“Hello,” she said. “I’m Millie.”
Millie. The other girls wore pins in their stiff, shoulder-length hair, but Millie’s chestnut hair was short. It swept across her forehead and curled around her ears like a choppy sea.
A choppy sea.
Fitz was startled by the poetic turn of his thoughts. But everything about her made him react strangely. He didn’t believe in love at first sight—and yet what was this if not that? There was no other explanation for how he felt, or for how he behaved in the weeks and months and years to come.
Really, Fitz should have known better—after all, he came from a line of men who did inane things in the name of love. It was a curse the men in his family could not seem to shake, a curse they all took pride in even as they lamented it.
Fitz’s uncle used to laugh about the millions he’d let slip through his fingers when he’d left his first girlfriend, a shipping heiress, for the daughter of the neighborhood grocer.Couldn’t help it, he’d say, laughing and throwing his arm around Aunt Margaret,I’d do anything for this one.
Fitz’s own father had liked to boast about how he’d sold a little plot of land that he’d inherited in order to buy his wife, Fitz’s mother, a white convertible that she’d once—once!—mentioned she admired. That car’s value plummeted the moment his mother wrapped her hands around the steering wheel, but the real estate? It drove Fitz crazy to think of what it would have been worth if his father had held on to it.
The men in his family were bankers, traders, developers. Smart, practical money men. And yet, to a person, love turned them inside out. It made them do the most reckless, destructive things.
Fitz had always vowed to himself that he would not follow in their footsteps, but then he laid eyes on Millie and found himself stupidly drowning heart-deep within the family curse.
Why couldn’t the damned lights in that restaurant have brightened over one of Millie’s friends, one of those girls with the movie-star hair, instead of her? Why did he have to fall like a ton of bricks for the girl who was different from everyone else? The girl with the laughing eyes, who couldn’t go a day without having a bit of fun? Who needed attention the way Fitz needed coffee?
The way she had smiled across the restaurant at him! He should have known then what sort of girl she was, the trouble she would cause, the chaos she would bring to his life, the way she would drive him mad.
But she was a delicious cake that he couldn’t get enough of, even when he knew it wasn’t good for him to crave her so. To want her all of the time. To so loathe the idea of sharing her.
Even now when he thinks of her, those old possessive feelings gain heat within him, filling him with a mix of anger and shame. He does not like to think of the path where that love had led him. He does not like to think of Millie at all. About their life together. How it ended.
What he did.
A knock on the door yanks Fitz from his thoughts.
He blinks. For a moment, he is utterly lost.The Oceanview Home, he remembers at last, looking down at the garden. The present floods around him, and he bobs to the surface of himself.
There’s another knock.
“What?” he barks.
One of the nurses—Fitz doesn’t know if they’re all nurses, or if any of them are, but this is the short one who wears her black hair in a tight ponytail—sticks her head into his room.
“Good morning,” she says in her no-nonsense sort of voice.
Fitz finds all of the nurses annoying, but this one annoys him the least of the bunch. She doesn’t carry on like a preschool teacher, punctuating her sentences with exclamation points. She isn’t even particularly patient, which is fine by him. There is enough patience at the Oceanview Home to make his ears bleed.
Isobel. That’s her name.
“I’m not dead,” he tells her. She can check him off on the Alive List and carry on with her day.
“What a relief,” she says dryly, and steps into his apartment. She glances around at his blank walls and decently neatened bed. Her eyes rests for a moment on the photograph of his dog, Tad, that is propped on his dresser and then on the bag of black licorice that he’s had for eons, rationing out one to himself every day. Then she looks at him again.
“Mr. Fitz, you haven’t come down for breakfast.”
“And? Is the headmistress very angry?”
Isobel’s arched eyebrows are as dark and severe as her ponytail. She looks Fitz up and down.
“Well,” he says. “How do I look?”
“Fiercely handsome and clever,” she responds. “Like a lone wolf.”
Her wit comes as a surprise. It’s a struggle to not crack a smile, but Fitz has a lifetime of practice under his belt.
