his head in a pile of dirt he made. Evie collapses next to him.
Jacob shuts his eyes against the sunlight, but it bleeds through his eyelids.
“Is there more water?” he asks miserably.
Evie pushes herself up. “We knocked the pitcher over.” Jacob groans. “There’ll be more inside and a bowl to wash your hands.” Despite saying that, it still takes her another minute to try to get to her feet. She lifts Jacob up as well, and he manages to stay standing on his own. He walks in a shuffle, under constant threat of his legs giving out. Evie stays by his side in case she needs to catch him.
They’re almost to the door when Jacob’s hair raises.
He can’t move. “Where is he?” he asks, and his voice sounds small and scared, like Father is walking around inside under a sheet to scare him.
Evie squeezes his wrist. “He’s in the sitting room.” Jacob relents when she guides him forward again. He doesn’t have to look if they go to the kitchen. He keeps his eyes trained on the back of Evie’s neck just in case.
The house is too quiet. Only Assassins about—not even the household’s cook—and only the three of them for that matter. Jacob listens, but he can’t even hear George, wherever he is. He knows their house as well as family would, down to every creaky floorboard that Jacob also had memorized before he’d turned eight.
Evie helps Jacob to another cup of water before herself, and then she leaves him to slump heavily in the wobbly chair they keep in the kitchen.
Jacob’s ears ring with silence. He tries to shift out from under the weight of it and can’t escape. Evie’s return is the only thing that alleviates it. She drags another chair with her to be across from Jacob, their knees interlocking when she sits down.
She has scissors, bandages, gauze, and a bowl to balance in her lap. The water stings and dirties quickly as she guides Jacob’s hand to it. There are other blisters that didn’t break, ugly and painful, so she doesn’t scrub, just glides her fingers over his sore hands to loosen the dirt and and clean the bloody fluid away from the open wounds. Evie grimaces as the water darkens, but Jacob’s hand comes out of it clean enough. She sets it in his lap, leaving again to drain the bowl outside and returns with it full again.
Someone will have to go get more. Jacob thinks about offering, but then his hand twinges and he knows he’d be an idiot to think he could bring any water back into the house.
Evie can’t do it, though. Evie’s done enough. She’s still doing more.
Father could-
Jacob huffs through his nose as his hand stings under Evie’s attention. George ought to do it, then. What good has he done except find a corpse?
Not that Jacob would know. He ran away rather than see.
He looks at Evie again. There’s a tightness around her eyes, wrinkles in her brow. Her hands are gentle enough, but every muscle up her arms is tense. If Jacob didn’t know better, he’d say she looked ready to fight someone. He shifts to press his knee against hers without disturbing the bowl. Evie squeezes her eyes shut for a moment, but it barely does anything to relax her.
“He’d commissioned a coffin,” Evie says just above a whisper. She swoops her fingers along the outer arch of Jacob’s palm to stir the dirt off.
“What?”
“Plain wood, cloth, and an engraving with his name.” Evie lays out the facts as if they can't hurt her that way. “He-” Her finger presses too harshly onto Jacob’s hand, and he hisses. She releases it entirely, lifting her soaking hands from the bowl. They have nowhere to go, nothing they can do, so they clench into fists and land in Evie’s lap as she continues. “He couldn’t have done so on his own.”
“Did you ask?”
“What’s there to ask, Jacob? He didn’t see anyone else.” Jacob turns his gaze to the doorway leading to the rest of the house.
“He could have had that made any time,” Jacob tries. “With the life he led, it could be years old, Evie. It could be older than us.” Evie lifts his hands from the bowl.
“It was new,” she says. “It hadn’t even gathered dust.”
“George didn’t kill our father by ordering him a coffin.” Jacob hates how much that sounds like he’s trying to convince himself of that. He’s rattled enough for superstition to make more sense to him than reality, and he hates it.
“He should have said no,” Evie hisses back. It’s nonsense logic, a crack in her armor, and through it, Jacob can peer at the bleeding heart of his sister. She lifts his hand to dry, returning to the other to bandage it. Jacob watches her nose twitch and wrinkle, the shapes of a further argument appearing on her lips and being silenced before she lets them loose.
If he hadn’t ruined his hands, he could comfort her. Instead, he’s made himself more work for her to do. Guilt is a sharp thing to swallow. It leaves cuts in his throat that he struggles to breathe around, an ache that grows and grows.
