Page 96 of Pretty Lies

“He’s not going to try something, is he?” she asked.

“Luis?”

“Or people for him. I don’t know.” Della let out a sigh. “Ma’s … handling what she can. We’re just waiting for the release of J’s body. What if that’s why he’s so quiet, Cory, and it’s not that he disappeared at all? What if he’s just waiting for the calm to pass, so he can come in like a storm all over again?”

The window overlooking the backyard of her townhouse caught her eye. The colored leaves that were just beginning to fall from the trees mirrored her current state.

Things were changing.

She had to roll with it.

Time would bring good things.

It was just hard right now.

She didn’t miss how Cory hadn’t answered her question. He was still staring at her from across the room when she looked his way again.

“Well—what if he’s just waiting for the moment when I’m weak?” she asked.

“Della.”

“What?”

“Babe … you were never weak.”

He said it so frankly.

Like it just was.

Della felt that in her fucking chest.

“That’s how people like Luis work—the only way they can manipulate you is to tell you lies about yourself and make you believe them. It’s how they do what they do to anybody they think they can use. They make it seem like they built you up so of course, they know the things to do or say to tear you down in the fastest way possible. Who gives a fuck where he is, Della, or what he might do? We’ll handle it. He’s toxic; he only knows how to make others be the same. Don’t let him in your head when he’s not paying rent to be there.”

Della didn’t reply.

She didn’t really need to.

Cory gave it a moment before he asked, “You’ve had four meetings today, and took more phone calls than I am years old. Can I take you away from all this and make you forget all of this shit even exists now?”

Her next breath ached in her chest.

She would never tell him no.

Not for that.

“Yeah, take me away, Cory.”

•••

In the chaos that had become Della’s life in the days following her brother’s murder, the one reprieve she found was always Cory. He wasn’t the next man to sit across from her desk, ready to try to flex his masculinity all over her new position under her father’s name. He wasn’t someone who needed her support, or to cry on her shoulder when she’d just finished drying her own tears. He didn’t take or ask for anything.

The man only gave.

It was not lost on Della how Cory had gone from being something that gave her anxiety first thing in the morning … to being the one person who calmed her simply by looking her way.

He was just there, still doing his job. That job, though? It’d definitely changed. Or maybe evolved. Della wasn’t sorry for that at all.

Cory was her soft place to fall. Where she didn’t have to feel sad or guilty or not good enough. When the day finally came to an end, and he pulled her beneath him, everything went away and nothing mattered. The world silenced. Her heart stopped hurting. Breathing came easier.