to risk rejection.
I had pitied her. Now I admired her.
“Twenty-seven days on from this moment, HarperCollins will agree to publish Samantha’s book,” Messenger said. “Samantha will read that letter seven times, will have no choice but to read it seven times. She will be frustrated by her compulsion, but she will also be elated. She will tell herself that now, at last, everything will change for the better.”
“But that’s not the way it works out,” I said.
“No,” Messenger said, and we were back in Samantha’s room, and her body was on the floor of her bedroom, stiffening, growing cold as it awaited her mother’s horrifying discovery that her only child was gone.
I shook my head. “I can’t do this, okay? I can’t. You have to let me go. I don’t want to see this. I don’t want to feel this, Messenger, whoever you are, whatever you are, I don’t . . .” I was crying. It should have been humiliating, crying in front of him.
“No one prefers this path,” he said. His voice was flat and devoid of emotion. But I saw something like nausea reflected in his expression. “No one would choose to feel another’s pain. But this is my . . . This is your fate, Mara.”
“No,” I said sharply. “This is all some kind of creepy trick!”
He didn’t deign to reply to that. He waited, silent, as the truth, or at least a part of it, began to sink in.
“I’m being punished,” I said.
Again, he said nothing. I wondered if I could find a way to feel what he was feeling—to know his mind as I had so easily penetrated the mind of Samantha Early—but when I turned my thoughts that way, I felt his mind retreat and fend me off.
It was like the door handle. I could see him, but I was not allowed to touch him. Not physically, not mentally. I was an open book to him, and he was closed to me.
I am not to be touched.
“Not all my . . . our . . . duties are quite so grim,” he said at last. “This terrible matter will hold for a while. And I think you could do with a change of scenery.”
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