Evie takes stock of his fingers first, snipping bandages smaller to wrap around the worst of the lot. There’s a hundred hours of practice in each motion. Jacob has always been made of torn knuckles and scraped knees. Evie’s only so much better at not getting hurt where it can be seen.
“Do you think-” Jacob starts. He wants Evie to have the answers he doesn’t, even knowing she won’t, and he’s grateful that he never finishes the question. George enters the room like a shade himself, drifting into Jacob’s line of sight. He bumps Evie’s knee, nods in George’s direction, and Evie sits up straighter to look back at him.
Jacob sees her flinch. So does George. She does very little to hide it.
She pulls the bandages into her tense fist and focuses again on Jacob’s hands.
There’s something in the way George looks at the both of them. It makes the growing crow’s feet around his eyes stand out. Jacob tries to wipe some dirt off of his cheek with the back of his bandaged hand and thinks he just ends up smearing it worse. Evie tenses in a way only Jacob would notice when George steps further into the room.
“So, you’ll be taking baths before the burial,” he finally says. His voice is rougher than both of theirs. Childishly, Jacob doesn’t think that’s fair. What’s a friend to a father?
“Can’t see him smelling worse than a corpse,” Jacob manages. He’s pretty sure that was his earlier excuse. It lands like a dead fish with George, but Evie gives a tired, half-hearted huff as she winds the bandage around his right thumb.
George shifts uncomfortably at the edge of the kitchen. He clears his throat.
He doesn’t come up with anything to say. Evie cuts the bandage, ties and tucks it. Jacob has trouble moving them too much beneath the layers of bandages and gauze, but that’s for his own good.
“I’m sorry,” George says. That’s five times he’s said that to Jacob today, and he’s been outside for most of it. Evie’s probably heard it in the hundreds. “If you need anything…”
He trails off. Whatever he might see in them, they haven’t been children he has to mind in a very long time. Evie keeps her head bowed over Jacob’s hands, even though she’s not doing much with them anymore. Jacob understands, nodding to take George’s attention.
“Thanks,” he says, “for everything.” He has no idea what George has done. Evie doesn’t want to talk to him anymore, and that’s enough of a reason for Jacob to get him to leave them alone. He looks pointedly at the door. George seems almost grateful for the excuse.
“Anything,” he repeats, like that’s something he can actually offer, and then he leaves. Jacob takes a deep breath.
Evie drops her forehead to his shoulder. It hurts, but Jacob reflexively goes to wrap his arms over her back anyway now that he can do so. Evie sucks in a breath, and then another, and then the third rips jagged out of her throat before she shoves her face into his skin and muffles a scream.
Jacob guesses that her voice still reaches most of the house.
“I’m sorry,” she says, a moment later. “I don’t know why I did that.”
“I do,” Jacob responds, “and there’s more in there.” He thinks Evie will ignore the clear offer in his words, but it’s too late. She’s already poked a hole in her own composure. She bows into Jacob, presses her open mouth against his shoulder a second time, and screams.
The volume, however muted, makes Jacob’s head pulse with pain. He doesn’t move until Evie’s done, out of breath and shaking a little and slumped against him. And he only moves at all to squeeze tighter around her back when the shaking gets worse.
“That isn’t George’s fault,” Evie tells herself.
“He’s been very helpful,” she tries to reason.
“And he knows so many things-“ Her voice cracks like the bough of a tree in a storm, and Jacob braces himself but doesn’t move away. “That Father never told us! But told him, while he was dying!” So Evie screams again, breaths coming into her lungs sharp and quick and overwhelmed because she’s never learned how to break except all at once. Jacob’s catches every piece of her, even the sharp ones. Her shoulders fold in with a sob. Jacob presses a kiss to her hair.
George probably heard her screaming despite her attempts to muffle it. He wouldn’t know what to do with her anger. Even Father didn’t.
Jacob does. Jacob takes it until she’s given all there is.
And when she’s struggling to pick herself back up, he does the only thing he can think of to help her.
“I’m ready now,” he says.
“Jacob-”
“I’m ready. I’ll see him with you.” He leans on those words. With you, he needs her to understand. Evie takes a deep breath.
