Chapter Text
Maybe Harper would come around. Maybe she would be talked into the fact that she was… not delusional, that was too harsh a word. Mistaken. Maybe Harper could be convinced that she was mistaken. Which she was, wasn’t she? She seemed to be under the impression that Clara had murdered Charlotte, and that certainly wasn’t true. It had all been a horrible accident.
There was also the possibility that Clara would die before having to see Harper again.
Harper would probably like that. Clara certainly would, too.
After Charlotte’s death, she went from having an occasional cigarette at a party to chainsmoking. It took the edge off. She felt herself physically relax when she took in the smoke, and she liked being able to take a drag when she wasn’t sure what to say or she feared she would say too much.
And then, there was the obvious, delicious karma of it. Had smoke been the last think Charlotte tasted? Would it kill Clara like it had killed her cousin?
Even as she took Charlotte’s place, Clara was still thinking of her cousin. She was sacrificing herself to her.
In no uncertain terms, Clara wanted to die. Her mother had died. Her aunt and uncle had died. Charlotte had died, and Harper was, in a way, gone with her. Clara had been a deeply miserable child in the best of times, so she really couldn’t figure out how or why she was still around.
In childhood, she’d saved imagining her own death for when she was sitting up late at night, imagining ghosts in the shadows, or listening to very sad songs, or on the anniversary of her mother’s death. Now, it was a pastime. Her favorite and only hobby when she wasn’t managing the company: Step into the rapids and be torn from this bleak island and this and this bleak life of hers or step off of the widow’s walk and let gravity do the rest.
It turned out, however, that Clara was a coward.
She would stand on the edge and only allow herself to think about going over. That didn’t do anyone any good. She chided herself for pretending to be remorseful enough to want to kill herself when that was demonstrably untrue.
So instead, she just kept smoking those damn cigarettes. Wade hated them, and her… her grandfather kept telling her it was unladylike.
To which she had to nod and apologize and act like everything was fine.
As much as it chagrined her to agree with Jackson Thornton, it was unladylike. But she couldn’t stop. Her addiction was only compounded by guilt. She told herself how monstrous she was, killing Charlotte and then taking her place. She understood why Harper called her a murderer. She told herself that, too, when she was trying to motivate herself to just take a couple small steps.
She told herself this so many times that it lost its bite, lost its cruelty. Murderer. It was just background noise. You, Clara Thornton, are a killer. Fact.
And in the year that followed, something happened, happened slowly, worse than suddenly being swept away by the tide on the wrong side of Blackrock Island.
She started to find comfort in the thought.
Because a good businesswoman, she was learning from stockholders and COOs and CFOs, was above all ruthless. One looked out for their family by looking out for their interests. The board probably would have liked her considerably more if she had murdered Charlotte in cold blood.
This presented a very tempting persona, a Clara unshackled by guilt. She would be cutthroat enough to ensure that Thornton Industries, if nothing else, survived. She wouldn’t be the bastard cousin who never should have been conceived, she would be the woman came from nothing and had clawed her way to the top. No matter the cost.
But that Clara was someone else. That Clara couldn’t exist, because she couldn’t get drunk with Wade. She wouldn’t reconcile with Harper when Harper returned.
And Harper would return. She was coming back for the summer, and Clara had been assured that the school her grandparents had chosen was fixing her.
She didn’t come back fixed, though. Harper didn’t come back as the girl Clara had been hoping for, the one who retold novels with exaggerated enthusiasm, who she’d caught crawdads with in the shallows, who she’d run with in the woods so long ago.
Harper was quiet. Subdued. She didn’t seem to want to talk to anyone or do anything except read.
This was only marginally preferable to the Haper she’d been a year ago, the one who had attacked mourners at Charlotte’s funeral, who had bared her teeth and called Clara a killer.
It was obvious that this belief had not changed. Harper had only learned to keep her suspicions closer to her chest.
This meant that Clara was still utterly alone.
One day, when she watched Harper, frowning at the table as she read, Clara was removed for a moment from Thornton Hall. She saw past the walls, the grandiose furniture, the limits of the physical world. She felt herself come disconnected, somehow.
She and Harper were just two souls floating out in the vast expanse of empty space, darkness. They had once been connected to each other and to Charlotte, but when Clara looked now, she saw no connection between them. It had been broken, and she was entirely untethered.
And still, she couldn’t bring herself to take those few little steps.
What she really needed was help.
A little push.
There were a lot of reasons for doing this. Charlotte had been dead over a year, and some days, Clara felt just as sick as she had that first day. Some days, she would almost forget what had happened, and that would be worse, because it was unforgivable.
Clara had lived through the death of her mother, and then the deaths of Roger and Marie. She knew the grief would be everlasting.
