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She sighs and shakes her head. “You’re making things so much harder than they need to be. You realize that, don’t you?”
Yeah, I think miserably to myself. I really fucking do.
39
WREN
I wake up with two completely unrelated thoughts in my head.
The first is that I can’t afford to alienate Dmitri, because he has the power to keep me away from my son.
The second: it’s my birthday. More importantly, it’s the first birthday I’m going to be spending without Rose.
Cue the crying.
I cry through my morning pee and my shower and, when I realize that I’m not in the least bit hungry, I skip breakfast so I can put my pajamas back on and curl into bed and cry some more. Fetal position all the way, because that’s how God intended for His creations to cry.
Or so I assume.
I lose time to thought and, somewhere in the midst of my grief, I fall asleep. Not the restful kind—it’s too tormented with old memories disguised as dreams for that.
I picture walking down sidewalks and every face is Rose’s. None of them will talk to me.
When I wake up, feeling worse than I did when I fell asleep, my cheeks are sticky with dried tear tracks. I don’t bother wiping them away because no sooner am I awake than do fresh tears start to fall along the same paths.
In some ways, it makes sense that I would lose it today. Right after I buried Rose and Jared, I jumped back into work. It was the first time I’d actually been grateful to Dmitri for being the Type A control freak he is, because he’d kept me so busy that I didn’t have time to dwell with my pain. I could always feel it, hibernating deep inside me, but I was able to keep the lid on it.
Now, though, that lid has well and truly been blown the fuck off.
If this keeps up much longer, I’m going to be a dried husk of a woman. I’d go to the kitchen and guzzle some water if I wasn’t so nervous about running into Bee and Dmitri. Today of all days, those aren’t encounters I feel up to handling.
Death by dehydration it is, then.
As it turns out, I don’t even have to leave the room to get exactly what I don’t want. Around three in the afternoon, Bee raps on my door. “Wren? Is everything okay in there? You haven’t left your room all day.”
She sounds worried. But I’m sure that has nothing to do with me and everything to do with what she walked in on last night. Which was intense and confrontational in my eyes, but probably nothing short of suspicious in hers.
I glance down at my arm and find an indigo bruise blotching my skin from where Dmitri held me. “Happy birthday to me,” I mutter darkly.
“Wren,” Bee calls out again, “can we talk?”
I cringe. Talking is the last thing I want to do. I don’t have even a fraction of the emotional bandwidth to discuss what may or may not be happening with Dmitri and me.
Especially not in a conversation with his future wife.
Whose wedding I just happen to be planning.
The term “shitshow” was invented for people like me.
“Wren, if you don’t open this door right now, I’mma give it my best hi-ya and break it the fuck down.”
I collapse back into bed and throw the covers over my head. I feel like a bitch for ignoring her, but I just can’t face today. I’ll sleep through it and deal with the consequences tomorrow. At the moment, it feels like a solid plan.
Or at least, it does—right up until I hear the lock turn in my door. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that they have a spare key handy. There’s no such thing as privacy in this freaking prison.
Whatever. I’m just going to stay under the covers and pretend I’m alone.
That backup plan is shot to hell just like the others when Bee grabs the blankets I’m hiding under and tears them right off me. Flinching, I grab my last line of defense—the always-trusty pillow—and plop it over my head.
