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I have no idea where we stand. Yes, we’re married. Yes, we’re on our honeymoon. She seems to be open to the idea of friendship. But the truth is that the suggestion of friendship was a desperate attempt on my part to break down the walls she had built up around herself during the wedding. Walls I despised, even while knowing that it was my doing that put them there.
I had no fucking right to offer her my friendship. Especially considering I have no clue how to be just friends with her.
I don’t know how to be around her without wanting to be closer.
I don’t know how to be around her without wanting to fuck her senseless, wanting to make her laugh, wanting to keep her safe.
I don’t know how to be around her without falling the fuck apart.
“Thank you for bringing me here,” Paige says, cutting through the conflict raging in my head.
She glances towards me. The moon is casting a blue shadow against one side of her face. Her eyes are bright and warm. It’s the first time I’ve seen her clutching her pendant with something resembling gratitude instead of the usual fear or sorrow.
“Clara would have loved this city,” she says softly. “So full of life and history and romance. She used to say that when we left Corden Park, we’d go somewhere far away. Somewhere exotic and exciting and cool. She never really said where, exactly. It’s taken me this long to realize that it’s because she didn’t have enough exposure to dream this far. She probably couldn’t have even imagined a place like this.”
Her eyes swim with naked emotion in her eyes. The icy grip of her grief. She usually hides it so well that I’m almost surprised to see just how deep it runs.
“The night of my bachelorette party, I told you the story about the asshole who tried to hit on me. You asked me why I didn’t tell Clara…” Her voice trembles . “It’s because I walked into her little corner of the trailer that day and caught her with a knife to her wrists.” She takes a deep, calming breath. “She’d made shallow cuts already. I snatched the knife from her hands, threw it in the garbage, and asked her what she was doing. She admitted that she fantasized about killing herself a lot. That’s how she put it, too.Fantasized. I cried more than she did that day. I cried so much that eventually she cried, too. But she wasn’t crying for herself. She was just crying because she didn’t like upsetting me.”
The tears keep falling from her eyes, but she continues anyway. Like she’s been waiting years to get this off her chest.
“After that, I made her promise to call me any time she started having those bad thoughts. We never talked about it again, but she called me a lot. Every time, I wondered why. Like, was she suicidal the day she came over in the rain just to bring me a bagel? Did she want to end it all that time she called me from a payphone two streets over to ask me what I thought about the color blue?”
She inches closer while she talks. I’m not even sure she realizes she’s doing it. But just like that, she’s in my arms. To me, it feels completely natural that she should stay there. It’s where she belongs.
“You asked me how she died once,” she whispers, reaching up and winding her fingers around my dog tag. “I didn’t tell you the whole truth.”
I hold my breath. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”
Paige shakes her head. “I’ve never wanted to share this story with anyone. In fact, I never have. To this day, Anthony doesn’t know that Clara ever existed.”
I raise my eyebrows. “You never told him about her?”
“I don’t know why I didn’t. I just—didn’t. Maybe…” Her voice drifts off for a moment, dipping painfully before she glances up at me. “Maybe I was scared that sharing her death with someone meant I would have to face the fact that I could have prevented it.”
84
PAIGE
“Paige.”
He utters my name like a whispered prayer.
His hand is on mine, and it gives me the strength to continue. Because I recognize now that I have to continue. I can’t turn back now that I’ve started down this road.
“It was a shooting,” I say. “That’s how it was spun in the news, at least. A gang-related shooting. There were two others in the last few months. She was just the third victim. She fit the profile, too: young, disadvantaged, disturbed. That’s what they said about her. They almost made it seem like it was her fault that she was gunned down in the street. Like somehow, all these things that happened to her were things that she could have controlled. No one seemed to realize that if she could have controlled anything, she wouldn’t have been in that fucking trailer park.”
I take a deep breath and look up at him. He really is listening. Intently. With his whole body, his whole heart, his whole soul.
I’m clutching my pendant so hard that I can feel it digging into my skin. Misha seems to realize the same thing, because he slowly loosens my hand and wraps it around his own instead.
“She’d started dating this guy, Moses, three months before her death. He was a member of the gang. I knew that relationship was wrong. I should have stopped it.”
“Clara was her own person,” he rumbles. “Her choices were not yours.”
“She wanted to self-destruct, Misha,” I protest helplessly. “What’s more self-destructive than getting involved with a man who’s in a gang? A gang that was already responsible for so many dead people?
There’s more to this story, but I find myself choking on my own sobs. Even after all this time, I’m still just trying to find a way to turn back time.
