I built my whole existence on a single conviction. That if you are clever enough, and patient enough, and you cover every angle, you can engineer any outcome you want. You can solve for the missing piece. You can make the numbers come out right in the end.
I covered every angle.
I solved for every variable.
Except for the one that mattered.
Some equations have no solution. Some wounds don't close. Some doors, once you've let them shut, stay shut, and all the money in the world just stands there in the dark beside you, useless as a coat in a house fire.
I sit on Maddie's bed, in the quiet. Even with all I have, I have never had less.
Chapter Nineteen
Maddie
Ispentthewholeday being aggressively fine.
Today is my mom's cancerversary slash Cancer-Butt-Kicking-Day party and I am determined to spend it celebrating Grace Berwick's fight and not feeling sorry for myself.
I'm wearing the fine like a second outfit layered right over the first. I've laughed at my uncle's terrible jokes, refilled the lemonade pitcher twice, and told roughly nine separate people that work is good and nothing is new. All nine of them believed me, because if there is one genuine skill I have mastered in this life it is looking okay even when I'm not.
Particularly when I'm not.
Today is not for me. Today is all about my mother. Whatever happened to me this week can wait in the dark place where I shove everything else. It can wait out there forever, frankly.
Only Jazz and my parents know about the breakup with Demetrius and I want to keep it that way. I know it's probably as likely to stay a secret as I'm likely to sprout horns and fur, but I'm holding on to hope I won't have to face the gossip mill of a small town backyard gathering. At least today.
So instead of focusing on my own battered heart, I'm focusing on the people around me while lurking as far from the action as I possibly can without alarming my parents.
Jazz finds me hiding by the cooler. I have been stationed there since approximately three in the afternoon because I'm in no mood to face the flood of nosiness headed my way. It's a small town after all and what could be juicier gossip than a local girl falling for a billionaire and having her heart broken.
Twice. Having her heart broken twice by the same man.
By tomorrow, the whole town will know. I should get it over with and tell everyone, but I just can't.
My bestie drops into the lawn chair beside me and hands over a paper plate with a hot dog on it that I do not remember asking for, but the gesture is Jazz at her most loving, which is to say it involves food. She stays uncharacteristically silent. At least for the first thirty seconds.
"You good?" she asks without looking directly at me.
Like I'm some skittish stray kitten she's trying to coax out of hiding.
"I'm great."
"Uh-huh." She takes a long pull of her lemonade and surveys the backyard with a slightly menacing glare. "Mrs. Kowalski is about to head over here."
I don't look up from my plate. "I know."
"She's been watching you for twenty minutes."
"I know," I repeat, still not looking up.
"There she goes."
Ugh. I knew this was coming, but I still wish I could dig a hole under the patio and stay there until we cut the cake.
Mrs. Kowalski arrives in a cloud of lily of the valley perfume, walking way too fast for a person barely reaching four feet high. The gnome lady who has lived three doors down from my parents for the past thirty years is the neighborhood gossip at its finest and I just know that once she gets her tiny fingers on this story, the entire town will know faster than I can scream Heartbreak. She knows absolutely everything that happens in this neighborhood, in this town, and possibly on this coast.
But she loves my mother, so I force myself to look up and slap a half-assed smile on my face as her tiny feet plant themselves in my field of vision.
