The Becoming of Noah Shaw

by Michelle Hodkin

  “I know,” Mara says, calm as anything.

  I’m so far beyond anger I’m mental. “You might as well have pushed her off the bridge yourself.”

  “No. What she did wasn’t my fault,” Mara says.

  “It’s not your fault, Mara. Say it.”

  That’s what I said to her when my father forced me to choose between saving her and killing Daniel or the other way around. Mara begged me to give her a shot to stop her heart, and I wouldn’t do it. Not until I heard her compare herself to Jude.

  “I can’t let Daniel go,” she’d said desperately. “I can’t let what happened to me happen to Joseph. They’ve done nothing, nothing wrong. I’ve done everything wrong.”

  “Not everything.”

  “You haven’t been here! Your father isn’t lying. I did those things. All of them.”

  And then I said next, “I’m sure they deserved it.”

  How many other people had died because Mara thought they deserved it? “Is anything ever your fault?”

  “Yes. Your father.”

  “What about him?”

  “I killed him.”

  She announces it. Just like that.

  I laugh because it’s fucking gorgeous outside and Stella’s broken body was just pulled out of the river and the girl I love is announcing that she made my sister an orphan. “He killed himself,” I say like an idiot, knowing it’s not true.

  “It looked like he killed himself,” she says. She’s studying me, spine straight, stare direct. Not hiding. Not crossing her arms, not defensive.

  “Because you made it look that way.”

  “Yes.”

  I blink and see Sam Milnes, hanging from the buttress. “Like the others.”

  “No,” Mara says.

  Beth steps off the platform in front of the train.

  “Not like the others,” she says.

  Felicity burns herself alive. It’s all I see when I look at Mara now. That and my fucking father. Stabbed himself, they said in the fucking obituary, and that piece—“What the fuck was that about the poisoning?”

  I regret the question as soon as I ask, watching the words shatter against the stone of her skin. No guilt, no remorse, no fear—there’s nothing there. Nothing anymore.

  “Everything Stella said . . .” I let the sentence trail off, thinking of her in the hospital, alone. “I defended you.”

  “I never asked you to defend me,” she says. “Not to anyone.”

  “You asked me to help you. You asked me to fix you, for fuck’s sake!”

  “That’s true, I did, once. And you told me I wasn’t broken.”

  What else had gotten twisted up in her mind in the past nine months? She’d endured trauma beyond torture, I always knew, but that doesn’t lead to this?

  “My father,” I start, grasping at what I can understand. “How did you do it?”

  “I stabbed him in the neck.”

  I think back to my conversation with Stella, to just the other day with Mara, in our bedroom. To walking out of the room, my hand dripping blood on the floor after I found—“The scalpel? The one you kept after stabbing Dr. Kells?”

  She shakes her head. “I didn’t keep that one. The one I have is different. From a hospital.”

  “Have you murdered anyone with it?”

  “No.”

  I think back, revise. “Have you killed anyone with it?”

  “No,” she insists.

  “Then why keep it?”

  “I told you, it makes me feel safe,” she says, and now her arms are crossed, and she is defensive. “I haven’t lied to you. You never asked, so I never told.”

  “I’m asking now,” I say.

  She shrugs. “And I’m telling you now.”

  “A bit fucking late.”

  “You told me you saw me,” she says. “So many times. You said you loved me anyway, no matter what I’d do. I thought you understood.”

  “I want to.” God help me. “Help me understand,” I beg her. “My father . . . you were defending yourself—”

  “No, I wasn’t,” she says, but this admission costs her. “I waited. I knew it would hurt you even though you said more than once you thought that he should die for what he did. I mostly wanted to make sure he could never come after my family again.”

  I do understand that, I do. But the others . . .

  “Why everyone else?”

  Her silence is horrifying. The flat is so quiet I should be able to hear our hearts beating, but I can’t hear anything at all.

  “There were twelve who showed up,” she finally says. Her voice is toneless, robotic. “Jamie and Daniel were in a chamber beneath the factory. Then it was just me, holding you, and Jude begging to die. I killed him because he killed you, which was what he wanted, it turned out.”

  “No great loss.”

  “No. But you were.” Her voice tightens. “I was still holding the knife I killed him with when the police came. I wasn’t thinking about them. I felt the breath leave your body. I listened to your last heartbeat. And then I was surrounded by people who would do their job and then go home to their families and laugh around their dinner tables and read their children bedtime stories and you and I were never going to get that because you were dead and I was alone.” Her voice breaks, and a cold finger traces the nape of my neck.

  “I would have given anything to bring you back.” She looks at me then, reining all feeling in. “So I did.”

  There are a thousand words circling my mind, but none can escape my throat.

