The light filtering through the curtains woke me up. Sometime in the night, maybe even before he had come out to find me by the tree, Ned had propped open the window, and the humid night air made way for a gentle morning breeze that whispered itself around my face and my toes. I was on top of the bedspread on Ned's bed, my head on his pillow. Glancing over, I could see that he lay in the other direction, with his head at the foot of the bed, so that we fit together like shoes in a shoebox.

The sun was just coming up, touching the sky outside with gentle fingers of bright blush pink, of electric green, of robin's egg blue. It would be hot–I could already feel it. The sun would burn off most of the moisture from yesterday, but still leave the air thick, as it always did in August. August already.

Watching the wind bounce the curtains, I remembered hiding in my closet on the edge of a meltdown, calling Ned in tears. I hadn't thought about that night in a long time–the sheer panic I'd felt at kissing Henry, and wanting to kiss Henry, at liking kissing Henry, coupled with Mary finding my paintings. I remembered Ned's voice on the phone, how he had come right to me when I needed him. We had slept next to each other that night, too, but side by side, his head on my pillow, my blanket covering us both. My fingers itched as I remember the buttons on his shirt, the ones I'd played with. I hadn't thought about that moment in years. I had been too preoccupied with the memory of the next morning.

Ned's face was turned away from me. He still had his socks on, I realized, in a move that would have scandalized Billy and Uncle Liam–socks on the bed–but one of them had fallen to pool around his ankle. His shoulder rose and fell with his breath, rose and fell, rose and fell. I turned away to look up at the ceiling, at the small crack that ran in the plaster around the light fixture. Not a sign of a faulty foundation, I now knew. Possibly a sign of previous water damage from a leaky roof, but maybe just old plaster. The cornices around the edges were original to the house. Maybe the plaster was, too.

How often had I woken up before everyone else in this place? Or gone to sleep far afterwards? How often had I tried to be awake and alone? It seemed that I could have filled pages and pages, canvas upon canvas, with those moments, but maybe they just felt more important than they actually had been. I remembered how desperately I'd wanted to be included, and then, once included, how desperately I wanted to be alone. I let myself think, for the very first time in a long, long time, of the sight of my dress, hanging, cut to shreds, in my closet. Of the books of mine Nola had burned, the pictures she'd destroyed, the sea shells she'd crushed, all with that perfect calm. I had spent so much of the last few weeks looking for places where I had been happiest alone or with Ned. I had spent so much of the last few weeks avoiding the whole truth.

My breathing must have changed, or the wind must have blown, because Ned's voice floated up from the foot of the bed, "You awake?"

"Yeah."

"You okay?"

I huffed a laugh, "You okay?"

"Come join me. The air's nice down here."

I flipped around so that my head was next to his, at the foot of the bed–my feet on the pillow–and we lay, side by side, on our backs. The crack looked like a lopsided grin from this angle, but the kind that comes when something's just a little bit wrong.

"Did you sleep?" His voice was husky with morning disuse.

"I did. Did you?"

"I did." He sounded vaguely surprised. "I wasn't sure I was going to."

"We need to leave."

He sighed, his hand reaching out to smooth his hair away from his face. Still we didn't look at each other. "I know. I've been pretty selfish, keeping you here."

"We wanted to be here. It's not like you were holding us captive."

"The witch in Hansel and Gretel."

"The witch in The Snow Queen."

"I think it's the Snow Queen in The Snow Queen. Could be wrong, though, just a shot in the dark."

"You're obnoxious."

"And so smart."

"Yes, yes, the smartest." A robin sang from the eaves. They must have built a nest somewhere close by. Maybe we should close the window, after all.

"Ned?"

"Mmm?"

"What is God like to you?"

There was silence again, this time different. I turned to look at him then, to see if I'd offended him, but he was staring at the ceiling thoughtfully, his mouth working a little as he thought, that wrinkle folding his brow in the exact middle. In spite of myself, I smiled a little.

