The Glass Ballerina Who Danced On Knives

Penance

Say you love somebody new
And beat my heart, to black and blue
Then they leave, and it's me
You come back to
- The Cut That Always Bleeds, Conan Gray

"There has to be more to the puzzle than this. There has to be. I couldn't just be a random person born on the right calendar date. That can't be it. What about my mother? What about her secret—a secret she'd mentioned on my fifteenth birthday, a full year before Emily had died? What did Tobias Hawthorne have to apologise for? He didn't just randomly select a person with the right birthday. There has to be more to it than that." Avery paces nervously as I sit in the shadows, waiting.

"I'm sorry." Grayson speaks, beside Avery. "It's not Jameson's fault that he's like this. It's not Jameson's fault..." The invincible Grayson Hawthorne seemed to be having trouble talking. "... that this is how the game ends."

Avery sits on a step.

"I should have known." Grayson's voice swells. "I did know. The day that the will was read, I knew that all of this was because of me."

"What are you talking about?" Avery looks at him, like he's a fallen Angel and she was trying to figure out how his wings had been cut. "How is this because of you? And don't tell me you killed Emily."

No one—not even Thea—had called Emily's death a murder.

"I did," Grayson insists, his voice low and vibrating with intensity. "If it weren't for me, she wouldn't have been there. She wouldn't have jumped."

"Been where?" Avery's interest piques. "And what does any of this have to do with your grandfather's will?"

Grayson shudders. "Maybe I was meant to tell you," he says after a long while. "Maybe that was always the point. Maybe you were always meant to be equal parts puzzle... and penance." He bows his head.

"We'd always known her. Mr. and Mrs. Laughlin have been at Hawthorne House for decades. Their daughter and granddaughters used to live in California. The girls came to visit twice a year—once with their parents at Christmastime, and again in the summer, for three weeks, alone. We didn't see much of them at Christmas, but in the summers, we all played together. It was a bit like summer camp, really. You have camp friends, who you see once a year, who have no place in your ordinary life. That was Emily—and Rebecca. They were so different from the five of us. Skye said it was because they were all girls - which made Trinity feel...something, but I always thought it was because there were only two of them, and Emily came first. She was a force of nature, and their parents were always so worried she'd overexert herself. She was allowed to play cards with us, and other quiet, indoor games—but she wasn't allowed to roam outside the way we did, or to run.

"She'd get us to bring her things. It became a bit of a tradition. Emily would set us on a hunt, and whoever found what she'd requested—the more unusual and hard to find, the better—won."

"What did you win?"Avery asks.

Grayson shrugged. "We're brothers. We didn't have to win anything in particular—just win."

"And then Emily got a heart transplant," Avery notes.

"Her parents were still protective, but Emily had lived in glass cages long enough. She and Jameson were thirteen. I was fourteen. She'd breeze in for the summers, the consummate daredevil. Rebecca was always after us to be careful, but Emily insisted that her doctors had said that her activity level was only limited by her physical stamina. If she could do it, there was no reason she shouldn't. The family moved here permanently when Emily was sixteen. She and Rebecca didn't live on the estate, the way they had during visits, but my grandfather paid for them to attend private school."

Understanding fills Avery's eyes. "She wasn't just a summer camp friend anymore."

"She was everything," Grayson says—and he doesn't exactly say it like it was a compliment. "Emily had the entire school eating out of the palm of her hand. Maybe that was our fault."

"Or maybe," Gray continues, "it was just because she was Em. Too smart, too beautiful, too good at getting what she wanted. She had no fear."

"She wanted you," Avery says. "And Jameson, and she didn't want to choose."

"She turned it into a game." Grayson shakes his head. "And God help us, we played. I want to say that it was because we loved her—that it was because of her, but I don't even know how much of that was true. There's nothing more Hawthorne than winning."

"The thing was..." Grayson chokes. "She didn't just want us. She wanted what we could give her."

"Money?"

"Experiences," Grayson replies. "Thrills. Race cars and motorcycles and handling exotic snakes. Parties and clubs and places we weren't supposed to be. It was a rush—for her and for us." He pauses. "For me," he corrects. "I don't know what it was, exactly, for Jamie."

Jameson broke up with her the night she died.

"One night, I got a call from Emily, late. She said that she was done with Jameson, that all she wanted was me." Grayson swallows. "She wanted to celebrate. There's this place called Devil's Gate. It's a cliff overlooking the Gulf —one of the most famous cliff-diving locations in the world." Grayson angles his head down. "I knew it was a bad idea."

Avery chokes. "How bad?"

"When we got there, I headed for one of the lower cliffs. Emily headed for the top. Past the danger signs. Past the warnings. It was the middle of the night. We shouldn't have been there at all. I didn't know why she wouldn't let me wait until morning—not until later, when I realised she'd lied about choosing me."

Jameson had broken up with her. She'd called Grayson, and she hadn't been in the mood to wait. That little -

"Cliff diving killed her?" Avery asks.

"No," Grayson says. "She was fine. We were fine. I went to grab our towels, but when I came back... Emily wasn't even in the water anymore. She was just lying on the shoreline. Dead." He closes his eyes.

"Her heart."

"You didn't kill her," Avery says.

"The adrenaline did. Or the altitude, the change in pressure. I don't know. Jameson wouldn't take her. I shouldn't have, either."

"You know what my grandfather told me, after Emily's funeral? Family first. He said that what happened to Emily wouldn't have happened if I'd put my family first. If I'd refused to play along, if I'd chosen my brother over her." Grayson's vocal cords tense against his throat, as if he wants to say something else but couldn't. Finally, it comes. "That's what this is about. One-zero-one- eight. October eighteenth. The day Emily died. Your birthday. It's my grandfather's way of confirming what I already knew, deep down.
"All of this—all of it—is because of me."

And then she kisses him. Tenderly, gentle. Something they both need. He cups her face in his hands.

Something swells up in my throat and tears prick my eyes. Tears of anger, not sadness. I've had enough of those.

He kisses her back, and I feel the heat, even from behind the curtains.

I make an odd sound - part cough, part snort, part choke, part cry.

Grayson and Avery look up.

"Alright lovebirds," My red and black dress drags across the marble floor. "I'm not entirely innocent either, and I'll regret the choices I made for some time.

My eyes don't meet anyone's.

"But she made a choice, Gray. And we have a mystery to solve and a family to put back together. A family that means more to me and you than anything in the world."

A.N.:let's say this counts as yesterday bc I haven't slept, soo...
<33!
Have an amazing week! Ily