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“S-Simon?”
“Yes and I should’ve. And that’s how I know what you are to him. Still.”
“What am I?”
“Something he wants but won’t let himself have.”
My knees completely give out and I have to grab onto the windowsill to not crash to the ground, instead of lowering myself to it like a dignified person.
But the thing is, my dignity is dead. It’s completely gone.
God, I’m pathetic.
I’m pathetic in that in all these months, this is when my heart has chosen to race. This moment. This is the moment my body has chosen to wake up from a long-time sleep. Goose bumps, flutters, the beginnings of a storm.
“Willow? You there?”
I laugh, a short, jabbing sound. “I’m here.”
“Hon, I know –”
“Why did he leave? After that day. Why did he leave? Why didn’t he come back?”
I’m digging my nails on my bare knees, sitting on my ass, propped against the wall of my bedroom. I’m one step away from curling into a ball.
“You should ask him that,” she replies.
Something is starting to shatter into a million pieces. It’s not my heart. It can’t be. He already broke it. So maybe it’s my psyche.
Maybe this is how I’ll lose it. Third time is the charm, isn’t it?
Maybe I’ll call it The Simon Incident.
“No. I’m asking you.”
“He left because he was going through something and he thought he was doing the right thing.”
“Does that something have to do with Claire?”
Her sharp intake of breath doesn’t go unheard. “You know about Claire?”
“No,” I snap. “And that’s the problem. I don’t know anything. I don’t have the right to know anything, Beth. He never gave me the right.”
Maybe she is choked up with a ton of emotions of her own, as well, because I hear her swallow. “I’m not condoning what he did. But at the time, he thought leaving you was for the best.”
“For whom? Him or me? Because from what I remember I was drugged up and sedated and he wasn’t there.” I sniffle. “And you know what else? I still looked for him that morning. I woke up and I thought after everything he’d be there. He’d at least, talk to me. But no, I was wrong. He never came.”
I’m just about to break my skin; I can feel it. My nails are long and sharp, unlike they were when I was locked up at Heartstone.
Now, they are lethal.
“Do you know his mother was his father’s patient?” Beth says after a while.
“Yes,” I whisper.
I do. But not because he told me. It was Renn.
After everything happened and Simon left, she found a way to get the whole story. I didn’t ask her to. She said she couldn’t see me all broken up, so she at last got the help of her father’s assistant, like she told me she would. He told her everything there was to know about Simon. Including about Claire.
But when Renn tried to tell me about her, I refused to listen. I didn’t want to know. Whatever it is, it won’t change the fact that I love a man who thought I was a phenomenally tight fuck and nothing else.
I hug my knees tighter, feeling so lonely. Lonelier than ever. Lonelier than when I was actually waiting for him to come back, lying awake in that lumpy twin bed at Heartstone.
“They were in love, his mom and dad. So much love. Joseph and I, we weren’t very happy with it at first. But love is love. It happened. They wanted to get married and that was that. They were happy in the beginning, but things changed. Alex – Alexandra, she was a stunning woman, but she was a lot for Alistair to deal with. I’d be first to admit that he was weak. He let his marriage go and the weight of it fell on Simon. That boy was there for his mother from day one. And he stayed by her side right until the end. He was the one who found it, her dead body.”
“What?”
My nails come loose from my skin as if I’ve lost all my strength. All my anger. My fight.
“He was fourteen. His dad was out of town for a conference.”
I’m stumbling. My heartbeats, my breaths. My entire body.
“I-I didn’t…”
“It’s okay, not many people know. I only know because the police, they called us, Joseph and me. God knows, if they hadn’t, Simon would never have told us himself.”
She killed herself.
I remember his face from the day when he said it. He looked so devastated. So lost. No one has ever needed me the way he did on that day. No one has ever made me feel so useful and wonderful, like an answer to their every prayer.
A strong burst of longing catches me off guard and I press a fist to my mouth, almost biting down on the knuckles. Despite it, I manage to say, “Yeah, he wouldn’t have.”
