Last time, when Rhine doesn’t respond to Linden’s selfless offer of being locked back up at the mansion with the rapists, he suggests she go live with his uncle instead. Anything to keep her from actually doing something.

Now the family is enjoying the limo ride. Rhine informs us that the baby looks great. He’ll also grow up to buy women and rape them.

And Cecily is mad for him. I’ve never seen anyone love anything as much as she loves that baby. Even now, though she’s facing the sky that rushes past, she’s singing a lullaby for him.

Rhine has not told her about how Evil Mad Scientist switched him onto formula to try to keep Cecily from being too involved and how she just watched Cecily cry about it while feeling superior. Maybe if she did, Cecily would be more okay giving Rhine her precious privacy.

What’s really sad is it’s not a lullaby, it’s a poem Jenna used to read, which was probably the closest Cecily ever got to hearing one.

I can’t believe Vaughn let us use the limo for this. Maybe he’s trying to stay on Linden’s good side, to manipulate him by being contrite and reliable.

Linden using the limo for this is not an attempt to manipulate Rhine, though. Not at all.

Cecily tries to ask where they are and Linden either legitimately never bothered to find out because he has people for the whole driving thing or he just doesn’t want Cecily getting any ideas.

a two-story brick house that looks as old and stable as the mansion, but much smaller. Surrounding it are half a dozen tarps arranged like black car-shaped ghosts. There’s a dilapidated shed and a windmill. The roof is covered in reflective panels.

Cecily is evil and judgey about that, because if we remembered she led a life of poverty rather than wealth it might get in the way of how everything is her fault, and apparently the “reflective panels” aren’t tinfoil but solar panels, because solar panels work by reflecting sunlight in this world. Rhine, being morally superior, thinks that this just looks like the houses where she lived. Since people couldn’t afford electricity despite random streetlamps in abandoned areas being on last book, they relied on their own solar panels, which were so much more affordable but not so much that the government just used them to provide widespread cheap electricity.

The limo stops, and I open my door quickly, afraid of sleeping gas or locks or snakes that could come slithering through the vents to strangle me.

In this series, bad things just happen to girls. She’s not afraid someone would do this, because the book knows even Evil Mad Scientist can’t work as a scapegoat here with his son sitting next to her. But she can’t say that the person who’s actually done this to her was Linden, or that he’s the one who might toy with her this way. So she’s just afraid of it happening, causeless.

Then she stares up at the stars and Rapist-chan stares up at them and he says his uncle he never mentioned before taught him constellations but he was so bad at it :(((((( so she helps him find one.

He turns toward me, and I can feel his breaths, so faint and unassuming that they only move the finest hairs around my face. I don’t dare take my eyes from the stars. My heart is pounding. Memories rush through me. Memories of his fingers unbuckling my shoes, inching under the strap of my red party dress. His lips on mine. The darkness of my bedroom swimming with ivy and champagne glasses the night we came home late from the expo. Snow dusting his shoulders and his dark hair the night we said good-bye.
Cecily slams the car door, snapping me back to reality.

THANK GOD.

Cecily then demands to stay, afraid the guy here might hurt Rhine. And Rhine wants to yell at her for being rude and how the man she’s never met and knows only as a relative of her kidnapper’s family is totally so nice letting her stay there and anyway stupid Cecily’s useless and wouldn’t help no matter what. But Rhine is such a nice person, unlike stupid rude Cecily, she decides to say nothing so Cecily will stay rather than go back to Evil Mad Scientist.

(The possibility that Cecily may have only said this for exactly that reason is unmentioned. Or the possibility the murdering lunatic she’s afraid of is Evil Mad Scientist – he can say she ran off in the night.)

“My uncle isn’t a lunatic,” Linden says, and opens the car door again to pull out the suitcase that was sliding around the floor on the way here.
“Why does your father hate him so much, then?” Cecily says.
Linden’s father is no judge of who is or is not a lunatic

Neither is Linden, given he thinks his dad is great and Rhine’s a lying traitor. But he’s the love interest and Cecily’s the competition.

Rhine then thinks about how super right Rapist-chan is about her not leaving, because she tried so hard before and then she’s back where she started and Gabriel must think she’s dead and obviously that means she should take even longer to try to contact him and say she’s not.

