My mother knew how she wanted to die.
Ruby knew how she wanted to live.
And somewhere in between the two of them, I’d spent the last eighteen years in a holding pattern, waiting for something to happen to me. Waiting for my life to begin. To become the person I was meant to be—whoever the hell she was. And now the one thing I’d carried with me for all of these years, the one thing I could point to as something I’d done—something I’d completed—was gone.
But it wasn’t just the script. I didn’t just want to be a person with a job. There was a whole life that had unfolded behind me full of stops and detours that I never got to take. Instead, I’d kept my head down and never even bothered to become the type of person who would demand a raise or send a script off to an agent or put herself out there enough to meet someone who wanted a bona fide relationship that included a healthy sex life and dates in public and ordering takeout and going on weekend getaways and shopping at flea markets.
Instead, I’d let myself become the person who took care of everyone else, and that was it.
That was Vera.
She was a good girl.
Chapter Six
Crashing on Ruby’s couch for three nights straight had permanently altered the construction of my spinal cord, but that still hadn’t stopped me from sleeping harder than I’d slept in months. I’d only gone outside to walk Marlon.
My eyes still crusty with sleep, I checked my phone for the time. It was twelve thirty-four in the afternoon. When I worked for Brody, I left my house every morning at six thirty. I was not a late riser. And yet, over the course of the last few days, I’d discovered that the more I slept, the less time there was in a day to be awake. The fewer hours I spent awake, the less time I had to live with the reality of whatever my life had turned into.
At the metallic sound of the key entering the front doorknob, I dropped my phone and closed my eyes again. By this time, Ruby would have had a breakfast with friends, gone to a water ballet class, and maybe even hit up a resale boutique. When she saw me lying here, she would definitely haveopinionsand I didn’t want to be awake for them.
The door opened and the key hit the counter with a clatter. Heavy footsteps dropped closer and closer and I instinctively squeezed my eyes shut before realizing I probably looked constipated and then forced my face to relax, even letting my mouth fall open into a snore for good measure.
Ruby cleared her throat.
Nope. I wasn’t falling for that trap. If she was going to lecture me, Iwould at least be showered and wearing a bra. So until she disappeared into her room, I’d play dead.
“Vera?” asked a deep, baffled voice. A voice much too deep to belong to Ruby or even Hollis.
I opened one single eye as I squinted up at the tall, broad figure hovering above me.
This was a dream. A depression-induced stress dream.
Against my will, I opened my other eye.
Because no way in hell wasElias Buckleystanding in Ruby’s living room, holding a stack of light bulbs.
I closed my eyes again and begged myself to wake up from this dream within a dream. “You’re not real,” I said to the dream version of Eli. A hypnagogic hallucination or a waking dream. Maybe with a side of sleep paralysis. Or something like that. I’d read about this before, but never experienced it myself. Stress could do weird things to a body, though.
“I assure you,” the Eli-shaped hallucination said, “I am real.”
I opened one eye again and then, to prove his point, he tapped his index finger to my nose.
Okay. I felt that.
“Uhhh...” As I sat up, my blanket fell away, and I was suddenly aware of my braless forty-year-old boobs, nipples pointing to the ground like a pair ofYou Are Herearrows on a shopping center map.
“Not to be a bad hostess,” I said as he leaned on the arm of the chaise longue, “but what the fuck are you doing in my grandmother’s apartment? Are you even real?”
He held up the boxes of light bulbs, and then, likeIwas the one out of place here, said, “Changing light bulbs. And yes, I hope that I am real.”
“Are you a maintenance man?” My head felt like one of those shape-matching kids’ toys and not a damn thing about this scene fit in the shapes of my brain.
He shook his head. “I just play one on TV.”
I blinked at him. Did Eli Buckley make a... joke? I recalled many things about Eli, but his humor was not among them.
In fact, the last time we saw each other was deeply unfunny.
