The warbler, p.1
The Warbler, page 1
Praise for Sarah Beth Durst
New York Times, USA Today, and Indie Bestselling Author
“Durst consistently defies expectations.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Elements of fantasy and magical realism provide an intriguing framework for exploring the ideas of complicated grief and whether not telling the truth can leave real remnants that affect the world around us.”
—Booklist
“The Lies Among Us is a wonderfully inventive novel, beautifully written, with a cast of characters that is fantastic in every sense of the word . . . a marvelous read!”
—Louisa Morgan, author of A Secret History of Witches
“This book is full of lies (and that’s exactly why you should read it). The Lies Among Us is an engrossing and wildly inventive story that takes a magic wand to the lies we tell ourselves and each other and imagines a world in which the line between truth and fiction is a curtain that could be pulled back at any moment.”
—Ruth Emmie Lang, author of Beasts of Extraordinary Circumstance
“An incredibly fun and inspiring read.”
—Katherine Arden, New York Times bestselling author of The Bear and the Nightingale
Other Titles by Sarah Beth Durst
Books for Adults
The Spellshop
The Lies Among Us
The Bone Maker
Race the Sands
The Deepest Blue
The Queen of Sorrow, Book Three of The Queens of Renthia
The Reluctant Queen, Book Two of The Queens of Renthia
The Queen of Blood, Book One of The Queens of Renthia
The Lost
Books for Teens
The Lake House
Fire & Heist
Drink, Slay, Love
Chasing Power
Conjured
Vessel
Enchanted Ivy
Ice
Books for Kids
Spy Ring
The Shelterlings
Even and Odd
Catalyst
Spark
The Stone Girl’s Story
Journey Across the Hidden Islands
The Girl Who Could Not Dream
Out of the Wild
Into the Wild
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Otherwise, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2025 by Sarah Beth Durst
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781662524110 (paperback)
ISBN-13: 9781662524103 (digital)
Cover design by Laywan Kwan
Cover image: © rolandtopor / Shutterstock; © enot-poloskun / Getty
To Becca and Noah
Whatever path you choose to follow,
Wherever life takes you,
I will always love you.
Fly free and root deep!
Contents
Chapter One: Elisa
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four: Rose
Chapter Five: Lori
Chapter Six: Elisa
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine: Rose
Chapter Ten: Lori
Chapter Eleven: Elisa
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen: Rose
Chapter Fourteen: Lori
Chapter Fifteen: Elisa
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen: Rose
Chapter Eighteen: Lori
Chapter Nineteen: Elisa
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two: Rose
Chapter Twenty-Three: Lori
Chapter Twenty-Four: Elisa
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Rose
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Lori
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Elisa
Chapter Thirty: Lori
Chapter Thirty-One: Elisa
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three: Lori
Chapter Thirty-Four: Elisa
Chapter Thirty-Five: Lori
Chapter Thirty-Six: Elisa
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Chapter One Elisa
Now
My mother is a willow.
She stands by a stream that burbles like a toddler’s kisses, and her leaves dip into the water whenever the wind blows, to be nibbled by fish who don’t know any better.
Everyone believes I am being so poetic when at last I tell them, when I say goodbye.
I am not.
If I stay, then one day, beneath the watchful blue sky, I too will grow roots, my skin will harden to bark, and the strands of my hair will blossom.
Perhaps I will be a pear tree.
* * *
I’m packed before I’m ready to leave—socks rolled, underwear efficiently tucked into my bra cups, extra cash wedged into sneakers at the bottom of my backpack, a half dozen granola bars stashed in the outer pocket with my toothbrush and floss.
I am an expert at packing the stuff I don’t care whether I lose.
Everything else I can’t bring anyway.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, I look at our—at his—bedroom. There are photos of us tucked into the edge of the mirror. I’d meant to buy frames. I wish I had. Not to hang on the wall, because that would be too permanent and whoever comes next won’t appreciate my face smiling so determinedly at them. But to sit on the dresser, to be tucked into a drawer, to be kept. Unframed photos are too easy to toss. I don’t want to be tossed. I’d rather be gradually forgotten, like a sunny afternoon indistinct from other summer days. The ones where I sipped iced coffee that was more sugar than bean and he haphazardly weeded the flower bed, randomly assigning “weed” and “flower” status to the indistinguishable green shoots.
I’d love to take just one memento with me: A shell from the beach where the breeze blew my hat into the surf. He waded in after it even though the water was frigid. Or the lucky dime I found the day I realized he’d memorized my favorite kind of pizza (with ricotta), my favorite ice cream flavor (black raspberry), and my favorite cheese (Havarti, melted on pita bread). Or even just his old headphones—a practical theft—but I’d know they were his every time I used them, which is exactly why I can’t take them. I don’t dare.
