After a long, painful moment, he stood. Instead of looking up at him, I stared at the snowy porch floorboards.

“I am sorry, Ellie,” he said, his voice cold and formal. “But everything I do is to protect you at any cost, even if it means sacrificing your father’s reputation. I’m sure he was a good man, but for years the thing you knew as your father wasn’t him. It is a tragedy what happened to your family, but you have to understand that we cannot risk exposing our world to the human world. I hope one day you will forgive me.”

I looked up to meet his steady gaze. Our world. My family was my world. This nightmare I fell into the day I turned seventeen could never change that. I wanted to fly to my feet and hit him and scream at him, but it would do me no good. In truth, I was terrified of letting my emotions go. I’d lost control of my power for the first time in a long time, and from what little I could piece together from my memory, I’d hurt Will and Nathaniel. I’d hurt them badly, and I felt terrible for it. But my regret couldn’t make me forgive Will for what he’d done to my father’s name.

His gaze narrowed and darkened at me. “Your mother fought like hell for her life, and here you are ready to throw your own away.”

He turned and walked back into the house.

I didn’t follow him. I pulled out my phone. There were eleven voice mails. All of them were from Kate, one of my only remaining ties to the human world. It was just me and the darkness now.

My mother’s funeral went by in a haze. Fake friends and family I’d forgotten I had all attended, shared their condolences, gave me lifeless hugs. They all looked at me with pity, some with fear. The little girl whose daddy killed her mama and took off. When I stepped up to my mother’s coffin, I saw that they’d cleaned her up. No one could tell how the bones in her neck were shattered to dust, see the cracks in her skull or the bruises and gashes beneath all the makeup. They’d even put lipstick on her. When I touched her face, her skin was hard and cold, nothing like the softness and warmth that I had always known. She looked like a doll, frozen and clothed in a dress suit I knew she hated. She never wore it. That was why it looked brand-new. I think Nana had picked it out. How morbid, I thought, to have to pick out the clothes your daughter would be buried in. Perhaps it was even worse for the poor fool who did her hair and put the lipstick on her mouth. They could all be glad, though. No one saw her die but me.

I felt the strange glances from everyone at the funeral who expected me to be crying. That wasn’t going to happen. Nana had wanted me to say something about my mother to everyone, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t stand up there and feel all those eyes on me, knowing exactly what was going through their heads. Instead, Nana got up and spoke about how kind and generous my mother was, what a good daughter and mother she had been. Nana said nothing about my father, which was a wise decision. That day the world pretended my father had never existed. No one wanted to think about him, but of course he was on all our minds.

I could feel Will there at the funeral the entire time, hidden within the Grim, but he only let me see him once without me having to follow him into that Hell dimension. I never spoke even a word to him.

I would be moving in with Nana until I left for college in the fall, but I wasn’t ready to yet. I needed Kate. I needed to feel like a teenage girl. I needed to get away from reapers.

That night I curled up in Kate’s bed with my knees tucked to my chin. I hadn’t cried since the night my mother died, and I didn’t want to start again. It hurt too much. Kate’s mom forced me to eat dinner and even made hot cocoa, but I only took it because she was relentless. Now I felt sick to my stomach, and every time I closed my eyes to try and sleep, I was hit by terrible memories in the darkness of my mind.

Kate inched up behind me and rested her chin on my shoulder. She wrapped her arms around me and squeezed gently. I knew she meant well, so I wouldn’t punish her for being kind to me. She, like everyone else, thought my dad had killed my mom. Thanks to Will and Nathaniel.

“They’ll find him,” Kate whispered.

I said nothing. There was no way I could tell her the truth, and I wasn’t even sure I would want to if I could. Why should I bring her into this horrible world? She didn’t deserve that kind of punishment. But then again, why did I?

At Nana’s house, I was moved into the guest room, a room filled with too much white and nautical blue and maple wood furniture. It had been my mother’s room when she was growing up, but her scent and feel had long since faded. Nana had already gone to my house and packed up certain belongings my mom had kept, things that were special to her, and to Nana and me. All of them were still in boxes on one side of my room that I had only stared at since they’d arrived. My clothes were still in the suitcase or in a pile next to them. The hangers in the closet were empty. To unpack and move in here would be to accept that my old life, my old home—everything—was gone forever.

Returning to my house and walking past where everything happened rebroke my heart with every step. Will had cleaned up all evidence of the reaper like he and Nathaniel had discussed. There was no dark stain in the spot where I’d torn apart the reaper, no dried blood on the walls, no claw marks, nothing. It was as if a tornado had blown through my foyer, and no one had ever died. I don’t know how Will did it, but I had a feeling that book of Nathaniel’s that Will took wasn’t a Martha Stewart home-cleaning guide. Magic had to have been involved. The police had questioned me relentlessly about the inconsistency of the damage, but I had no information for them, and they soon gave up.