"It's funny, I feel like I have a very different answer for that at seminary," he said slowly. "We talk about God a lot, and faith a lot, and I guess I'm so used to it that I never really think about it. But it's a different question here, I think."

"Because I'm not in seminary?"

"Partly," he glanced over at me, serious. "But partly because we know each other better and for longer and…just, differently, you know? It feels like a more serious question when…" he trailed off, turning to look back at the ceiling. "Best I can put it, if I put it in any way, is that God feels to me like a net of some kind. Not like a net that traps us, not like something we want to escape, but more like a net that connects us. Like a web, only without a spider trying to, you know, suck your blood." His face started to wrinkle, and I couldn't help laughing a bit. He grinned, turning back to me. "Not a great analogy, I know. I should really work on that material."

"No, you should definitely tell all the others at seminary that God's like a spider. I think they'd enjoy it."

"Summa cum laude."

"Degrees on degrees."

He sighed, shaking his head, bringing his hands up to rest on his stomach. "What I'm trying to say, really, is that I feel God is in the connections between everything and everyone. We can't do anything without it affecting someone else. We can't pick a flower without it affecting a bee, you know? Or be in one place without being absent from another. I see God most in how we help and hurt each other, how we help and hurt ourselves. I see God in the way we grow and change. There's a line connecting me with everyone in the world, even people I never meet, and there's a stronger line connecting me with the people I know, and an even stronger line that connects me to the people I love. Sometimes, I feel like I can see it, can see that line, that web, that net, and sometimes I feel like I'm probably just crazy. It's humbling," he said, his voice settling now, even quieter, less passionate than it had been a moment before, "it holds me responsible for everything I do, and everything I fail to do, or choose not to do. But it's also freeing. That's the best I can explain it, Flan." He turned his face to me, and his eyes were so serious, serious in a way I hadn't seen before.

"Thank you for telling me."

"Thank you, for asking me." We just looked at each other for a moment, our heads close together at the foot of the bed. The robin sang again, and some part of me was aware of the sky lightening steadily.

I turned away to look down at my hands, raised to splay my fingers against the light coming from the windows by the head of the bed. My bracelet, the one with my real name, dangled loosely off my wrist.

"I never knew what people meant when they said they felt God in things. My parents definitely didn't raise us to be religious, though I remember a cross on the wall at home. I think it had, like, 'God Bless This Home' painted on it, and even at seven I knew that there was no way God was a part of that place. Like, how could he be? How could he sit back and watch that?"

Ned's breathing was steady, in and out. In and out. "What was it like?"

Of all the things Ned and I had talked about, this had never been one of them. Maybe he'd been curious at first, maybe he'd been curious all along, but he had never asked me. After a while, I assumed, I had just been part of everything, like the trees and the pond and Julia and Mireille, just a part of the natural order of things. Or maybe, possibly, a piece of me suggested, maybe he had been waiting for me to tell him myself. Maybe he had been waiting for me to trust him that much.

And I never had. And he was grown up enough now to ask.

"When they were there," I started, then stopped and licked my lips, "when they were there, it was a nightmare. It was a nightmare when they were gone, too, but a different kind. Billy had to figure out how to feed us, and sometimes there was nothing to eat, but sometimes there was. Uncle Liam looked in on us as much as he could, but he and my dad fought all the time, mostly because my dad was an alcoholic nightmare, but especially because my mom hated Liam. They hated each other, blamed each other, though I'm pretty sure Liam was right."

"About?"

"About how my parents screwed up their lives? About what kind of person my mom is? I don't really know, but I know that she hated him and he hated her. I don't remember her face, really, since I haven't seen her in years, but whenever I think about her, I think about Nola. So you know it's got to be good."

He reached out his hand, then, and offered it to me. I grasped it in my own, weaving our fingers together. His breath was slow and steady, in and out, in and out.

