The Becoming of Noah Shaw (The Shaw Confessions Book 1)

AS SOON AS I’m alone, I text Stella to say that I’ll meet her tonight, and she almost instantly sends me a location. Jamie and Goose seem to have retreated to their rooms, and Daniel’s gone back to his dorm, which saves me the trouble of having to lie about where I’m going when I leave. I write Mara a short note in case she emerges, then take the train to the park Stella mentioned. There’s an old stone house at the entrance. Stella’s waiting for me outside the gate.

“Thanks for coming,” she says.

“Rather odd place to meet, isn’t it?”

A slight, shivery shrug. “It’s between your place and ours.”

“Meeting in the middle,” I say, looking about. “Obvious metaphor or just convenient?”

Her eyes crinkle at the corners.

“You’re not worried about walking through parks at night by yourself?”

She arcs an eyebrow. “This is Park Slope. And it’s basically a playground.”

“Playgrounds without children are even eerier.” A fall breeze rustles the trees, and a swing nearby creaks, making my point . . . until I see the dog that brushed it, squatting as his owner dutifully waits for him to finish his business.

“What did you tell Mara?” she asks, refocusing my attention. “About where you were going?”

“Nothing,” I say. “She went to bed.”

Stella’s forehead scrunches. “So early?”

“We had a . . . disagreement.”

“Trouble in paradise?” She examines me, and that’s when I notice her noticing my wrapped-up hand.

I take the opportunity to look, really look, at Stella for the first time. She is different from the girl I knew at Horizons, which might as well’ve been years ago. It’s not just that her hair’s lost its shine, or that her face has hardened, her curves whittled down. There’s something missing behind her eyes. Something lost.

“How’d you end up in New York?” I ask.

She blinks. “I was in New York. With Jamie and . . . Mara.”

“Right, but as I understand it, you left?”

“I went home.”

I wait for her to finish. Clearly, she has something she wants to get out, or she wouldn’t’ve asked me here.

“Once it was obvious we weren’t going to find a cure for our . . . Gifts . . . I just. I stayed for a while after that, but then after Mara . . .” Her voice trails off. “I was going to go back to Miami—I didn’t know where else to go. But I left without anything—I had no money, no friends. I literally didn’t know what to do. I ended up sitting for hours in Grand Central, just sitting there, when Leo just walked right up to me.”

“What a coincidence.”

She avoids my eyes. “It wasn’t a coincidence. One of us can . . . find people like us. We told you that.”

“You did, but failed to mention whom,” I say, bored by the mystery already. Leo wouldn’t give anything away, but perhaps Stella might.

“She doesn’t live in the brownstone,” she says. “It doesn’t matter—the point is, Leo found me, told me I had a choice—he’d help me get home if I wanted to go, but also said I had a place with them if I ever wanted it.”

“How generous.”

She shrugs one shoulder.

“So you went home with a perfect stranger?”

At that, she laughs a little. “Safer than staying with my so-called friends.”

“And your family?”

Her bitterness deepens. “Not everyone has a perfect home life.”

“We have that in common.”

“Anyway, Leo wouldn’t have hurt me. I couldn’t hear his thoughts, but I knew—he’s not like anyone else I’ve ever met. He’s special.”

Aren’t we all.

“Look, the town house is like a safe house for people like us. Anyone can go there, anytime, and they take care of each other. It’s like—they’re like a family, okay?”

They, not we.

“And they welcomed me in, and Leo helped me figure out what I’m capable of. And Felix, and Felicity and S—” she catches herself. Was she about to say Sam? I want to ask, but I don’t want to throw her off. “They matter to me. I’m worried for them.”

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“Daniel said,” she corrects. “You didn’t.”

“Is this why you asked me here in the middle of the night? Because honestly, you needn’t have gone to the trouble—”

“I wanted to talk to you about Mara.”

I’m on guard, but try not to show it. “What about her?”

Her eyes dart away. “You seemed . . . left out . . . at the house earlier.”

Nerve struck. I pretend otherwise. “Excuse me?”

Stella meets my eyes. “What did she tell you about what happened after Horizons?”

“Why are you asking me this?”

“Because I heard what you were thinking!” Her voice echoes in the empty park, but it’s the words that lift the hairs on the back of my neck.

She takes a deep breath. “You were right. I was listening to you.”

“And what is it you think you understand?” My voice is low, quiet, but I’m furious.

“That Mara and Jamie went through something together that you weren’t a part of.”

