Page 152 of Boardroom Mask

But I’ve always been different than him. He’s cold stone; I’m hot fire. So if a mountain stays… what does an inferno do?

I’m afraid I know the answer already.

I’m not going anywhere.Is that what Jillian needs from me? For me to show up and refuse to leave, the way my father just did? Do I plant myself in front of her and sayI’m here, deal with it, I’m not moving?

Or is that exactly the wrong thing? Maybe loving Jillian doesn’t look like showing up. It could look like stepping back, away, out. Gone forever. Giving her room to breathe without my shadow falling across every doorway she walks through.

She spent five years rebuilding herself after a man ripped her choices away. And then I snuck through her window and started taking them again.Idecided when I came and went. I chose. Not her.Me.

What if fires are only born so they can return to ash?

What if the bravest thing I can do for Jillian is let her go?

64

JILLIAN

“Every time I close my eyes, it’s like a dark paradise / No one compares to you”

— “Dark Paradise” by Lana Del Rey

I’m at the playground again. It’s too cold for anyone with common sense or love of feeling in their fingertips to be out here, so I have the place all to myself. The swings creak in the wind, chains rubbing against the crossbar.Screeeee. Screeeee.

Unlike the other, smarter people who usually come here, I no longer care if I have sensation in my nose. Let it be numb; that way, it matches the rest of me.

I got to the courthouse too late. By the time I parked and ran up the steps, the microphones were being dismantled and the satellite trucks were packing up. A cameraman told me I’d missed it. Lazarev made a shocking statement and left. That was that.

I sat down on the steps, pulled up Twitter, and watched the whole thing. I felt sick when it was over. Not only was myarticle wrong and incomplete, it also hurt people needlessly. I’m a myopic bitch, a life-ruiner. Like always, everything bad that’s happened is all my fault.

I push off with my toes and let the swing carry me back and forward.Screeee. Screeee.Only in a massive city can you feel this alone.

You disgust me.That’s what Kir said before he left. No three words have ever been so devastating. Nor has an aqua-colored envelope ever looked so horrible. The fact that it contained a letter saying my daughter wanted to talk to me didn’t really console me, either. Why would she want that? Doesn’t she know how fucked-up I am? Even a masked murderer can see that. It would take her one look at me for her to come to the exact same conclusion: that I’m disgusting.

She’s old enough to see it. She’d be five. That’s plenty old enough for this playground. I bet she’d have a favorite swing and that she could do the monkey bars all by herself now.

You disgust me.

Screeee.

Screeee.

I don’t hear him coming. That’s nothing new. He’s never made a sound unless he chose to. But Ifeelhim coming. A warmth on my back, eyes swallowing me up. The crunch of shoes on the rubberized fake mulch.

Kir stops a few feet from the swing set. He looks like absolute hell. His clothes are pristine, as always, but his face is unshaven and the circles under his eyes are black enough to be bruises.

I don’t say anything.

He doesn’t, either.

Screee. Screee.

My toes drag against the mulch until the swing stops swinging and I’m left just sitting there, hands wrapped around the cold chains, watching him watch me.

“I tracked your phone,” he says. No apology for that part. Not even a little bit. If there was ever a time I’d be mad about that invasion of privacy, it’s long gone now.

Kir looks past me at the empty playground. The slide, the monkey bars, the little climbing wall with the colored handholds. His eyes move across all of it with a slowness that tells me he’s not just seeing what’s here. He’s seeing whatIsee when I come here.

“I understand now,” he murmurs. “Why you keep coming back.”