"For the most part, they were gone and back at the same time. Billy would try to take the brunt of it, but they hit both of us. That's what got my mom sent to rehab, actually, was hitting Billy in public. In front of everyone. That's what saved Susie–my mom was actually sober when she was pregnant with her. Didn't last long, obviously, but it was long enough."

Ned squeezed my hand. I squeezed back.

"Liam had had a pretty hard life. He'd been engaged and then his fiancee died in a car crash. He'd been in college on scholarship but failed a class and had lost everything. And his parents hadn't been great, either. You know that my dad's name is William, right? William and Liam, because my grandparents didn't bother thinking of different names. But he wanted to save us. Wanted to be our dad so badly. He took parenting classes on his nights off, read a whole bunch of books. Tried to prove to the court that he could take us. But he was a single man with a full time job. He could take Billy and Susie, since they were next of kin, but the court decided that he didn't have the resources to look after a kid with special needs like me. And I didn't complain, much, because I was so happy to be out of that house that I would have gone anywhere."

"You'd have been happier with your family." It wasn't a question. He didn't need to ask.

"Yeah. But I couldn't have been with them. The court wouldn't let me." I opened and closed my fingers over his, watching our hands. This was what Mary had meant. Maybe I shouldn't be holding his hand like this. I let go and dropped my hand back to my ribs.

"Flannery?"

I turned to look at Ned, at the wrinkle between his eyebrows. He knew I'd been somewhere else. I wouldn't tell him where. I smiled crookedly, like the ceiling, and shook my head a little before saying, "You blamed yourself for all the things you didn't notice when we were kids."

He turned away again. "If I recall, you maybe blamed me a little, too."

"Maybe." I had to clear my throat to say, "But you also gave me a childhood. I wouldn't have ever had that if it weren't for you."

He looked back at me, the shock in his eyes twisting something somewhere in my chest. "What?"

"Before you, Ned, I hadn't really played a whole lot of games. I hadn't climbed trees or swam in a pond or played tag or hide-and-go-seek. I hadn't been able to stay up to watch a movie late at night. I had only gotten a few birthday gifts, and never had anyone really celebrate with me. I had never had a real Christmas before, and maybe there weren't a lot of Christmases that we got to celebrate together, but the ones I had with you were perfect, Ned. You and Tom took me sledding and skating, and you told me ghost stories. There was a lot about our lives, about my life, that wasn't good. But don't saddle yourself with all the guilt of my childhood, not when you're choosing to ignore everything you were to me. The adults here abandoned me until I was useful to them, but you never did, and you never would."

Ned's face crumpled them, and before he brought his hands up to cover his eyes, I could see a tear leak down his temple and into his hair. He turned on his back again, taking deep breaths, trying to control the sobs that shook him. I hadn't seen Ned cry in a very long time. Had I ever seen him cry?

"You need to forgive yourself, Ned. Please." His chest shook all the harder. Was this what I had looked like, last night? If so, I understood why Ned hadn't come out until I was calm. What a wretched thing to watch.

He started to roll toward me, then stopped, righted himself, and sat up, dropping his hands from his face to open his arms to me. I sat up, too, and leaned my head against his shoulder, wrapping my arms around him as he shook and shook.

"Do you? Forgive me?" his voice was barely controlled. He could barely get the words out.

"Yes, Ned. Yes." I whispered it into his shoulder, but he heard it. I held him as he cried, the way he had held me countless times. He didn't say it, and I didn't say it, but it would be my last morning at Mansfield, and we both knew it.

In the end, Ned and Dr Bertram insisted on driving us back together. Mrs Bertram had wanted to come, too, but Ned had persuaded her that it would mean the car was too full. She had hugged Susie and me tight, and cried, and pressed a small photo album into my hands. She'd gone through all the photos and found ones of me, pictures I hadn't known had existed. I didn't have the courage, then, to look at all of them, but I could see what she had seen–I looked exactly like Susie, except around the eyes.