After her mother had died and Clara was sent to Blackrock to live with her aunt and uncle, she had imagined growing into someone else entirely. She would imagine—with no small amount of guilt for her late mother—becoming one of the Thornton sisters. She knew that she would never forget her mother or watching her die, but she had hoped, secretly, that she would become removed from it somehow. The memories would be put behind glass, and they would eventually feel like they had belonged to someone else, or that they were just scenes from a movie she’d watched a long time ago.
So, she knew from the start that Carlotte’s death would be a part of her forever. She had no delusions about the sadness subsiding or the guilt ever loosening its grip on her.
And she knew she couldn’t go on like that.
She also knew that Harper was still suspicious of her. She had felt her cousin’s eyes on her, heard the creak of floorboards when she should have been alone.
What could Harper have been expecting to find out? Did think Clara would be scheming in the Thornton Hall library, throwing darts at Charlotte’s picture, calling hitmen to have Harper taken out?
Of course not. Clara wasn’t the villain Harper thought she was, no matter how much easier that would have been.
But thoughts of who she could have been, who she wanted to be… they would all be silenced soon. She wouldn’t have to worry about it. Deciding who she had been, that would be Harper’s mess to unravel.
When Clara stepped out onto the widow’s walk, drink in hand, she knew Harper wasn’t far behind.
“I know you’re there, Harper.”
Silence.
Clara took a sip of her old fashioned, her sense of calm waning. “You’re never gonna find what you’re looking for, you know.”
When she turned around, Harper had simply appeared, and they regarded each other coldly.
“You can keep skulking around all you want, honey.” Clara noticed that her hands were shaking. Whether it was from fear or anticipation, she didn’t know. “If you think you can pin anything that happened that night on me, you’re wrong. You’ve got nothing on me. You never will.”
Harper looked as though she was trying not to panic. It wasn’t the reaction Clara expected. She’d wanted rage. Instead, Harper’s eyes kept darting around the roof, maybe hoping that someone else was around to bear witness to what Clara was saying.
Of course, no one was coming for either one of them.
“What are you saying?” Harper eventually spoke.
It should have been so easy to play the cold-blooded killer. Wouldn’t Harper be sure to push Clara to her long-coveted death if she could only take on that persona and boast about having ended Charlotte’s life to take her place?
I killed her. The words burned in Clara’s chest, begging to be set free. It wasn’t even a lie.
“What are you SAYING?” Harper howled. She punched Clara in the shoulder, the same way she used to when they were kids and their games got too heated. Clara’s drink dribbled down her shirt. Something released inside of Clara, a burst of energy, and she shoved Harper back, hard.
Harper stumbled backwards, face livid.
“You’re a monster.” When she spoke, staring at Clara as she got to her feet, her voice was low, but shaking with deadly rage. “You are a monster.”
The way she looked at Clara made her skin crawl, as though Harper was seeing past the cousin she’d known her whole life and finding something completely different, something inhuman.
“We let you into our home…” Harper whispered, sounding sick.
Rage flared inside of Clara. She was ten years old again, in her new bedroom on Blackrock Island, bags still packed because she was convinced it wouldn’t last. Flashes of being a teenager and noticing how Charlotte and Harper never passed up the opportunity to correct their school friends when they mistook Clara for their sister. At twelve, considering what it might feel like to call her uncle Roger “Dad,” but never working up the courage to do it.
Their home.
Clara wasn’t even thinking about her death wish anymore. Suddenly, her only wish was to hurt Harper with a ferocity.
She dropped her drink and lunged forward. The glass shattered at their feet, Clara’s in heels and Harper in only her stockings.
She was grabbing Harper by the collar and trying to shake an apology out of her.
This scene was familiar.
In her flurry of rage and grief, thinking of how badly she wanted to be someone else, how badly she wanted Harper to hurt like she did, to stop being so self-righteous and vindictive, Clara shuddered with excitement at the prospect of changing the scene in front of her.
She wasn’t losing control. She was perfectly in control.
She grabbed Harper’s face, nails digging into her little cousin’s gaunt cheeks.
“I killed Charlotte,” Clara spat into her ear with a cruel smile. She wanted it to be true, wanted to have murdered Charlotte, wanted to make Harper struggle. She let out a guttural laugh at Harper’s face when she let go, her expression more terrorized and livid than Clara could have even imagined.
She staggered backwards, and Clara challenged her with her eyes. What would she do? What could she do? Run off and try to tell someone again? The town had no more reason to believe her now than yesterday; no one had heard Clara’s confession, and no one ever would.
That left Harper with a single choice: To take matters into her own hands.
She lunged at Clara. Her bare feet crunched across the broken glass, surely getting cut to ribbons, but she acted like she couldn’t even feel it.
They struggled for a moment, but it wasn’t a real fight. Clara was yanking Harper about just to toy with her, to panic her, to rile her up more and more.
Harper probably thought she was fighting for her life against a cold-blooded killer.
Clara laughed to herself quietly as Harper shrieked and scrabbled and stumbled across the glass and the liquor.
Clara didn’t snap back to reality until it was too late. She hadn’t expected it to work.
