Last time, the girls were terrified to see that instead of Rapist-chan, it was Evil Mad Scientist who’d come to get them.

I maintain my distance, keep my tone neutral when I ask, “Where’s Linden?”
“Your husband had an early meeting with a potential contractor,” he says. “He sent me for you and Cecily.”
“Sure he did,” I say

No, that seems perfectly believable. He doesn’t believe you about his dad, and he doesn’t give any fucks about you so he wouldn’t care about your feelings either.

Evil Mad Scientist does the usual creepy stalker menace women have to put up with.

Rhine, darling, you’re such a fascinating creature. You should be flattered; before you came along, I was sure I’d seen everything. I couldn’t help but get carried away.”

And he says she can come back and be first wife again. Yay. Cecily comes out for moral support. She doesn’t want to leave either, but Evil Mad Scientist has brought her baby to taunt her with. If she wants him, she has to leave now. So she goes.

“Don’t feel bad, doll,” Reed says. “My mother never cared for Vaughn either. Though, bless her soul, she did try.”

This doesn’t resemble any sort of actual reassurance, since Rhine is upset at the loss of Cecily and the fact Cecily is now in danger. But it does show that Reed is a collossal asshole, more concerned with saying his mom loved him more.

She goes back in to examine her suitcase and how nicely packed it is because Rapist-chan is a saint.

A lesser husband would be angry after what I put him through, would hope the wound became infected and the entire leg fell off.

Rapist-chan continues to meet Rhine’s high standards of not wishing agony and death upon his kidnapping victim.

I tie my hair back with one of the many rubber bands hanging on the doorknob.

Has the author never put one in her hair? You don’t do this to hair!

“Hungry?” Reed asks. I shake my head.
“Didn’t think so,” he says, pouring grease from a frying pan into an old can. “You seem birdlike. Even your hair is like a nest.”
Maybe I should take offense, but I don’t mind this image of me he’s painting. It makes me feel wild, brave.

You know, maybe it works if you do assume Rhine is so beaten down at this point that she’s clutching at reasons why the people around her are nice. She’s out of her mind with fear after the horrible things that happened to her last book, and desperate for anyone else to protect her, so she wants to believe they’re good and nice and kind.

“Bet you never eat,” he says. “Bet you drink up the oxygen like it’s butter. Bet you can go for days on nothing but thoughts.”

But I’m not so this just seems like the misogynist ideas about how women shouldn’t eat and they’re so much more attractive when they pick at food and stay bony.

And more and more of this chatter, with Reed being overly familiar without actually seeming to give a fuck about her and otherwise not seeming like the charming curmudgeon the book wants.

I don’t know what’s making me talk so much. In the almost year I spent at the mansion, I don’t think I revealed so much truth about myself as I have this morning.
I’m homesick, I suppose, and talking to a total stranger is my way of dealing with it.

Bullshit. The author twisted herself into a pretzel to keep you quiet in the mansion, you wouldn’t suddenly be chatty.

I wonder if part of this is that it’s only now the author’s really settled on her family’s backstory, so before it wasn’t hard to avoid talking about it but now the temptation to share is just too much.

Uncle Perfect goes on to ask Rhine to say the word “ridiculous” and it turns out she even sounds like Rose.

“You look just like my nephew’s first wife. You even have her voice, and ‘ridiculous’ was her favorite word. Everything was ridiculous. The virus. The attempts to cure it. My brother.”

That doesn’t sound anything like Rose when Rhine met her or the Rose of the Seeds of Wither story. It’s infantalizing too – Rose spent her childhood trying to escape his brother, she was forced to be pregnant when she didn’t want to bring more children into a world like this, then her child was murdered by his brother to teach her a lesson. She then spent her last months in agony due to an attempt to cure her of the virus. Does any of that seem like the sort of thing that’d lead to someone inarticulately repeating “ridiculous” over and over again?

“Your brother is ridiculous,” I agree.

But I guess the author has again decided that Rose isn’t a person, just a prop for whatever new thing she wants. The fact she was a prisoner for half her life doesn’t matter, and the only horrible thing done to her was her body being cut up after death.

