Chapter 189

Abby

Sebastian didn’t come back.

I waited for him. Every afternoon in the garden, every time I heard footsteps in the corridor that weren’t the guards’ or the maid’s, I felt my whole body go tight, and Diana come up off her paws. But the days went by, and he didn’t come. I saw him once, from my window, crossing the gravel at the front of the house to a car with two men behind him, in a dark coat, talking on his phone. He didn’t look up.

That was worse, somehow. I knew what he was doing. He was letting me wait.

The moon was growing.

I could feel it before I could see it. Every night it rose a little later and a little fuller over the trees on the far side of the river, and every night Diana felt it a little more. She stopped lying down. She stopped pacing, too. She sat inside me, upright, very still, with her nose lifted toward the window, the way a dog sits by a door when it knows someone is coming home. The light in me rose with it. I could feel