  “My grandmother wrote me a letter,” she says, and I vaguely remember reading it, but nothing in it to explain the expression on her face. “She said, ‘You can choose to end life or choose to give it, but punishment will follow every reward.’ I can reward people, did you know?” She says that almost to herself, looking over my shoulder out at the city. “It’s one of the things she wrote, in her suicide note. One of her memories I have. Along with your great-great-grandfather discovering her. Her moving to England to live with your family.”

  “The letters you were reading, the journal”—I gesture to the trunks, the boxes, newly raging—“you knew what it was all about, yet you were giving me shit about keeping things from you?” Everything in me turns in on itself. “Who are you?”

  “I didn’t know I could bring you back that way. I didn’t know it would work.” She shrugs. Like she’s not talking about having murdered innocent people, but thought she’d try getting high because she was curious. “But I’m not sorry it did. You’re here.”

  “And they’re not,” I say in my newly hollowed-out voice.

  Her eyes glass over, hard and fathomless. “ ‘I would do it again.”

  It’s unreal that we’re standing in the same room, in the same universe, having this conversation. “I suppose it doesn’t matter now that the power’s out, as it were.”

  “Mine isn’t.”

  “How do you—no.” I nearly laugh. “I literally don’t want to fucking know. You’ll never do it again,” I manage to say, at full volume and without hesitation.

  “I’ll have to do it again. Because you don’t heal anymore. And it’s not temporary. I’ve been reading up.” She looks at the trunks. “Your father was right about some things.”

  “Not this,” I say. “Not ever this, not ever again.”

  “I’m not apologising for saving your life.”

  “It’s my life!”

  “And how many times have you tried to end it? Would you let me die?” she asks, but I’m not ready for it, so I say no.

  She leans back against the desk, jagged and unmovable. She’s a rock I want to break myself against. Her expression clarifies that she thinks this is a victory of sorts, and I’m so furious and consumed by shame that the last thing I say to her is, “But I never want to see you again.”

  47

  NO OTHER LIFE BUT THIS

  IF SHE REPLIES, I DON’T remember it. I don’t remember her packing and leaving. Only t
he sound of the door as it closes behind her. I stare at it for a moment and then lean my forehead against the wood and scream.

  In that forever moment there’s a storm inside me. When I can breathe again, I move to the window and stare at the street below. The day’s escaped, somehow—at dawn, Stella’s spine was intact and my life was unbroken. Now the dark street’s empty but for a black car. And then I see her. Mara strides down the cobblestones, a small speck, a dot, moving farther away until she turns the corner.

  I need to stop staring at the space where she used to be, but when I force my eyes from the window in a minute that feels like an eternity, I’m still here, in this fucking room, somehow fantastically unchanged since she’s left. It’s beyond fathoming—how did I get here? Pacing alone in a room of relics, so completely fucking lost?

  I can’t stand still and I can’t seem to leave, so I unlock one of the other trunks, small and brass, and start furiously looking through it, searching for a distraction, a diversion. I find one.

  An envelope, large and black, with gold calligraphy addressed to me at the North Yorkshire address. A condolence card, likely—the others seemed to be—but this is unique enough to divert my attention, which desperately needs diverting, so I rip it open, tearing a bit of the thick card that bears only two sentences.

  Condolences on your loss. Congratulations on your inheritance.

  —A.L.

  I throw the card like a disc, giving in to the fresh wave of disgust. I’m about to crush the envelope and bin it when I notice something peeking from the fold. Another paper, which I unfold as well, knowing I’ll regret it, but what’s one more regret to throw in with the lot?

  It’s a page torn from a book—some sort of history book. The title isn’t on it. A section about priest holes, the sixteenth-century secret passages created when being a Catholic priest was high treason.

  There are rooms in this house even I don’t know about.

  I crush the paper in my fist, toss it back into the trunk. The lid slams shut on its own, and with it, everything I’ve faced, to bring me to exactly this moment. He engineered what we are. I knew it, ignored it, and still ended up playing a hand of cards dealt long before I existed, without even knowing the game.

  “Only play the games you can win,” Jamie had said. I didn’t realise that the mere fact of my existence makes me a player. How do I win at someone else’s game, with someone else’s rules?

  I check my mobile, because it hasn’t sunk in, quite, that she’s gone. I check our texts, e-mails, expecting that little (1) to show up in the account I’ve got just for her, but there’s nothing new. Realising that there might never be anything new again—that I’ve told her I don’t want anything from her again, and she listened—that pain is next level. I can’t take my words back. I also can’t give back the lives that she took.

  My hands round into fists, and I dig my nails into my palms. They bleed.

  That’s never happened before; the fact of my not healing hasn’t quite sunk in either, I suppose. I consider it.

  I don’t have to live without Mara if I don’t want, not anymore. I can finally stop, put an end to it, reach the oblivion I’d been chasing, cut myself and bleed until there is no blood left. That would be an ending too.

