She looks up then, her lips flattening with what appears to be a poor attempt at a smile.
It barely lasts a second.
“Baby,” I croak out. My hand slides toward her leg, fingers curling loosely around her ankle like I’m afraid of her being frightened by my next words.
Who am I kidding? I’m downright terrified of messing things up again. Terrified of asking the wrong questions. Maybe even asking the right ones, but in the wrong way.
She hums. The smallest, most precious smile takes over her face. And it still looks painfully forced.
Shit.
“You…” I clear my throat. “You’re on Seroquel, right?”
And just like that, her smile disappears. Taken over completely by a deadened, blank stare as she nods.
That’s when I fucking realize how difficult that smile must’ve been for her.
I swallow hard. “Have you missed a dose, baby? Recently?”
Silence.
Then she abruptly yanks the duvet off herself. The movement is sharp enough to make me flinch.
She climbs out of the bed without looking at me, shoulders stiff. “I’ll go make us some lunch,” she mumbles as she strides over to the door.
I expect her to slam it shut once she walks out. Instead, the soft click when it shuts behind her somehow feels worse.
A soft sigh escapes me. Because in this silence, I’ve gotten my answer anyway.
TWENTY-THREE
Cece
Out of the thirty-three years of my life, I’ve spent about ten being thoroughly confused and miserable—two of them in an introspective haze where nothing made sense, but everything did.
That had happened pretty much immediately after I finished my MBA thesis.
To this day, I hear random online chatter in my alma mater groups about the ‘Cece disappearing act’ whenever I’m in the tabloids.
The conversations are mostly about me, and rarely directedtome.
About how I was the stoic bitch who fell off the HBS throne after a one-and-done, financial tour de force. Only to resurface two years later as a rising heiress economist.
Suddenly, for anyone outside of Harvard, I was simply that. An heiress. A woman whose successseemed spoon-fed.
Like those two years I spent as a hermit gave me a clean slate I didn’t want. One I didn’t even anticipate.
But very little of those condescending remarks ever reached me. Because I was about to spend the next eight years of my life as a newly diagnosed, morosely medicated, put-together woman.
The only person from my pre-medicated years who ever really gave a damn was… Sebastian.
But then, he did his own disappearing act.
I didn’t begrudge him for it. I had no right to.
So I stuck with what I knew. What I had started to learn about myself, cataloguing my behaviors like they were a pattern recognition research paper I was building.
Statistics made sense. Categorization, lists, and pie charts of my stupid highs and lows.