Maybe she’d expected for Harper to realize it was a game to Clara, or to wake up in her bed some morning a long, long time ago. Maybe she expected Harper to see what Clara was trying to do, how far gone she was.
In any case, it wasn’t like she expected.
Dreaming of the solace of death was one thing. Falling four stories to her death, cracking her head open on Blackrock below was another thing altogether.
There was no moment of peace, no relishing that it would all be over soon. There was just a sudden jolt of panic, more primal than anything Clara had ever experienced, more frightening than her mother’s ghost stories or the prospect of being all alone as a child or the threat of being found out.
Harper pushed hard enough to send her over the edge, and Clara was falling.
Through the adrenaline, everything seemed to happen at once. The wooden railing snapped. Clara felt her head hit the roofing. She could still feel Harper’s fists on her shoulders. She tasted her own blood, not just in her mouth—it seemed to overtake all her senses. She couldn’t breathe.
Clara did not want to die.
This, she realized only as she was tumbling down the rooftop. How far until the fall? She grabbed for something, trying to stop herself, but only managed to tear her fingers apart against the shingles.
And suddenly, there was no roof left. It was simply gone, and she was free-falling, still groping at the air for anything to save her.
In the panic, her newfound desire to live was blinding, all-consuming.
There was an explosion of pain when she hit the ground.
And then, she couldn’t feel anything at all.
/
Why did you make me do this?
WHY DID YOU MAKE ME DO THIS?!
/
Clara had not imagined waking up after the fall. What she had always imagined was nothing, forever. Silence, darkness, peace.
She had it for a moment.
It didn’t last, of course. The silence was broken after a spell.
Still limp and disoriented on the ground, she could feel the percussion of footsteps approaching in a fury.
“WHY DID YOU MAKE ME DO THIS!?” Something jostled Clara in the gut. She would later realize that she’d been kicked, kicked hard, but at the time, it was painless. And she couldn’t remember why Harper, the disembodied voice above, was so angry.
That was when Harper unleashed a shriek, a sound filled with all the agony of the past year, all her grief and mounting anger. It was horrible; Clara tried to get up, get away from the sound she thought was going to split her head in two, but she couldn’t move.
In her semi-conscious state, Clara Thornton was either seeing into the afterlife or simply dreaming of the sad, scary ghost stories her mother had told her so long ago. As Harper screamed, the hungry shadows began to writhe in the darkness all around her. Clara could see them growing stronger as Harper’s agony rose.
The life-affirming fear returned, just as strong as it had been moments before. The shadows were everywhere, infecting everything. They were inside of her, tendrils reaching into her very blood and threatening to tear her apart—
It was happening. They were taking her.
/
The fear was gone when Clara woke up, slowly and comfortably.
This couldn’t have been the shadowy world of horrors she was sure she’d been destined to rot in—it was too bright, too warm.
For the first time in her short, miserable life, everything was fine.
Quietude. Peace.
It ended when the nurse noticed that Clara was awake. And when the painkillers started to fade, the fear returned.
In her dreams, Clara saw the hungry shadows. As she fell asleep, she was constantly jolted awake by the feeling of falling.
Clara had split her head open after the fall. Along with a series of spinal injuries that left her extremities tingling and the most violent bruising she’d ever seen, Clara had a nasty slash above her left eyebrow. She was finding it difficult to thing, difficult to hold onto her own thoughts.
Writhing shadows, baring her teeth at Harper, the sound of Charlotte choking on smoke.
Harper had left.
That was all anyone would say to Clara when she asked. “Harper left.” “Harper is gone.” At first, they were looking for Harper. Whether they meant the Thorntons or the police, Clara wasn’t sure. But they must have never found her, because she never returned after Clara was released from the hospital.
In her jumbled thoughts, Clara kept seeing the fear in Harper’s eyes, kept hearing her cry lamenting why Clara had made her do such a thing, the agonized shriek. She wasn’t certain if that had been real or simply imagined by her fracturing mind.
Clara felt a soft surge of comradery with her cousin. Inwardly, secretly, she hoped she had made Harper understand.
She’d made a killer out of Harper, hadn’t she? She laughed at this thought before it faded from her grasp: Clara hadn’t tried to kill Charlotte, but Charlotte and ended up dying, while Harper had tried to kill Clara, and Clara had lived.
Harper had felt what Clara had felt a year ago, hadn’t she? The rage that had built up for so long finally surfacing, the fear of losing everything, all culminating in one fateful moment… Had Clara sent Harper a message in that moment? Had she understood — would she see how similar they were?
Maybe that was why she had left, Clara thought. Even now, in her ruined state, she knew it was stupid to be so optimistic, to think that she and Harper would ever understand each other again…
But maybe Harper was out there, and maybe she felt how Clara felt. Maybe she couldn’t fault Clara anymore because—even just in those two brief moments—they’d been the same.
Sisters? Clara wondered drowsily, with a hope she hadn’t felt since she was a child.