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For just a few minutes, it shut off my head. It wasn’t that it eased my mind, like Michael telling me to give it to him had done. But it made it so I didn’t think at all.
Out of breath, hurting, and barely alert, I made it home to my apartment. As was routine, my mind filled back up in the shower, so by the time I got to my bed, I cried. Large, wracking sobs that made me bang onto my pillow. I pounded, wept, and when I could finally manage it, I drank more water and a protein shake that didn’t hurt my stomach too badly.
Then I shut off the light and pretended that more tears didn’t silently flow down my face. How could I have loved him so deeply while he felt nothing? Had it always been a game to him?
I hiccupped and forced myself to stop. I’d sleep deeper if I cried myself to sleep, but then my dreams wouldn’t be great.
I, Bridget Radford, had become an expert at staying busy and crying myself to sleep, all while I pretended to be confident and capable.
No wonder he didn’t want me. I could hardly blame him.Yes, I can.I’m worth something, and fuck him for not only not seeing that, but for taking what little self-confidence I had and screwing around with it the way that he did.
I remembered howI worried I might be a sociopath.No way, but he might be one.
I closed my eyes. Tomorrow, I got to do it all again. I would add two more things to my list, and going to the doctor to see if I could stop snoring would go toward the top. Plus, it might be affecting my health. Secondly—I wanted to make a list of people I harmed by helping my father. He wasn’t around to help me anymore, so I’d have to do it myself.
It would certainly be hard, which meant I should absolutely do it.
* * *
During the tenminutes I allotted myself for lunch—greens didn’t upset my stomach if I ate them with just a little extra virgin olive oil—I saw the news. Or rather Layla did.
Didn’t you say you met her? Didn’t she used to date Michael?
I stared at the link she sent to our group chat with my mouth agape.Bodyguard to the stars, Sylvie Comisier, found dead of an apparent overdose on her living room floor.
I almost dropped the phone, but I texted back,Yes.
Sylvie looked gorgeous in the picture included with the article, all dark haired and beautiful as she trailed behind a billionaire at a conference earlier that year. I blinked. Was it almost a year since I saw her?Almost a year? Holy cow. I was coming up on the anniversary of my breakup day very soon. Should I do something, I wondered?Like walk around naked in my apartment in front of the windows just because?
She overdosed?Hope answered. She must be scrolling while she breastfed. It was the only time she checked her phone lately.
I couldn’t really work up sadness over Sylvie’s death. I hated the woman, and despite the fact we both got screwed over by Michael, the connection didn’t make me like her any more. It surprised me to learn she did drugs. Did the article say which drug? It didn’t. I clicked out of it.Well, poor Sylvie. She liked Michael way too much to not have it returned, and I certainly knew what that was like.
He did have that tendency to do that to women.
I wondered what woman he did that little trick on these days, then put down my phone and forced myself to breathe.
How is the baby, Hope? I texted the chat. I didn’t want to talk about Sylvie. I never even wanted tothinkabout her again. I needed to make it feel inconsequential, so maybe someday, the whole thing could be equally unimportant.Oh, that time with Michael? Why, it was worthnothingto me. In my head, I said it with a southern accent, like I was a sophisticated lady.
Delicious.
I smiled at her response. My stomach panged. What could I have eaten to make it hurt so much? I looked down.Oh, dang it. Tomatoes.The flaw with mindlessly eating, I supposed. As quietly as I could manage, I went into my bathroom in the office and puked. With so much practice, I got good at managing it quietly so no one would notice. Nothing made it less horrible to experience, but it at least stopped the litany of people asking if I was okay. When I was done, and my stomach emptied, I put my head on my knees.
Clients would arrive in ten minutes. I needed to pull it together. That was life, pulling it together. My mind drifted to Sylvie again. She probably would’ve loved seeing me this miserable, if she’d lived long enough to see it.
16
The appointment with my sleep specialist started in a half hour, which meant I needed to leave in the next five minutes. I recorded my puking from earlier in the week, since my GI doctor had me keeping a log. All of my time with doctors lately was starting to make me twitchy. I hated having to explain the poisoning.
No, they never caught who did it.
Why? It was probably my father’s co-conspirators, the Russians.
Inevitably, the conversation ended with them staring in either total bewilderment or remembering how Layla had been kidnapped by the Russians. In those cases, sometimes they put two and two together to make five.
Luckily, not too much of that would come up at my sleep appointment. My snoring wasn’t a new problem, but I still figured the poisoning would come up with the doctors. I hoped I could breeze over it and focus on the snoring, though. I didn’t want to disrupt future partners, after all.
Michael Li claimed to like my snoring. Then again, he’d lied about everything else.