She’s pressing on bruises, and she knows it. I refuse to give her the satisfaction. “You didn’t need to read my thoughts to know what’s literally true.”

“I know that she never told you what that something was.”

“She never told me because I never asked.”

Stella lifts her chin. “Because you don’t actually want to know.” She takes a step closer to me. “With your friend around? I can hear more than just the words you think before you say them out loud. I can hear what you’re afraid to admit even to yourself.”

My breath quickens as I grow angrier. “You were spying, in the most exploitive, violative way. Why should I believe anything you say?”

“Because you know I’m telling the truth.”

“I can’t believe I came out here for this.”

A bitter smile. “I can. You came because you know something’s wrong and despite acting like you don’t give a shit, you give a shit more than anyone—about this, at least. You don’t want anyone else to die. I may not be able to read your mind right now, but I know you can tell whether I’m lying or not. And you know I’m not.”

“I know you think you’re not. But just because you believe something doesn’t make it true.”

“And what do you believe, Noah? You think all of this is a coincidence? Everyone dying all of a sudden? Your father was the first, wasn’t he?”

The words I was about to say die in my throat. Does she know about him? What he did? Who he was?

Instead of those questions, I ask, “So you did send the clippings.”

She squints. “No. I didn’t. But I did read the obituary.”

There was nothing of consequence in the obituary. Which is what I’m about to say when Stella says, “It was a lie.”

I keep my voice even. “Was it.”

“He disappeared before he died.”

How does she know? I want to ask, but I don’t want to give anything away. “Why do you think that?”

“Are you saying it’s not true?” she asks. “That he didn’t disappear and then commit suicide—which happens to be how our friends are dying? How Sam died, at his funeral?”

A finger of ice trails my spine.

“What do you think Mara has to do with it?” I ask, but I’m feeling uneasier by the second, and my mind rebels against Stella’s words, pressing on me to leave. “Look, whatever happened between you and Mara, you’re clearly not over it, but I couldn’t care less, so if that’s all there is, I’ll just be going—”

“Whatever happened between me and Mara?” She laughs without humour. “God, you really don’t know her at all.”

“Oh, but you do. Because you were so close?”

“Because I was there. When she murdered Dr. Kells—”

“And what’s his name, right? Sorry, if you’re trying to shock me, you’re going to have to try harder.”

“Do you know what Mara did to him?”

“Killed him,” I say plainly. “Freed you, as I understand it.”

Another icy smile. “Yeah. She killed him. But not before cutting out his eye. While he was still alive.”

Got me there. I try not to show it, not to betray that her words cut me off midbreath.

“And she didn’t just murder Dr. Kells. She butchered her.”

“All of you were prisoners, test subjects. Mara got you out of there.”

“She did, but not before locking herself in a room with Kells and cutting her into a thousand pieces.”

“A bit dramatic—”

“With a scalpel. That she still has.”

That’s . . . indisputably disturbing.

She throws me a knowing look. “Oh, she left that part out?”

“Are you actually saying that you think Mara’s responsible for people she doesn’t even know committing suicide?”

Stella says nothing.

“What’ve you told Leo about her? Your friends?”

She lets out a puff of laughter. “That’s what you’re worried about? What I’ve told them about her?”

I’m feeling ill, light-headed, and not remotely about to admit that Stella is right about anything, any of this. Mara had no reason to want strangers dead—she wanted to find out about Sam as much, if not more, than I did. I stop playing defence, start playing offence.

“If Mara hadn’t killed Kells, and Wayne, you’d probably still be there, or dead. And,” I add, as Stella opens her mouth to speak, “despite all this, you still escaped with her and Jamie. And stayed with them for quite a while.

“I did stay. Until I couldn’t anymore.”

I already know I don’t want to hear why. “You were fucked with, abused, tortured. Whatever any of you did or didn’t after, you’re not responsible for it.”

She turns on me then, the force of her almost knocks me back. “We’re responsible for everything we do. We always have a choice.”

My words, once.

“And Mara chose wrong. Every time. There was this trucker—”

“Stop.”

“A trucker picked us up. I had to go to the bathroom, so we stopped and got out and Mara came into the bathroom and I left and she came out covered—soaked—in blood and he was dead.”

And? “That’s not all of it, is it though?”

She pauses. Then, “What?”

“Come on. You don’t expect me to believe she just killed someone for using the bathroom.”

I hear, see, the blood rush to her cheeks. “He tried to—he was waiting for me.”

There it is. “In the women’s bathroom. At the rest stop.”

Silence expands like a bubble around her.