Only leave with what you brought, or what’s exclusively yours—that’s safest. Only keep what doesn’t matter.
I stayed ten and a half months this time, half a month longer than I’ve ever stayed in any one place. I let Tyler distract me. He was a lovely distraction.
When I was a kid, ten months was the max we’d live anywhere, no exceptions. Mom would enroll me in school from September to June, and then we’d use the summer to disappear. Another school in another state would take me as its new kid the next September. Sometimes, Mom even let me keep my name.
Elisa.
She told me it means “wanderer.”
Sometimes I just vary the spelling when I uproot myself: Elissa, Alissa, Alyssa, Lyssa, Lissa, Liss, Lise. But I’ve also been Beatrix, Wanda, Gitana, and Barbara—all of which mean “traveler” or “stranger.” Once, I introduced myself as Journey, but that felt too on the nose.
To Tyler, I’ve been Lyssa. I liked being her. Lyssa had ticklish feet, a fondness for slightly-too-violent nineties cartoons, and an unholy love of cheese.
Who will I be next?
I haven’t decided yet, or even let myself think about it. That’s for the bus, which is leaving in—I check the clock beside the bed, his bed—fifteen minutes.
I heave my backpack onto my back and hop so the straps settle evenly on my shoulders. Last night, I told Tyler the truth. He didn’t believe me, of course, but at least he didn’t yell like Kevin did—the last boy I’d loved and left. So that was nice. Tyler said we’d talk more when he got home from work, even though I knew I’d be halfway to . . . well, not halfway to anywhere. Halfway from here.
I say a silent goodbye to the tiny slip of a house—formerly his parents’; he’d bought it from them when they moved to Florida—and let myself out the front gate. Above, a crow scolds me. Inside a neighbor’s house, a dog barks. I walk briskly past all the other houses, with my head down. I always walk with purpose. Tyler used to tease me about it, and I never tried to explain. He wouldn’t have understood. But there is a simple reason: when you can’t control when you go, it’s nice to at least control how.
As I reach the end of the street, I realize I’m already doing it: thinking of Tyler in the past tense, as if he’s died. I don’t cry as I walk toward the bus stop. There’s no point in that. I’m moving forward now, not backward. Away to my next life, my next self.
When the bus comes, I board and don’t look back.
Never look back.
* * *
This bus smells like stale coffee and peanut butter, mixed with the familiar odors of exhaust and urine that have seeped into the plastic upholstery of every bus I’ve ever been on. I have a window seat, which is the way I like it. I watch the houses flicker by and imagine the lives of the people who live in them. Mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, friends. I try to guess who is lonely and who wishes they were, based on only a glimpse:
Manicured bushes and mulched flower beds? They have either something to prove to the neighbors (Look, I belong!) or something to prove to themselves (Look, I belong!). Or they don’t want to prove anything to anyone; they just want to be left alone to play in the dirt.
Shades down? They want to either shut the world out or keep their own world in.
Junk in the yard? Perhaps they never learned to let go.
I could teach them about that.
With each mile, I shed who I was and gather who I will be. I know the drill. This isn’t my first bus ride. In fact, I can’t remember what number bus ride it is, and that unsettles me. When did I forget what I’ve forgotten?
What do I remember? My first real goodbye was to Emma Sanchez. She’d shared her green crayon the first week of kindergarten and was terrified of puppets. She came to my birthday party, the first to arrive and the last to leave. While our mothers talked, Emma and I hid in a closet and ate all the leftover cupcakes. I knew I couldn’t pack them.
My first goodbye kiss was Jasper Andrews. I was thirteen and had decided that a constant state of impermanence meant no consequences. I knew I’d be leaving; therefore there was no reason not to kiss him. It would have been a sweet moment, except he surprised me by shoving his tongue between my teeth, and I surprised him by instinctively biting down. I’m confident it was memorable for both of us.
There were a few years where I tried not to make any friends. And a few years where I tried to make every friend, as if quantity could make up for quality. With Tyler, I’d chosen quality for the first time in a while: a single intense relationship, all the sweeter for its mortality.
You can cram a lot of living into ten months, if you try.
Tyler didn’t understand that—why I was always now, now, now. But he went merrily along with every one of my ideas, from our first kiss at a party I’d crashed (sixteen pizzas delivered to one beach house—how could I resist that lure?) to the next morning, when he said sleepily, “I wish you didn’t have to leave.” And I said, “I don’t. At least, not yet.”
He always seemed vaguely surprised I’d chosen him. Equally surprised when it was time for me to leave, even though I’d warned him, obliquely, a thousand times that life is short and joy ephemeral—at least if you’re me.
“Goodbye, Tyler,” I whisper to the bus window.
And then I let him go.