Sitting in the back seat, I watched the green disappear, then the lane, then the forest. I watched the highways pass in much the same frame of mind I had when I'd last left Mansfield–a sort of calm emptiness had settled over me, filling me, surrounding me. Susie fell asleep holding my hand, and I traced her knuckles with my thumb, wondering at her, at this moment. Ned looked back at me in the rearview mirror and then away. He kept his eyes on the road for the rest of the trip.

Tom took it slightly harder than his mother. Susie and I, two of his three most regular visitors, had been the majority of his entertainment, but there was something else, too. He hugged us both fiercely, and made all kinds of threats to visit us. I saw Susie wiping away tears, but I knew better than to comment.

It wasn't until we had pulled up in Chelsea, in front of our house, that Ned spoke to me again. His hair was in a bit of disarray from the open windows, flopping over a part of his forehead while another part stuck straight up, like a child fresh out of bed. Ned let Susie and Dr Bertram go into the house first, then opened the trunk and looked straight at me, his mouth in a wry line.

At a certain point, I couldn't stand the silence. "You'll call, right?"

"Pinky swear." He stuck his pinky out and locked it with mine.

"You know what happens if you break a pinky promise." There was a pressure building in my chest; I tried to laugh it away.

He nodded solemnly, "May I be forever pinky-less if I break my word." He put his hand on his heart for good effect, smiling ruefully.

I pulled my bag out of the trunk from where it had been, next to a medium-sized cardboard box, then shrugged it onto my shoulder. If Ned were going to walk me in, he would have offered to carry it. He didn't offer.

Instead, he took a deep breath and reached in to grab the box before closing the trunk with the click of a button. "Come on, I'll walk you in."

"What's that?"

He shrugged, avoiding my eyes. "A present. But you might need to open the doors for me."

"If it's a puppy, Uncle Liam will kill you." I led the way up the steps.

"I have the feeling Liam's a guy who says he doesn't want a puppy, but put a puppy in front of him–"

I turned abruptly at the door. "That's not a puppy, right?"

Ned cracked the first real smile I'd seen on him all day. "You think I put a puppy in a sealed cardboard box for a two-and-a-half-hour car trip? You think I'm trying to give you a puppy corpse as a parting gift?"

There was no dignified response to that, so I stuck my nose in the air and opened the door for him, leading him past where Susie was giddily explaining the story behind a family photo on the fridge to Dr Bertram, down the hallway to my room to the sound of him chuckling behind me. He contemplated the door, then left it open. My room was in much the same shape as it had been when I left, if dustier, so there was no obvious clean surface to put his burden down on. I saw Ned decide on the bed with a general air of misgiving, then he stood up straight, wiping his palms on his pants, suddenly serious.

"Ned?"

He gestured to the empty chair, and I sat.

Ned's chest expanded on his first breath. With a start, I realized that he was actually nervous, more nervous than I ever remembered seeing him. He cleared his throat, then again.

"Okay. Two things. First: we're packing up your paintings at Mansfield and sending them to you. Or, to a storage facility of your choice. We'll pay the fees. My father was going to tell you, but I figure that's an important point to mention first."

"You don't need to–"

"Yes, we do." His jaw was tight, his tone flat. "Yes, we do. We should have done it when you left, and I'm sorry we didn't."

I decided not to mention that it probably wasn't his idea to keep my paintings in the first place. I decided not to mention that that wasn't his to apologize for.

"Okay."

"Okay, and, well, second. Second, there's this," he gestured to the box on the bed, then dropped his hand. He didn't seem to know what to do with it, so he clasped his hands behind his back, just the way his father did. I don't know why, but the sight alarmed me.

Ned sighed again, shifting his weight from foot to foot and back again. He looked at me, and then to the floor, and to the box, and then, finally, back to me. When he spoke, his voice was quiet, shaking just slightly. "I've been thinking a lot about forgiveness. And I've been thinking a lot about justice. You've forgiven me, which is a gift, Flan, and I don't take it lightly, but you also said I need to forgive myself. I think that's true. I think I want you to be able to move on, and it's only possible if I move on, too. If you still want me in your life, that is. Which is, by the way–" he said, holding out his hand to stop me interrupting, "not me fishing for reassurance. Just, you know, setting realistic parameters."