She takes his bandaged hands in hers and presses kisses to both of them. It twinges a little to be touched even beneath the cloth. Jacob has trouble getting his body to move again when she leads him, but Evie’s patient, collecting herself in his trust. She leads him down the hall, past mirrors covered with whatever she could find. She doesn’t let go of his wrist as she brings him to the sitting room. Jacob moves forward, not to look at their father, but to peek into the room before Evie does to check that George didn’t retire back to Father’s side. He’s not there, so Jacob falls back a step behind Evie again.
The room smells like she did before jumping into the grave with him, like soap and flowers scrounged up from the garden. It takes Jacob a minute to understand what’s missing. He looks over at the clock and realizes the hands aren’t moving. The steady ticking has been stopped dead.
Evie tugs him forward. He’s growing more reluctant. He won’t-
It isn’t a matter of won’t. He can’t. His father is there in the corner of his eye, but if Jacob looks, it’s real. It all has to be real, the blisters and Evie’s red-rimmed eyes and George saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry-"
Evie stands at his side, her grip tight on his wrist. She presses against him.
“Does he look like he’s asleep?” Jacob asks. They say that about dead men, sometimes. Not that Jacob would know if it’s true. He’s mostly known death as a weapon to wield, and everyone who ever stood on the other side of it died terrified.
He doesn’t think he can do this if their father looks scared. He doesn’t know how to ask Evie if he is.
“No, not really. He looks… gone.” She rubs her thumb over Jacob’s wrist. “George said we shouldn’t bury him in his robes, and I wanted to fight him on that. But… He’s right. They’re well-maintained. They’d be going to waste in the ground.”
“Doesn’t feel right,” Jacob says. Evie hums agreement. “Who’s going to wear them? They don’t fit me.”
“They might fit George.”
An ugly noise escapes Jacob. “Well, there you go, then.”
He can’t make Evie wait for him forever. He turns his head and forces his eyes down.
She’s right. He just looks gone.
Pale and still. Waxy. Gone.
His hair’s been done well, though. He imagines Evie cleaned him up like that. It’s how Father did his hair exactly, except for a lock near his right ear that’s been snipped short.
Jacob looks at his sister, opens his mouth, and decides not to ask. Not if it was her, and not for a lock for himself if it was.
He expected more to happen. To see his father and for the world to end. Or maybe for him to sit up, restless because he hadn’t given Jacob one last telling off. At least, to burst into tears like a son should.
He’s gone. There’s nothing more Jacob can do. Nothing he can say. His father is gone, and that’s all Jacob will ever know of him.
Evie squeezes his wrist again. If Jacob hadn’t gone and messed up his hands, he’d be holding hers back even tighter. As it is, he leans over and knocks his temple into hers.
“Evie,” he pleads.
“Don’t ever make me bury you, Jacob,” she says, suddenly, clear and harsh like the striking of a bell, and Jacob nods before he’s even understood the words.
“I won’t,” he promises. “But four minutes before you, does that sound fair?” Evie’s mouth twitches twice for that one, a real attempt at a smile.
“Don’t rush,” she says.
Jacob doesn’t want to stay in this room. He’d like to think Evie can sense his discomfort, but more likely, she can feel the way he’s leaning away from their father’s body. She lifts her hand to his shoulder, but she doesn’t touch, just hovers it there over his sunburns.
“Time to wash up?” she offers. Jacob makes a face.
“Do you trust me in a bath right now?” he says, and for emphasis, gives a little stumble, like his legs might give out from under him.
It’s not entirely for show.
“I’m not going to abandon you,” she answers. They turn away from their father together. “You used to run through the house naked. It’s nothing I haven’t seen.”
“That was you,” Jacob says. Evie looks affronted as they trail away from the coffin.
“It was not.”
“Yes, it was. And you’d go scramble up a tree still nude if you didn’t get to wear what you wanted.”
“And Father stopped trying to put me in skirts after the third time.” Evie’s voice is soft and warm and proud.
“He didn’t try that hard.”
“He knew me,” Evie says. Jacob swallows.
It’s true. That will always be hers.
Jacob didn’t want it anyway, that understanding. He’s glad Evie has it. He is.
And he still has Evie. This will always be theirs, Jacob thinks. Death can’t touch his sister; it’s not possible. He thinks that in the shadow of an impossible thing, and somehow, he still believes it again.
He goes with her, so he’ll look halfway presentable for when they lower the coffin together.