Rhine is also out of her mind afraid of his brother, but she agrees with what he says here because she’s a good birdy and she knows all that matters is singing sweetly. He doesn’t care what her life was like, and hearing it was depressing would just be a downer.

“I’m going to call you Rose,” he says with resolution, picking up a screwdriver and working the back off an old clock.

Because none of them are people. (Imagine how Rhine would lay into Cecily if Cecily had decided she could rename someone.)

Rhine says she doesn’t want him to rename her with the name of someone whose agonizing death she was there for (and whose suffering is in fact the catalyst in ruining her life and the lives of all the other girls), and he argues with her about how but he wants to because he’s such a great guy, then argues her name is weird. She tells him about how it was a river, and he says then it is a river because the world is all still fine.

Okay, maybe he is a little bit mad. But I don’t mind.

He wants to rename her and views her as interchangeable with another person, but the only problem is he’s a conspiracy theorist.

Because Rhine always, always hates anything that might move the plot along, she proceeds to not ask him to elaborate on this or any other subject. All she wants is that he doesn’t ask her any questions, because she has to hide the shameful, shameful secret of why she’s leaving Rapist-chan.

…

What the hell is this book doing?

I mean, this isn’t the usual rape apologism horror, but it’s like the author’s just bored of the whole story already and wants to write about Rhine the estranged wife hanging out at some older man’s house while working through her issues.

This series has always had weird issues with ignoring the elephants it invites into the room, but it seemed to mostly be that Rhine didn’t give a fuck about most people and thought the rapist was a sweetie. Now we have another old man who she can’t excuse as just being “sheltered” – he’s less sheltered than Evil Mad Scientist, if anything, because at least that guy seems to be legitimately horrified by the world outside the gates and doing his best to avoid it. So he knows exactly what “wives” are, exactly what Rose was. He knows what his nephew has done to get these women. And he supports it.

And Rhine must understand that because she doesn’t want to say anything to suggest she’s unhappy or had any issues with his beloved kidnapping child rapist nephew, as if this will anger him and make him kick her out.

The scenes with him seem to be framed around the idea he’s so charmingly gruff, but here is nothing to like about the man.

Rhine is gushing over how he isn’t asking questions, as if not caring at all why she was horribly injured, terrified of his brother and desperate to leave is somehow a sign of goodness. It certainly isn’t because he respects her silence, because he asks questions, he just doesn’t care enough about her at all to ask many.

And it’s obvious the author must think he’s being all truth to power, but no, he’s just got a petty grudge against his brother. He seems unaware of the actual horrifying details, but not in the sense he thinks his brother’s a good person. He and his brother fight and so he’s mad at his brother and likes anyone who seems to be on his side, and that’s it. He doesn’t care what’s been done to Rhine or what reason she has for feeling this way, just that she’s another notch on the list of people who like him better than they do his brother.

We keep hearing he knew Rose, but he talks about her as a funny toy, and his memories of what she said are just how the words sounded. He never did anything to actually help her, and he cares so little about her memory that he’s fine calling another girl by her name since they look the same and that’s all that matters about women – so much that he’s willing to steamroll over her objections. Because women are property and you get to pick their names.

And either he wouldn’t let Rose tell him about what happened to her baby, or it was so inconsequential he doesn’t think of it now when faced with a girl he says could be her ghost coming here to escape the same man.

He wouldn’t even let Rhine stay in his house for a couple days to heal without demanding something from her. If it’s because he doesn’t have enough money to do whatever he likes and actually wants an extra pair of hands to help, he could easily have demanded the money to actually hire a person from Linden. And that can’t possibly be it because he’s the older brother, so unless his family disinherited him, he should have everything his brother has if not more.

This book has literally only one thing to recommend it, the beautiful writing and dreamlike horror. Now it doesn’t even have that, it just has stuff happening that completely ignores what’s come before while being about a boring asshole and the women who keeps agreeing with him and saying he’s so great.