" 'Realistic parameters'?"

"God, I know. If Tom could hear me now, he'd crack a rib laughing." Ned huffed out a laugh, shaking his head before swallowing hard. "So I want to forgive myself, too, but I think what's been eating at me is that you gave me your forgiveness, but I never gave you justice. Nola can't, or won't ever apologize to you, so that's out, and my parents are doing what they can, and so is Tom, but, Flannery, here's the thing," and now that he was warming up, his voice steadied, his shoulders loosened, and he seemed more at ease, more able to look at me, "here's the thing: you were exposed in a way that no one else could have been. We went into your things and stole your paintings and I saw, I saw all the bad memories you'd had, and you never gave me permission to do that. When you said you wanted to burn them all, I thought, my God, what a waste, even if it's just of a record of your life, and I didn't think, then, that you should be able to do what you wanted with your memories. I didn't think of them like that, but that's what they were. We invaded your life, and violated your privacy, and I can't help but think that that's something that no one can really give you justice for. No one except me."

He took a small penknife out of his back pocket, and the ease with which he did so made something drop in my stomach even before he had sliced the top of the box to reveal dozens of small black notebooks, each identical, lined up vertically. Journal upon journal upon journal, all lined up. His back pocket had been empty, except for that knife, empty the way it had never been for almost the whole time I'd known him.

"Ned…" I was on my feet, now, but I stayed where I was, on the opposite side of the room, almost as far away as possible from all of the thoughts Ned had ever had, lined up neatly in a box, presented to me.

"It's a shitty gift, I think," he said ruefully, not looking at me. "And it's not really justice, because I'm choosing to give these to you, and you didn't have that choice. But it's the only way I could think of to make things right," his voice dropped to just above a whisper, "and I really want things to be right between us."

Ned looked up at me, face as serious as I had ever seen it. There were still dark circles under his eyes, but they were smaller, now. Or maybe it was just the light in my room.

"What do you want me to do with them?" The enormity of what he was giving me was almost unbearable. I had seen him write in his notebook every day since I was ten. I had never asked to see them, had known they were sacred. He had never offered, either. These were his, and his alone. How could someone else own them? How, without owning a piece of him?

He shrugged a little, helplessly. "Whatever you want. You don't have to do anything with them, really. I'm not asking you to read them, but they're yours, now. You can read them if you want, you can ignore them if you want, you can burn them if you want, or use them as wallpaper, or prop up tippy chairs, or whatever. They'll just belong to you, whatever you decide you want to do."

"But, Ned, it's not…" I trailed off, too, and we both stared at each other, miserably, and then at the box, miserably.

"We had your paintings on display in the house for years. You saw them. They were there for anyone to see. Giving these to you now, I really understand what that means. You don't have to do anything with them if you don't want to, Flannery. I just can't…I just want us to be equals. I know things about you that you don't even have the opportunity to know about me. I'm not asking you to read all of this and, I don't know, comment on my life, but I want us to be equals. You deserve to have the same power that I have, the same knowledge. Or at least," he said, running his hands over his hair, flattening it, then spiking it again, "I don't want to be able to protect myself where you weren't able to. Does that make sense?"

There was a space at the back of my closet. It could live there. Maybe I could forget it was there. Maybe, whenever I moved next, I could forget that I had it and leave it with Liam, who could donate it or recycle it when he found it. But the thought of Liam reading those journals felt like a violation, too. Or Billy. Or even Susie. It all felt wrong.

I looked up at Ned, who was looking right back at me, his arms now folded across his chest. His dear, dear face, so serious, aware of what he was asking of me.

"I've never thought I wasn't equal to you, Ned." He blanched, alarmed, and took one step, two toward me.

