MARISSA
Rissa thought about going to the zoo with her older sister, and smiled. She imagined them walking side by side, laughing and eating cotton candy.
Marissa had never eaten cotton candy, but a puffy cloud of sugar sounded delightful.
Gillie would probably drag her to see the lions, tigers, hippos. Gillie liked the biggest, scariest animals.
She wasn't afraid of anything.
Marissa seemed afraid of everything. She wanted to be brave like her sister, she really did. When she was with Gillie it's like her older sister shared her aura. If Gillie could do it, Rissa could, too.
She wasn't sure how long she lay awake in the dark, clutching the unicorn stuffie Gillie had given her when she was ten. It was her favorite thing.
At some point, she drifted off imagining her sister's return: a tap at the window, a whispered confession, the warmth of their secret kept a little longer.
***|***|***
MARISSA
At 3 a.m., Marissa jolted awake, heart hammering, as the doorbell's chime thundered through the marble halls—a sound she'd never heard at this hour.
The chill of the night seeped through her thin blue nightgown as she crept from bed, feet whispering across the rug and onto the cold, moonlit floor.
She barely remembered moving, only that her hands shook as she gripped the banister and hurried toward the grand foyer.
The house felt impossibly vast, every step punctuated by the slap of her bare feet against the marble.
Dread was a living creature inside her, an acidic pulse that started in her chest and radiated through every trembling limb. It filled the hollows behind her collarbones, drummed against her ribs, and caught in her throat.
The air in the house was thin and cool, charged with a tension she'd never felt before—a knowing, as if the walls themselves anticipated disaster.
The marble under her feet was icy, and the chill shot up her legs to pool in the pit of her stomach.
The foyer's crystal chandelier threw spindly webs across the walls, and the moonlight streaming through the stained glass made everything look warped, unreal, like she was walking through the dream of a house instead of her home.
She remembered every story her mother had ever told her about what could happen to her and Gillie if they ever went out on their own. The sum of all her mother's fears seemed to be waiting on the other side of that door.
Her hands hovered uselessly at her sides, then fisted into the thin fabric of her nightgown, damp with sweat in spite of the cold.
She crept down one step, then another, willing herself not to cry, not to make a sound.
Her heartbeat was so loud she was sure it was echoing down the staircase, broadcasting her fear to whoever waited below.
She hesitated at the bottom of the stairs. The foyer stretched away, impossibly long in the blue-black dark, and at the end of it stood the double front doors. Two slabs of dark wood, gleaming like the surface of a lake at midnight.
She stopped on the stairs, one hand frozen on the banister.
She heard voices before she saw anyone, the conversation seemed flattened by the heavy front door.
A man's uncertain tone reached her. "We found the motorcycle…off the bridge…"
Then her father's voice, clipped with forced calm: "Are you certain she was with him? That they were together?"
"Her helmet and jacket were recovered downstream. There was damage to the railing. The current's strong this time of year. It's unlikely they survived. But we haven't recovered any bodies."
Her mother's gasp, sharp and small, like glass breaking, pierced Marissa's heart.
She pressed herself against the wall. Her throat tightened around a breath she couldn't release. Bodies?
"No chance they made it?" Her father's voice shook.
"Nothing is certain, but…" The officer shook his head.
She watched her parents through the gap between railings. Her mother in a silk robe, swayed as if she might collapse. Her father, jaw clenched, one hand vice-gripped around her mother's waist, the other white-knuckled at his side.
The officer's hat was in his hands, his face solemn. "We'll keep searching. We'll update you immediately if we find them."
For a dizzying moment, hope fluttered in Marissa's chest.
Maybe Gillian had escaped, somehow. Maybe she was alive, hidden, waiting to be found.
Michael Feeney. Gillie had raced out into the night with the boy she loved.
And she wasn't coming back.
Because of him.
Her mother's knees buckled and her father caught her, and the hope died unspoken.
Her parents didn't believe Gillie was alive, so how could she?
Marissa stood in the dark, invisible as always, until Geoffrey materialized at her elbow.
He didn't speak. He only placed a steadying hand on her back, a gentle anchor amid the flooding chaos.
A sob splintered the silence. Her mother twisted out of her father's arms and turned. Her gaze alighted on Marissa standing on the staircase.
She closed the space between them. She wrapped Marissa in a crushing hug, the scent of gardenias and the weight of grief pressing against her.
"We won't lose you, baby," her mother whispered, her voice brittle but fierce. "Never. I'll never let anything happen to you."
Marissa wanted to surrender to the safety of her mother's arms, to fold herself into that gardenia-scented embrace and let grief be softened by the warmth of a mother's love.
But the longer her mother's arms encircled her, the more Marissa recognized the hug as a desperate restraint. She tried to inhale but the air was so thin in her lungs, she tasted only the edge of panic.
Her mother's words were meant to soothe, but they landed like a prison sentence, not a promise: We won't lose you. Never. I'll never let anything happen to you.
Her mother's body trembled with every shallow breath, the sobs making her shudder violently, so that Marissa had to brace herself to keep from being knocked off balance.
Over her mother's bony shoulder, she saw her father standing in the center of the foyer, not moving, his eyes fixed on the staircase like he expected it to collapse or catch fire.
He looked so much older in that moment, as if entire decades had rained down on him in a single night.
The officer lingered at the threshold, uncertain, hat twisting in his hands, until finally Geoffrey guided him out with a butler's practiced discretion.
The air was colder now, the night outside pressing against the stained glass, all color leached from the world except the bruised blue of her mother's robe and the raw red rims of her father's eyes.
Marissa's own hands hung limp at her sides. She envied the officer, whose sadness was duty, not destiny.
Even as she shivered in her mother's grasp, Marissa knew what this meant for the rest of her life. Zachary was gone. Gillie was gone now, too, and with her any hope Marissa had of ever being brave, or wild, or even ordinary.
She would be the one who stayed behind. The one left at home. The precious thing that must be guarded at all costs.
She was the last Vanderson child left in this world.
The very last one.