“He raped you?” I ask.

A small shake of Stella’s head, and I know. I wasn’t there to witness it, but I know.

Mara’s been through—hell. It’s the only way to describe it, how this all started.

The boy, if he can be called that, barely human as he was, started out as her boyfriend before he became her tormentor. A night out with him and her friends had ended up with her trapped in an abandoned insane asylum, after he tried to force her, nearly raped her himself—that’s how her ability first manifested. That’s how the woman who raised him, a doctor bought and paid for by my father, forced it out of her. Mara thought she’d killed him and her friends that night, but he made it clear to her—and only her—that he was still alive, tormenting her with his existence, and no one believed her but me. I was there for that bit. Every second he lived tortured her. He took her freedom and crushed it, and then Kells did the same. Mara was violated, in every way, by people she was supposed to trust—her boyfriend. Her doctor. And she was committed for it—not even her family believed her, the people she trusted more than anyone in the world.

Her parents don’t know. They thought they were helping, genuinely, and her mother would fall on her sword if she knew the truth. Mara knows that. She knows it’s not their fault. And yet.

Mara also knows she didn’t deserve what’d been done to her. But in Horizons, I saw this tiny cell of guilt—the thought that she accidentally killed her best friend—turn into shame when she believed she killed her friend to save herself. It grew every day, cancerous, threatening to eat her alive.

Maybe it finally did. I may not know everything about Mara—it seems I know less than I thought, but I know this—she would never let anyone be violated the way she’d been again. Stella might not get it, but I do.

“Mara came in. She killed him, and you got out.”

“Yes, but—”

“She saved you.”

“You weren’t there!” Her words tear at the trees, sear the air. “You didn’t see her face when she walked back to the truck. You didn’t see her expression when she decided to kill these two dumb college kids for practically nothing—”

What?

Tears begin to fall. “You don’t know about the subway. The train tracks. Jamie and Mara haven’t told you.”

“Look, Stella—”

“It wouldn’t matter to you that Jamie forced these two assholes onto the subway tracks to punish them for urinating on a homeless woman and calling him a—” She stops, and the word she doesn’t say hangs there, sick and poisonous.

“They were racist, and horrible,” Stella says, sniffs. “But they didn’t deserve to die.”

“Did they?”

“Did they what?”

“Die?”

Another head shake. “Jamie just wanted to scare them. But Mara”—she breaks into another laugh, chilled—“she was going to kill them. She kept them there, I don’t know how—their noses began to bleed and—”

The droplet of blood from Sam’s nose that ran over his lip, fell into the puddle beneath his swaying body.

A slight smear of blood on Beth’s first knuckle . . . as if she’d wiped her nose just before jumping.

The weight of everything I realise I don’t know about Mara, didn’t want to know, is suddenly too much.

“They didn’t die,” Stella says, letting out the anger she has left. “But they would have. Jamie stopped her from killing them. Otherwise—” She stops, breathing hard, wipes her eye with her wrist. “You weren’t there.”

And there it is. That bruise that won’t heal, the fracture still splintered. And she’s pressing on it. Bending it. Waiting for me to break.

I’m so tired, suddenly. A wave of exhaustion crests, pulls me down with it. I want nothing more than to leave Stella there in the park and sleep. Forever.

“You’re right, Stella,” I say casually. “I wasn’t there. And you weren’t there when she sacrificed her own life for her brother’s.” Both brothers, in fact, but I leave that bit out. “So what are you trying to say, exactly? That she’s a monster? Bringing death and destruction in her wake, wherever she goes?” The minute I say it is the minute I realise that that’s what my father had been saying about her. How he tried to persuade me to kill her.

Stella lets out a shivery breath. Her eyes flutter closed. “What I’m saying is that she’s not who you think she is. She’s changed.”

My head feels numb. I can’t do this much longer. “And you haven’t?”

“Of course, I changed too.”

I nod. “You left Mara and Jamie—”

“And Daniel,” she adds.

“But now here you are, fetched up in Brooklyn after abandoning them—”

“It wasn’t like that—”

“But you’re lecturing me about Mara, who’s given more of herself for the people she loves than you will ever know.”

The transformation is instant. Her face hardens, and she takes a step back, crunching dead leaves. “How much, Noah?”

“What?”

“How much of herself has Mara given up?”

When I don’t answer, Stella says, “You don’t know what she’s given up either.” She’s the one to turn around first, to start walking away. But she tosses one look, one sentence, at me as she leaves.

“But you will.”