Cecily and Linden are talking—something about what counts as eccentricity versus insanity, I think, and the conversation is getting terse as they interrupt each other. Linden is a creature of saintlike patience, but Cecily has a way of wearing anyone down.

I hate this fucking book so much.

We don’t know what the conversation is exactly, but my guess is the real thing that’s upsetting Cecily is this guy presumably does have wealth, being a member of the family. She grew up in poverty and deprivation and here this guy is slumming by choice. This argument makes no sense to Rapist-chan, who assumes everyone’s life is just because they chose it. He chose to live in luxury, his wives chose to be locked up, the girls he didn’t pick chose to be shot, the ragged people he sees dying in the streets are so eccentric!

“Does he know we’re coming?” I ask.
“I told him last week when I visited,” he says.
“How often do you come out here?” Cecily says, wounded. “You never told me.”

But really, Rapist-chan was every bit as much a prisoner, the poor dear!

They head inside because eccentric means not bothering to answer the door.

He sees me first, then Cecily. “These are your wives?” he says.
Linden hesitates. But he doesn’t have to answer, because the man returns to his work rather unceremoniously and adds, “I thought you said there were three of them.”
“Just two,” Linden says, with so little emotion it gives me pause. It’s as if Jenna never existed.

As far as he’s concerned, she never did. She was the fucktoy, you were the replacement goldfish, and Cecily is his ambulatory womb.

Which he proves: “And this is my son,” he adds, taking the baby from Cecily’s arms. “Bowen.” by the kid being the only one he bothers introducing.

Proving that no, this guy isn’t any better, all he does is say Bowen doesn’t look like Linden, then gets a better look and insists that he doesn’t look anything like Linden and who’s kid is he really, which is not really a funny statement given what could happen to Cecily if Linden isn’t, or thinks he isn’t, the father.

“He’s mine,” Cecily says.
Reed snorts. “How old are you? Ten?”
“Fourteen,” she says through gritted teeth.

That’s his response to his nephew having a kid wife. Not horror or sympathy, just mocking her for being so young.

“Doll, you could be her ghost,” Reed says. “Do you believe in reincarnation?”
“She can’t be a reincarnation of Rose,” Cecily says, indignant. “They were both alive at the same time.”
Reed looks at her like she’s something he just stepped in, and she inches closer to Linden’s side.

Evil Mad Scientist likes Cecily, Good Uncle thinks she’s scum who should be seen and not heard. But he’s definitely good because he wants Cecily to shut up so he can keep paying attention to the only people who matter, Rapist-chan and Rhine.

my nephew’s story was confusing. You’re running away from him, and he’s helping you?”

And he knows what “wives” actually are. If he didn’t, he’d be confused why Rapist-chan was helping a wife who was leaving him or why she was here if she left before, but he has no problem understanding that she escaped and was dragged back. Rapist-chan meets him every week, so he certainly had input on everything that’s happened. Evidently, he was fine with it.

For some reason, though, Rapist-chan lied about how she was in a car accident. He’s also agreed Rhine will help him in the shop without bothering to tell Rhine that was a condition.

Cecily is upset and thinks he’s doing it because he’s mad. Linden says it’s a favor and anyway she’s just so good at handling herself isn’t she.

I nod like I’m not at all unnerved by this new cold side to him. Not cruel like his father. Not warm like the husband who sought me out on quiet nights. Something in between. This Linden has never woven his fingers through mine, never chosen me from a line of weary Gathered girls, never said he loved me in a myriad of colored lights.

Rhine seems to have forgotten what happened to the rest of them. I don’t think she ever referenced it in the previous book either, so I guess it was really only Jenna that remembered what Linden did.

They go to Rhine’s room and Rapist-chan tells her that his uncle won’t ask questions about why she’s not staying with him. She doesn’t think anything about the entire family’s cheerful support of kidnapping, murder and rape, but is upset that he and Cecily are still going back. She attempts to justify how this is all her fault and he just doesn’t believe her, but if he wanted to know, he could go down there.

But the words come out of me anyway. “Don’t go.”
He looks at me.
“Don’t go,” I say. “And don’t take Cecily back there. I know you don’t believe me, but I have a terrible feeling that—”
“I can take care of Cecily,” he says. “I would have taken care of you, too. If I’d known you were so worried about my father.”