"That's not what I mean," he was close enough that he didn't need to speak louder than a murmur. "I hope you know that's not what I mean."

"You don't need to apologize for everything. I've told you. You were a kid, Ned. You were a kid, too." I wanted to reach out and hug him again. I wanted to punch him in the sternum.

"I was, and then I wasn't. I was an adult when Mary stole your paintings out of your closet, and I was an adult when I chose other people's opinions over yours. That wasn't me as a kid, Flannery. That's my responsibility as an adult."

I was shaking my head. My whole body was shaking, in fact, in a way I found that I couldn't control. Ned saw it, his eyes sweeping over me in concern. He reached out to me and steadied me, one hand under each elbow.

"If you really don't want them, then it's okay. I'll take them to the dump or something–" I looked up at him, stricken, "but I'm not going to keep them. They're secrets I don't deserve to keep." Ned's face, which only a few minutes ago had been nervous, looked calm, almost serene. He meant it.

I understood, then, with a swooping sensation, why Ned hadn't wanted me to burn my paintings. I'd threatened that, hadn't I, on that morning? Told him that I was never going to sell them, that I would rather burn them, and then told him he needed to help me. What did it mean, to take all these memories and throw them away? Even if he never read them again, even if they sat in his basement and molded away, then they were still his. Giving them to me felt too much, but the idea of destroying them, that was unthinkable.

And there was the reality, too, that I knew what he was offering me only because of what he'd said, what they'd stolen from me, when Ned had helped them steal. This only felt as serious as it did because I had had my secrets stolen, and I knew what it meant.

But at least my secrets had been on display for people who cared about me. Most of them, anyway. I couldn't change what Nola had seen, or what Mary had seen, or what Henry had seen, but even they knew that it was an indication of some talent on my part. My paintings weren't, in fact, at the bottom of a dump, or ashes in a furnace. I hadn't actually lost them. And now, now that they were coming back to me, I was glad of that. I didn't think I would ever be able to look at some of them again, but I was glad.

What a heady thing, to be the keeper of another person's secrets. What a heady, terrifying thing. They could sit at the back of my closet, and I would keep them safe, and when Ned wanted them back, there they'd be, waiting for him. I wouldn't read them, but I could keep them safe for him.

My hands found their way to Ned's, and he must have felt me settle. He must have felt my decision before I had a chance to say it. I looked up into his face, this wonderful face, the face of my best friend, at the wrinkles that were starting to form around his eyes, at the tiny mole he'd always had, just under his right cheekbone, at how tired he was, and I nodded.

"I'll keep them safe, Ned. You have to start forgiving yourself, but I'll keep them safe. You can leave them with me."

Ned smiled then, wobbly and relieved, and a single tear made its way down his cheek, dripping onto his rumpled t-shirt.

"You're a watering can, dude," I said, and he laughed, shaking his head, before pulling me in for one last, powerful hug.

"You have no idea."

Then silence descended, and my room breathed, and the earth moved, and we simply were.

A/N: So it's been a minute. Thank you all, anyone who stuck around, for your patience. There are a lot of not-important reasons I was gone for so long (nothing bad happened, I promise, besides the bad that happened to everyone, but thank you all for your well wishes), but the biggest reason was that, honestly, I had no idea how to write the last chapters of this story. I knew what was going to happen, yes, but how to make it happen, that I didn't know. That's a particularly infuriating form of writer's block, friends.

It's a little silly, in some ways, given that this is an adaptation of a book that's already been written and I've already read several times, but writer's block is pretty real. I have several docs where I've tried to write the last two chapters, and they're all absolute garbage. It took until literally yesterday for me to figure out how to write this one, and let's hope that means that the next chapter (or chapters, if I realize that there are more chapters left than I thought), won't take as long.

Thank you all again, and thank you to those who left reviews recently. It really did help me to know that people were still reading this story, and that you wanted to see it finished. Your reviews are never expected, but know that I love reading them.