Tomorrow I Become a Woman

A Debt Not Her Own

Chapter 4: A Debt Not Her Own

Tam found her on the kitchen floor around midnight, still sitting where she'd slid down against the cabinet after her mother had finally gone, hollowed-out, to bed. He was in his nightshirt, hair sticking up on one side, holding the ragged stuffed rabbit he swore to anyone who asked he'd outgrown two years ago and clearly hadn't.

"You're not sleeping either," he said. It wasn't an accusation. It was just a fact, delivered the way ten-year-olds deliver facts, flat and unadorned.

"No."

He sat down next to her without being invited, the way only a little brother can, close enough that his shoulder pressed into her arm, and was quiet for a while. Wren had spent all evening being talked to by adults about debts and bargains and things two hundred years old, and there was something almost unbearably restful about sitting next to someone who just wanted to sit.

"I heard you being sick outside," Tam said eventually. "By the fence. I looked out the window."

"You should be asleep."

"You should be asleep too, but you're not, so I don't think that's a real rule right now." He picked at a loose thread on the rabbit's ear. "Is it going to hurt? Tomorrow?"

Wren wanted, badly, to lie to him. She'd been lied to gently for seventeen years by people who loved her and thought it was kinder, and she had just spent the whole evening learning exactly how much that kind of kindness cost, and she found she couldn't do it to him, not even to spare him one night's sleep.

"I don't know," she said. "I don't think anyone who hasn't gone knows for certain. But I'm not going to just let it happen to me, Tam. I've got Bastian, and I've got Mother finally telling me the truth, and I'm going to fight it as hard as I know how."

"Will you win?"

"I don't know that either." She put her arm around him, and he let her, which he almost never did anymore, being ten and increasingly convinced that hugging his sister was beneath him. "But I'd rather tell you the truth and have you scared with me than lie to you and have you scared alone. That's the one thing I learned tonight that I actually want to keep."

He was quiet for a long moment, working through that with the particular seriousness of a child handed something too big and determined to carry it properly anyway. "If you don't come back," he said finally, very small, "can I have your room? It's bigger than mine."

Wren laughed — a real laugh, wet and surprised, the kind that comes out sideways when you least expect to still have one in you. "You absolute goblin. Yes. You can have my room."

"Good." He leaned his head against her shoulder, satisfied, and within ten minutes he was properly asleep, the way children can just switch off mid-crisis, and Wren sat there on the cold floor with her brother's weight against her arm and found she was crying again, quietly, for an entirely different reason than she had been an hour before.

Bastian came to the kitchen door a little after that, having apparently decided that propriety could wait until after the world stopped threatening to end. Wren let him in with Tam still half-draped over her, and Bastian's face did something complicated when he saw them — softened, in a way she hadn't seen it soften yet, even during the frog story.

"I can come back," he said quietly.

"He sleeps like the dead. It's fine." Wren shifted Tam gently against the cabinet, tucking a folded dish towel under his head for a pillow, and stood, joints stiff from the floor. "You look terrible, by the way."

"I've been called worse tonight. Mostly by your uncle." He held up his mother's worn notebook, the cover soft with handling. "I couldn't sleep either. I kept rereading her notes trying to find something I'd missed the first forty times. I think I found it."

They sat at the table, careful to keep their voices low. He opened the notebook to a page near the back, dense with cramped handwriting and cross-outs, and Wren saw her mother's story reflected back at her in someone else's research — a pattern of early bargains, desperate offers made before the appointed night, always granted, always more costly than they looked.

"My mother believed the pact isn't as fixed as this village teaches it," Bastian said. "She believed it can be reshaped, not broken — nothing that old gives up a claim for nothing — but reshaped, if the offer's made by the person it actually concerns, in full understanding, instead of made on their behalf by someone too frightened to know what she was signing away." He looked up. "I think that's what went wrong for your mother. She made her offer honestly, but she made it alone, at seventeen, with no one telling her what the terms would eventually cost. I don't think you have to make that same mistake."

"You think I can out-bargain something that's been doing this for two hundred years."

"I think you're the first Ashworth in longer than that who gets to walk in already knowing what it wants." His voice was steady, but his hands, Wren noticed, were not — he'd been picking at the corner of the notebook page until it had gone soft and fraying. "I also think I should be honest that I don't actually know if it'll work. I've read my mother's notes a hundred times and I still don't have a guarantee for you. I wish I did."

"Why does it matter to you this much?" Wren asked. "You came for Corinne. For a promise to your mother. You could have your answer about the wall and go home tomorrow and never think about Hollow Bend again."

Bastian was quiet for a moment, turning the question over like he was checking it for a trap. "Because I got here and found a village that's spent two centuries turning a horror into a bake sale," he said finally. "Casseroles and hymnals and everyone very politely not looking at the eleven names with nothing after them. And then I found you, standing in front of that wall counting them, the same way I've counted them for two years, and I thought — I don't want to be the man who gets his answer and leaves the next girl to become the next blank space. I don't think I could live with that any better than my mother lived with Corinne's."

He reached for her hand, not the marked wrist, just her hand, plain and rough with pencil calluses, and Wren let him take it because some stubborn, tired part of her had been waiting all day for someone to reach for her like she was a person and not a debt coming due.

"I don't have anything clever left to say," she admitted. "I've cried twice tonight and thrown up once and my ten-year-old brother just asked if he could have my room if I don't come back, and I told him yes, because it is bigger."

Bastian huffed out something that was almost a laugh, tired and surprised out of him. "That's a very practical child."

"He gets it from our mother." Wren looked down at their joined hands on the table, at the pale mark curling just above them. "Tomorrow I'm supposed to let the Wood decide what I become. I don't want to do that anymore."

"Then don't," Bastian said. "Decide first. I'll be there. Whatever it costs to help you do that, I'm not going to be thirty miles away wondering, the way my mother spent two years wondering about Corinne."

Outside, past the dark shape of the orchard, Hollow Wood waited the way it had waited every night of Wren's life — patient, unbothered, certain of tomorrow. For the first time, Wren let herself hope it might be wrong to be so certain.