There’s different ways you can read this, but to me, I picture him shutting down as soon as she says Cecily’s name. If she said not to go because she wanted him, he’d have cared, but if it’s the same concern she feels for Cecily, it’s not love.

Linden then explains why he’s so good and pure and just doesn’t understand:

“My father thought that if you didn’t want to be married to me, he could have you. It’s because of your eyes. He wanted to study them, and he took it too far. He can be that way.” His eyebrows knit together, and he looks at his feet, struggling to make sense of what he’s saying, to force logic where there is none. “He isn’t the monster you think he is. He just—he gets so into his work that he forgets people are people. He gets carried away.”
“Carried away?” I spit back. “He drove needles into my eyes, Linden! He murdered a newborn—”
“Don’t you think I know my own father?” he interrupts. “I’d trust him before I’d believe anything you say. You couldn’t even do me the dignity of telling the truth.”

So she has nothing to fear from his father, but he’d have protected her from his father if she’d asked. But everything she says his dad did is a lie and he won’t take any action based on it, including protecting her. Cecily could prove her story, but no one cares about Cecily.

Rhine just emos about how she almost told him but she didn’t trust him she’s so terrible. Linden tells her he’d have let her go if she’d said she didn’t love him. I don’t know how the book imagines this to be true when he kept all of them locked up, but it is:

“You might have,” I admit. “But not your father.”

He says he does what he wants. She says no, he does what his dad wants. There’s no evidence of that and she only says it because the things he does are so monstrous not even she can justify them, only blame them on someone else. He leaves and tells her to tell Cecily he’s waiting by the car. Whether or not this is because he doesn’t care Cecily kept saying she wanted to stay or because he didn’t even pay enough attention to hear it isn’t clear.

The author appears to assume readers tune out Cecily as well, because she has to repeat again that she doesn’t want to leave Rhine.

“This place looks like it could give you cancer or something.” She’s remembering that word, “cancer,” from a soap opera Jenna used to watch. It’s a disease that was eliminated from our genetics.
“I don’t think cancer was something you could catch,” I tell her.

Rhine is actually wrong on this one. We have a whole word just for the class of things that give you cancer, because there’s so much.

Only now does Rhine bother to look over Cecily and see that she looks terrible. Also, she’s splashed water on her face, which means she went to the bathroom to throw up.

“It’s not so bad,” she says softly. “Linden takes care of me.”

The obvious reading is it’s not bad because Linden helps. More likely, she means it’s not bad because Linden pays attention to her and that’s worth suffering. His father may no longer care about her now that he doesn’t need to spy on the other two wives, and there’s no one else with her on the floor now.

I wonder if it has even occurred to her or to Linden that she hardly had a rest between pregnancies.

Remember how you wouldn’t stop bitching about how she was reading all the books she could find about pregnancy? She knows. And your precious Rapist-chan does too, because he was fine banning her from walking or crying for half her last pregnancy on the basis she was so fragile she might miscarry.

Rhine insists only Evil Mad Scientist knows.

I’m scared that she’ll enter that dark hall, descend the stairs, and be forever in Vaughn’s clutches. I think she’s scared too, because she doesn’t move.

While Rhine has a lot to say about how nothing is Rapist-chan’s fault, Cecily is kept at the edges. This is the only point Rhine’s admitted Cecily knows about what’s happening and has every reason to be afraid, even though just last chapter she was telling Rhine she knows but there’s nothing she can do to escape it.

“Ready to go?” He stands in the doorway, mostly in shadow.
“I’m staying the night,” she says.
They have some sort of conversation with their eyes. A husband-and-wife thing—something I could never quite get the hang of. Cecily wins, because Linden picks up the diaper bag and says, “I’ll be back for you in the morning, first thing.”

The book never seems to consider that this is just evidence he doesn’t care all that much.

Of course, we can’t have Cecily existing without going on about how annoying she is, so she’s thrashing around while she sleeps and has started snoring like she did last pregnancy in a way that’s obviously a medical complication. She wakes up, apologizes and tries really hard to stay still. Rhine also mentions her throwing up and Cecily says not to tell Rapist-chan because he’s so delicate and nervous.

That’s to be expected after what happened with Rose’s pregnancy. But it’s not as though I can tell her that.

