Chapter 39. Flat

Wren POV

I took the blanket to the woods behind the rink and put my face in it.

Wren had wanted it out of the apartment. She hadn't touched it again after she'd opened it. She'd just stood at the kitchen table looking down at it with her arms wrapped around herself, and then she'd signed, very calmly, Please take it away, and gone to her room and closed the door.

Dom had watched me fold it back into its paper without a word.

Now I stood alone among the pines with a gray wool blanket against my face, breathing in, breathing in, trying to find anything under the soap.

He'd washed it. Carefully. More than once. Laundry detergent, some cheap floral thing. Cardboard from a box. Dust.

And under all of it, so faint I almost missed it, so faint I had to stand there for five minutes with my eyes shut, something flat.

Not nothing. Flat. A room nobody had ever lived in.

The same flat as the footprints behind