Page 54 of Rogue’s Mark

"Okay," I hear myself say. My voice comes out level. A small miracle. "Okay."

"Vi." Rogue says it low. "You don't have to be okay."

"I know." I press the photograph flat against my chest, picture-side in, like if I hold it close enough, it can't be taken back. "I just, I need a minute. By myself."

He studies me for a second too long, deciding whether to believe me. Then he stands, and his hand lands on the top of my head, just once, heavy and warm, and he doesn't say anything else because there's nothing to say that wouldn't make it worse.

"I'll be down the hall," he says, kissing me on the cheek.

The door clicks. He's gone.

And I still don't fall apart, which is its own kind of insane, because now there's no one to perform for. I just sit there on the floor of my room with my father against my heart and my whole body locked up like a fist.

Mara. I need Mara.

She's in her room with a paperback. She takes one look at me in her doorway, just one, and she's up off the bed before I've said a word.

"Vi. What happened? What's going on⁠—"

I hold out the photograph.

She takes it. Looks. I watch her mouth open and then close again.

"Oh my God," she whispers. "Vi. Is that⁠—"

"It's him."

And that's the thing that does it. Saying it to her. It's him. Two words, out loud, to the one person here in the Rot who knew him too, who sat at his kitchen table, who got told off by him for tracking mud through the house when we were nine.

I don't even feel myself start to go down.

One second, I'm standing. The next, Mara's got both arms around me and we're on the floor of her room.

And then I'm crying. The way I haven't cried since the silence after he disappeared, when they scrubbed his name off the world and I made myself believe it. I’m ugly crying. The kind with no dignity in it. The kind that comes from somewhere in the depths of your gut, gooey and snotty and uncontrollable.

"I grieved him," I get out, wet and furious and broken. "Mara, I grieved him. I let him be dead. I made myself stop—" The words crack apart. "And he was out there. This whole time. He was just out there."

"My God," she says into my hair. She's crying too. She doesn't try to fix it, doesn't tell me it's okay, doesn't do anything except hold on, which is the only correct thing and she knows it because she's Mara. “I’ve got you girl. I’ve got you.”

And underneath the grief, sharp and ugly and not ready yet, something else is starting to move. Because if he's alive, then he chose to make me think he was dead. Every Sunday I didn't get a phone call, he was somewhere out there choosing not to make it. I don't have a way to digest that yet. It's too big and mean, and is breaking my fucking heart.

So I shove it down with everything else, and I let Mara hold me, and I decide that tonight I'm just going to be a daughter who got her father back, and deal with the rest of it when I can stand up.

I cry until there's nothing left, and then I cry a little more out of pure momentum, and Mara holds me through every bit of it on the floor of a room in a dead mall, with my father's face pressed between us, alive.

32

VI

I don't sleep.

Sometime after Mara finally dozes off, I peel myself up off her floor, go back to my own room, and sit down with the photograph under the one lamp that works.

And this time, I look at it like evidence.

That's the thing nobody warns you about in the Rot. It turns you into someone who can't stop reading a room, a face, a page. Months ago, I'd have clutched this picture to my chest and cried and called it enough. Tonight, I've already done the crying. Now, I want proof. The kind I can point to. The kind that'll hold up later, when my own hope tries to con me into believing something that isn't there.

So I go looking.