Except she could. She states this and there’s nothing else, no explanation. She could.

Just as I’m beginning to dream, she says, “I think about those other girls in the van with us. The ones who were killed.”

So it’s not that only Jenna kept remembering, it’s that only Rhine forgot.

It’s not something my sister wives and I ever talked about, the odd and horrific thing that bonded us to one another.

See? Jenna doesn’t exist to you either.

I especially wouldn’t expect to hear about it from Cecily, who has always wanted to be the happy housewife.

Yes, her utter terror of you not being a happy housewife really made it clear she was vapid and never thought about it, as did her hysteria over bad things happening because those things weren’t supposed to happen any more.

“I just wanted you to know that,” she says. “I’m not a monster.”

And…Rhine apologizes for this. Perfunctorily, but she says that Jenna’s death wasn’t Cecily fault. Of course, when Cecily says that it was, she can’t think of anything to say, presumably because it’s so true. Rhine also again tells us how grown-up Cecily seems, adding that she’s been all alone since Rhine left since it’s not as though she could explain any of this to her husband. except for the part where she could if only he wasn’t a monster himself, and you keep claiming he’s a good guy.

And no matter what I say, Jenna is still gone, and so are the other girls that were Gathered, and the girl Silas and I found lying in a ditch. Cecily still won’t live to see Bowen grow, and my brother has spiraled out of control in his grief, and I’m no closer to finding him than I was last year.

These are all the same thing to Rhine. Murder and acts of gods and personal failures.

She thinks she’s powerless, which is an interesting thing for the book to say when it never wants her to try to do anything in the first place.

Still, it’s time to be niceish to Cecily. She says she treated Cecily as a little kid who didn’t understand anything because she felt powerless too, and Cecily says she thought Rhine was so confident and strong and she wants to be more like that. She also says she told the rapist about what his dad was doing.

I feel hope. Linden might not have any reason to believe me, but he’ll listen to Cecily. Even if it’s just to humor her so she doesn’t go hysterical on him.

Even Rhine can’t keep up the fiction he’d actually believe Cecily for more than a sentence.

She says she badgered the rapist into going to the basement, but by the time he did there was nothing there, and no sign of Deirdre. She say she never say Deirdre or Lydia either.

I wish I could prove it.” She’s talking to me in that hushed, cooing tone usually reserved for her son. Trying to lull me to sleep, or compliance.
And then I realize why.
“You don’t believe me,” I say.
“Oh, Rhine, Housemaster Vaughn did such terrible things to you. You were so delirious, and so sick. Maybe there’s a chance some of it—”
“It was real,” I say, sitting up. “It was all real.”

No, this makes more sense.

I don’t believe Cecily would leave Rhine down there, but it’s even more impossible she’d have left the other girls to die. And Deirdre’s appearances didn’t make much sense, how she seemed to come and go at will and how she cared so much about Rhine when she was in an even worse situation. The only physical evidence is that she loosened the straps in a way Rhine was never interested in taking advantage of and that she knew about the tracker, and Rhine could have figured out the tracker on her own or from overheard conversations while she was delirious. She should’ve had a small wound originally from its insertion, which she could have subconsciously remembered.

And Rhine realizes this. She can’t work out what really happened and what didn’t.

Maybe Deirdre really did get sold to another house when I left, and Adair and Lydia too.

Of course…there’s a way to test this. If they’re all fine and were sold somewhere, then she should be able to find out where and meet them. But that’s not an option because it’d involve her doing something and this is a series about things being done to her.

So she gives up and says “You don’t have to believe me,” I tell her. “You just have to believe that Vaughn is capable of those things.” Which sums up everything wrong about how his character is handled.

But Cecily is willing to believe everything she says because Rhine is all she has left. She says she was wrong about the antidote and everything, she just wanted to believe they wouldn’t die. But since they will, Rhine should go find her brother, and she’ll stay with her babies.

“If all those things you saw are real, there’s nothing we can do about them. We have our own lives to take care of, and there’s only time to do so much with them.”
What she says is terrible and true.

It’s not. I forgive Cecily for saying it, but that’s because I can understand why she’d think it. Rhine should know otherwise.

When they wake the next morning, they find the person who’s come to get them is Evil Mad Scientist.