When the bus squeals to a stop two hours later, I disembark. My ticket is for Springfield, but you don’t ever want to go all the way to your destination. You could be tracked and then convinced to return. Safer to have a clean break.
When I approach the ticket counter, I widen my eyes and add a quiver to my voice. “Excuse me? Please? Can I exchange my ticket? I need to change my destination?” Each sentence ends with a question mark. There’s an art to being unmemorable, and it begins with leaning into people’s expectations of me—I’m harmless and forgettable, my rising inflection says.
The extra lilt isn’t necessary this time; this woman doesn’t give a shit beyond whether I pay and when her lunch break is. She won’t remember yet another customer. “Where to?” she asks in a bored drawl.
Perhaps this is an opportunity, given how little she cares. I don’t need to choose at random. I pull a list from my pocket, crumpled and stained but still legible. I’ve kept it for years, ever since I was a kid. It’s a list of places that could hold the answers that I so desperately need: where my family came from, why we can never stay anywhere, and how to break the pattern. I’ve crossed off many places over the years and added many others.
Tyler wasn’t on this list. He was a detour.
But it’s time to resume my search.
Comparing my list to the bus destination board, I find a match: Greenborough, Massachusetts. I don’t remember when I added it or why—perhaps it’s the town with the kid who’d miraculously survived a fatal car wreck. Or is it the one with the unexplained deaths that locals blame on a cursed playground? Or where an infertile woman gave birth and insisted it was due to magic water? Regardless, it must have enough unexplained oddities to make it onto my list. One of these places had to be either the place my family’s little problem began or the place where it could end. I just need to keep searching. Greenborough will do.
Ticket in hand, I scurry to the bathroom, buy myself a cheese sandwich (with cash—always only cash), and wait to board. I eye the other waiting passengers:
A middle-aged woman with baggy eyes who grips a toddler firmly by the hand.
An older woman with thin hair and headphones that dwarf her head.
A freshly shaved man in an ill-fitting suit.
Two college-age girls, one with an arm draped around the shoulders of the other. The first, an Indian girl with a pixie cut and a nose ring, is glaring at the other passengers-to-be, while the second, a White girl with heavy eye makeup, is absorbed in her phone.
Not the mother. If I were a lot younger, yes. If your cheeks are still squishy, then you can tap into their protect-the-young maternal instincts. But once your cheeks sink closer to your skull, those same mama-bear instincts can work against you if they feel the need to defend their young.
Not the older woman, either, with those don’t-talk-to-me headphones.
Definitely not the nervous-looking man in the suit. He’s fidgeting too much, adjusting the lapels on his jacket, futzing with his collar. He’s on his way to either an interview or a funeral.
So that leaves the young couple, the college-age girls.
I know I can still pass for a college student, even though I never was one. The backpack helps. Clean shorts and T-shirt, hair that’s brushed but not styled (a few flyaway pieces), no makeup, simple silver earrings—I’m harmless, that’s the snap judgment I want them to make about me, while I’m busy making snap judgments about them.
“Hey,” I say to the hostile-looking girl with the nose ring—the other, the one on her phone, is assiduously avoiding eye contact with anyone. “Sorry to interrupt, but any chance you know someone in Greenborough looking for a roommate or to sublet for a few months?”
The pale girl moves her eyes up to me, then back down to her phone. She doesn’t speak.
“Nope,” the other says.
“Okay, sorry, never mind.” I shift away, out of their space, and fix my gaze on the street as if watching for the bus, which I am, but I’m also watching them. Out of the corner of my eye, I see them whisper.
As the bus pulls in, the nose ring girl says, “You don’t want to live in Greenborough.”
Looking up, the phone girl nods. Her eyes are wide. Solemn. But that could be an effect of her eye makeup, heavy kohl black that makes the whites look startlingly pearlescent.
“Oh?” I say. “Why not?”
They glance at each other.
“It’s the kind of place where people get stuck,” the wide-eyed one says. Her voice is so soft that I barely catch the words.
A dead-end town.
I’ve been to those before. Good places to disappear. Not great for what I seek, but it could still serve as a transitional location. I can check out any oddities to see if they relate to my affliction, and I can try to earn as much cash as I can before hitting the next town—I know the drill. “I’ll only be there temporarily.”
She shrugs. Looks down again and murmurs, “You’ll see.”
I climb onto the bus and claim a window seat near the back. As we pull away from whatever town this is, I watch the houses again and imagine what it would feel like to call one of them home. And then I squash the thought—there’s no point in thinking like that, not when I have a new life to establish.
Greenborough.
What’s my story for moving there? A fresh start after a bad breakup? Striking out on my own, away from judgmental family? Lost my job so I’m trying a new town? Just wanted to live somewhere new, without any memories or ties? I like the last one. It lets the listener fill in the blanks. Can’t get caught in a lie that way.
