I spend a lot of time being angry. It’s making me tired. I want to look happy like Ry all the time. “I’ll be there.”

“Great! I didn’t tell you, my mom had the room entirely redone based on your advice. I wrote down everything you said. She thought it was brilliant. So you get to come and see the fruits of your genius.”

“Did you do the popcorn machine?”

“First thing that went in.”

“I wouldn’t dream of being anywhere else.”

And that’s how, three hours later, I find myself snuggled into a couch in the dark in a room I designed, perfectly happy.

And that’s how, three hours and fifteen minutes later, I feel Ry’s hand slip into mine.

For that single second before I pull my hand away, before my brain and will and resolve kick in, it’s like magic. Real magic, not the stupid blessed-amulet kind, not the using-the-right-words-that-Isadora-can-never-know kind, but electricity and butterflies and a feeling of everything in the universe suddenly lining up exactly so and opening up an entirely new way to see, to do, to be.

I yank my hand away. It’s too much. I can’t—I can’t feel this. I can’t do this. I stand and flee the room before he can finish saying my name, run out of his house, start the long walk home with tears in my eyes.

Butterflies are stupid, fragile things that have beautiful and tragically short lives. Electricity kills people. I don’t need a new person to suddenly spring up under my skin and push out who I was, who I’ve already decided to be. Those feelings have no place in my life and I will not let myself be a fool in love, with love, let it take over and destroy me.

Love isn’t magic. Just like my family, just like my place in the universe, it’s something that I can’t keep, can’t make last.

I would rather lose Ry before I ever have him.

I stand in front of the mural, glaring at the image of my mother leaning over my father’s dead body as she lovingly puts all of the pieces of him back together so that he can be given life again.

“Isadora,” she says behind me, but I don’t turn. I won’t. She keeps trying to talk to me, trying to explain, but I won’t let her. I don’t want to hear her pretend like she loves me, pretend like I am anything other than her clever solution to the problem of no more worshippers.

“Isadora,” she says, and this time her voice is hard and sharp, making a headache blossom behind my right eye. Still I don’t turn, so she walks around, putting herself between the mural and me.

“Please,” she says, and the tone in her voice is something I’ve never heard. I’ve heard her be gentle and sweet, but she sounds almost . . . desperate. “Please talk to me. Please let me help you.”

I take a step back, narrowing my eyes, and fold my arms across my chest. “I can’t stop you from talking. But I never have to listen to you again.”

Rage blazes in her eyes, but is quickly snuffed out by something deeper and sadder, something that, for a fraction of a second, makes me want to step forward and wrap my arms around her in a hug. Comfort her.

No. Why would I comfort her? I take another step back.

That’s when I notice that the mural behind her has turned black. The history of my parents, the triumph of my mother—it’s all gone, swallowed up in darkness. A figure blacker than the black looms up behind Isis, holds out arms, and wraps them around her in the way that I wouldn’t.

It pulls her into the darkness, and I watch.

I just watch, too scared to move.

I do nothing.

10

Amun-Re, sitting at the head of the court of the gods, could not make a decision between Set and Horus. They fought bitterly for eighty years, with little ground gained. Gods took sides, but neither Set nor Horus was the clear winner of the throne.

Isis, well-known for her maternal zeal, had been barred from the proceedings. So she disguised herself as an old widow and asked for shelter in Set’s home. Spinning a tale of woe for him, she spoke of her son’s wrongful treatment at the hands of a usurper who stole his inheritance. Set, enraged, declared that such behavior was wrong.

He did it in front of the court of the gods, unwittingly condemning himself.

Clearly he hadn’t yet learned the lesson I knew from the day I could walk: my mother wins every argument.

“DON’T YOU THINK HE’S HOT?”

“I don’t care if he’s hot.”

Tyler smiles smugly at me. “So you do think he’s hot, you just don’t let that influence you.”

“I am holding a nail gun. Do you really want to keep up this conversation?”

She raises her hands in surrender. “We will continue when you are unarmed.”

I glare, turning back to the plywood bracing frames I’m nailing to the wall. The most important parts of design are the ones people never see, and since we finally got approval, I’ve spent the past two nights awake calculating and recalculating and sketching and graphing.

Plus, no sleep means no dreams. No dreams means no worries. I am letting this room consume me and push out thoughts of everything else.

Including inky blackness swallowing my tragic past every night in my dreams.

Including sugar-colored tongues and easy laughter and blue eyes and Ry.

Especially Ry.

He knew. He knew how I felt about relationships, that I just wanted to be friends. And that’s the worst part—I did want to be friends. More than I even realized until he blew it and we couldn’t be friends anymore, and I actually miss him. But he ruined everything. He knew, and he ruined it anyway.