“I left because I felt like dying. But it’s the reason I didn’t call you after I landed in New York.”
“You blocked my number.”
“Mack deactivated the number.”
“That’s not an excuse. You could’ve texted me.”
“I know.”
She’s holding her breath, staring out of her window. She can’t even face me. “If you’d have just woken me up, Alex …”
“I know.”
“I didn’t publish that article.”
“You wrote it,” I counter, regretting the low blow immediately. She doesn’t need any more guilt over what happened. She’s already taken a share of the blame. I can see it in the slope of her shoulders, in the shadows beneath her eyes, in the reddened, raw skin around her fingernails.
I know she didn’t release it. Seeing her now, I don’t know how I could have ever doubted it, too untrusting of the world to let myself believe that good things are genuine, that good people won’t let me down.
“Yeah, I wrote it,” she whispers, like a dying confession. I can hear the pain in her voice, and despite my effort, I can’t drum up any anger over it. Not anymore. I don’t know what it is—maybe it’swatching my mother’s health slipping down the drain, maybe it’s the defeat in her eye, but I just can’t waste another hour resenting Ophelia when I could be loving her instead. “I wanted to break your father. I wanted him to lose everything. I wanted his family shattered, his business bankrupt. Iwantedthis. All of this. I wanted your mom to suffer because I wantedhimto suffer.”
“You didn’t.”
She whirls around to face me, eyes alight with anger. “I did. Don’t you see? This is exactly what I prayed for, night after night. I wanted your family to break.”
“Not like this. You didn’t want it like this.”
“It’s no different, Alex. You and I are doomed.”
Her pessimism is usually charming, but not now. “Stop saying that.”
Her teeth sink into her bottom lip to stop it trembling. “And I was wrong. But you left me. You didn’t give me a chance to speak, to explain. And now you’re asking me for the exact same thing.”
The second sentence is so full of anguish, I almost hear her heart crack when she says it. “I had to do what was right for the girls.”
“But you could’ve just woken me,” she says, raising her voice. Her eyes are glassy, shrink-wrapped by unshed tears. She’s fighting so hard not to cry in front of me, to save it for someplace else, someone else, and that might be the only thing worse than watching her fall apart. “We buried abodytogether, Alex. We killed someone, and then you left me to cope with that alone.”
Fuck.If she notices me wince at her words, she doesn’t let on. The list of ways in which I failed her grows longer, the regret that’s eaten away at me for weeks gets heavier.
Maybe the monster my father nurtured inside me is bigger than I’d hoped, because I hadn’t considered that at all, hadn’t really considered Bancroft as anything more than a photo that needs burying.
I hadn’t thought about how she’d cope with what happened to Bancroft, how it’d affect someone who isn’t used to all of this … mess.
“Just tell me how I can fix this.”
“You can’t fix this. I’m trying to just … I’m trying to move on with my life and now you’ve shown up here and ruined what little progress I’ve made.”
I shut my eyes and lean my head back against the headrest. “I can’t move on.”
She wraps her jacket tighter around herself. “That’s not my problem. You’re living thousands of miles away. It’s hardly been any time.” She wipes her nose on her sleeve, and it pulls my chest tight. “We just need to give it more time.”
I don’t want to give it more time.
I just wanther.
I think back to that dreadful morning, waking up beside her with the first few streaks of sunlight washing their way across the valley. It was so serene. So quiet. With Bancroft buried, I’d woken up with an unfamiliar lightness.
And then I’d checked my phone, seen the chaos. It’sthatmoment, those horrible next couple of hours that cost me this. Cost meher.
