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“I’m not sure. But I suspect.”
“Don’t tell them you suspect. Just go with the flow with those ones. If they make you feel good for now, spend time around them and the evil one won’t be able to get to you.”Unless he’s very, very strong,I thought to myself.
But Grace didn’t need to know that right now.
“As soon as… as soon as one of the guys I suspect is one of the good ones—Sam—came to my rescue, my ex vanished.”
“Yeah, doesn’t surprise me,” I said. “It’s because of thefeelingof your anxiety lessening. So there was nothing for your darkness to latch onto at that time, so he couldn’t keep coming after you. He wasn’t strong enough. Make sense?”
“I… I guess. This is all so crazy—”
“Of course it’s crazy. We’re both seeing Dr. Silk. We’re both crazy.”
“I’m not crazy,” she said with fortitude.
“Well, you’re not normal, either.”
She was quiet. Then she said, “So when you… ‘made peace’with the one with depression, it just… went away? In your head, I mean.”
“Yeah. It was great,” I said, feeling happiness and relief and satisfaction blossom in me like a field of flowers. “I haven’t felt depression since she vanished.”
“So if I make peace with Ink-Grayson… I can get rid of my anxiety? Forever?”
I shrugged. “Maybe. Like I said, I’m not an expert on this stuff. I can only speak from my own experience. Oh—that reminds me of something else,” I said, lowering my voice as I remembered. “Sometimes that dark stuff is packed deep,deepin your head. So it takes a while to figure it out completely. You think you’ve dealt with it, and then it comes out to bite you in the ass when there’s some trigger from your past. Happens when you’re least expecting it, and then your inky boy’s gonna show up.”
“I don’t like the sound of that. So he could just jump into my day at any time?”
“Sounds like anxiety to me,” I said smugly. “Better keep hanging around people that keep it at bay. Starve it. Make it weaker.”
“Is that what you’re doing with Summer?”
My stomach clenched. I glanced outside.
Still in the hammock.
“I still don’t know why she’s here,” I admitted. “But I added to the stuff I wrote about her. Made it less intense. Seems to be working.”
“I might want to borrow that pen again,” she said.
“I thought you might,” I said, twirling the pen. “But keep in mind, you can’t write them away. I tried that, too. You can only add on to them.”
“Commas, not periods.”
“Semicolons,” I said, looking down at my wrist.
My semicolon tattoo winked at me, hidden among the rest of my ink.
No one ever asked me about that one.
“I have one more question,” Grace said. “What about the good ones?”
“What about them?”
“How do you make them go away?”
“Why, you afraid you’ll do it by accident?” I asked with a laugh. “Afraid you’ll lose your good dickin’?”
Again, I could hear her face twist into an insulted expression through the phone.But this time, it didn’t bring me joy. “Those ones work the same.”