  That’s when I see the little grey pouch on the floor, where Mara had been sitting. I know what’s inside before I untie the knot, before the single pendant spills into my palm. Mara’s taken the other with her.

  I know, then, that I won’t choose to die, not yet, at least. I wagered my heart on her and lost, again and again, but still I would do it. I could never bet on anyone else. I know how you love endings, Mara. But this isn’t ours.

  I fasten the chain around my neck.

  I won’t quit the game. I’ll destroy the fucking board.

  EPILOGUE

  THE MEETING OF TWO ETERNITIES

  THE AIR THINS BY THE second. I leave, face the lift, see the button, and know instantly that I can’t press it. I stride down the hall until I see the door, nearly hidden, for the stairs. I take them two at a time, penthouse to ground floor. I’m breathing hard, fast, my lungs bursting, my heart racing to catch up with my roaring mind. I explode out of the tower using the service exit, and then—

  “Got a light?”

  My head swings toward the voice: female, an alto, intimate with a familiar sarcastic edge, brandishing a South London accent. It belongs to a woman standing at the corner where I last saw Mara. A black car idles some paces away. Police? Someone sent from my family to find me? My mind’s running in a thousand directions, but her voice is an anchor, her question a command.

  She’s wearing a dress—silk, ivory, and the hem curls toward the East River in the warm breeze. I flick open my lighter when I’m close enough, and she bends slightly, dipping her cigarette in the flame, the tip turning amber. The light changes her face enough to leave an imprint that I will never forget for the rest of my life, however long or short it is.

  A fall of thick ink-black hair tumbles forward, and when she leans back, reveals skin the colour of burnished bronze, and one black iris fringed in thick black lashes. A wave of hair shades the other half of her face. She takes the cigarette between her first two fingers and bends a delicate elbow, wrist up, against her hip. Every movement of every joint is perfect and graceful, as if she’s been practicing for centuries, though even in darkness, she looks only a decade older than I at most. Her smile is like the glare of headlights, and I’m a deer caught.

  “Thank you.”

  The words curl around my nerves.

  A rush of feeling—nostalgia, déjà vu, inevitability, incredulity—forces words out of my mouth. “I have to—”

  “What?” she asks. “What do you have to do?”

  “Go,” I say, my voice fading at the edge.

  “Shame,” she says. “I was hoping you could help me.”

  That shakes me back into myself a bit, forcing out a mirthless grin. “I can’t help anyone.”

  “It’s a matter of life and death,” she says.

  The ridiculously dramatic gravity of the sentence shoves off the weight of her force. “If it’s mine, you’re wasting your time.”

  “It isn’t.”

  “Whose, then?”

  She tucks the wave of hair back behind her ear. “Someone we love.”

  I’ve seen this woman’s face before, captured in black and white, in a photograph I found in a trunk of my mother’s things, with my mother standing beside her. I’ve seen her painted in bold, bright brushstrokes hanging on a wall in Mara’s house, sitting alone, commanding the attention of everyone who saw her. She is beautiful—stunningly, familiarly, and I know. Even as I ask the question, I know.

  “Who are you?”

  “Call me Mara,” she says, adding that fully grown smile. “Everyone else does.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THIS BOOK WOULDN’T EXIST WITHOUT THE READERS who read and loved Mara Dyer’s story, and wanted to read more of it. I’m deeply grateful to you for giving me the chance to share Noah’s story, and to the team at Simon & Schuster for their enthusiasm and help in getting The Shaw Confessions out into the world.

  Special thanks to my editor Liz Kossnar, who jumped onto this project midstream and got it to the finish line, to Christian Trimmer, who helped me get it out of the gate, and to Lucy Ruth Cummins for making it look beautiful. I’m also always and especially grateful to my agent, Barry Goldblatt, for everything you do for me.

  Thanks also to Holly Black, Sarah Rees Brennan, and Kat Howard for helping me find my early footing with this book, and to Libba Bray, Nova Ren Suma, and Justin Weinberger for your encouragement along the way . Most of all, my forever-thanks to Stephanie Feldstein, who did the heaviest lifting, in every possible way.

  Last but never least, I am indebted to and beyond grateful for my growing family. I couldn’t do what I do without you, and I wouldn’t be where I am without you.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

 
MICHELLE HODKIN grew up in south Florida, went to college in New York, and studied law in Michigan. You can visit her online at michellehodkin.com.

  Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

  Simon & Schuster, New York

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  Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Michelle-Hodkin

  ALSO BY MICHELLE HODKIN

  THE MARA DYER TRILOGY

  The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer

  The Evolution of Mara Dyer

  The Retribution of Mara Dyer

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2017 by Michelle Hodkin

  Jacket photograph copyright © 2017 by Chris Crisman

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  Book design by Lucy Ruth Cummins

  The text for this book was set in Caslon.

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  ISBN 978-1-4814-5643-2

  ISBN 978-1-4814-5645-6 (eBook)