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“Might as well just get it over with and be sisters already. You want to marry her, don’t you?”
A light flush tinged her cheeks, and she looked away. “I think it’s a little early to say… I think we like taking our time.”
“Focusing on your careers. Yeah, yeah. And you give me shit for working all the time.”
“Hey. At least Aria and I eat.”
“I’m eating!” I waved the sandwich at her before, my arm suddenly heavy, I let it drop by my side, sinking back against the headboard again. “I’m eating. Tastes like old socks, but I’m eating.”
She strained a smile, patting me on the arm. “It sucks. You remember I was like that after the label pulled the rug out from under me… you had to just about spoon-feed me soup.”
“Yeah, least I’m not that bad.”
“Um, you’re worse. You wouldn’t even take spoon-fed soup. So you passed out on the floor.”
I sighed. She squeezed my shoulder.
“Your appetite will come back. Just be gentle with yourself, okay? It’ll take time. Don’t force it, or you’ll just end up with eating disorders on top of no appetite.”
I squeezed the sandwich in my hands. “If I’m not forcing it, I don’t think I’ll finish this.”
She put her hand over it. “Then don’t finish it. Save it for later. No shame in that.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. I didn’tgetit. Harper was just a friend. I liked kissing her—liked doing more than kissing her—but we were never really anything but friends. Emberlynn was a friend, too, and she was here when I was hurt, looking after me, telling me all the things I needed to hear. Shouldn’t that have been enough? Couldn’t that have been enough?
“Thanks, Emby.”
“If you’re going to thank me, say my damn name right.”
“Thanks, Emberlynn Morgan Isabella Wood.”
“You know, screw you too. I’ll marry Aria and tack her names in there too. I’ll be Emberlynn Morgan Isabella Ried Macleod Wood, and you’ll refer to me by the whole thing or I won’t acknowledge you.”
“What? Macleod has to go last, or you’re disrespecting the clan.”
“Not even giving you that.” She clapped a hand on my shoulder before she stood up, pushing the chair back. “I promised Annabel I’d see her in a bit, so I’d better go, but… text me if you need anything. Anything at all. I’m here. Okay?”
“Mm. Thanks, Emby.”
“Dammit,” she laughed, shaking her head as she headed for the door. There was a warmth that she had around her, just like… the ease of familiarity. And it left with her when she shut the door behind her, and it was suddenly a hospital room again—cold and sterile and unfamiliar.
Time went past, somehow or other. I watched a TikTok or two, picked at my sandwich, talked to the doctor when she swung by, checked my email compulsively, made empty talk with the friends who came to visit, played with the flowers closest to me, and through all of it, I was suffocating on emptiness. Something was missing. Something hadalwaysbeen missing. And Emberlynn was wrong—Icouldfill that void by working. It didn’t feel so rotten when I was busy.
Emberlynn sent me a text somewhere around nine, asking if I was still up, and when I sent her a selfie, she said she’d keep me company again tonight. I told her off, saying she needed a proper bed and I wasn’t going to be responsible for her falling apart too if she had to camp out next to me every night, and she told me she’d at least visit me again. It was barely five minutes later that a knock came from the door, and I set my phone down, looking up.
“Jesus, you’re fast. Come in, Quicksilver.”
The door unlatched and swung open, and I shoved the last bite of sandwich into my mouth, just hiding the evidence that it had taken me five hours to eat the thing, and I’d only just managed to get it down and the wrapper in the trash before she came around the corner and into the room, except it wasn’t Emberlynn.
And either I was high, or it was Harper.
I froze, my heart pounding wildly. There was no way. She’d cut off contact completely after leaving town—her number belonged to someone else now, and her work and personal email addresses both got an autoresponder saying the accounts were deactivated. Dropped off the face of the goddamn planet.
But I wasn’t forgetting Harper.
She carried herself differently, had an aura around her that I didn’t know how to describe, and she was wearing a black suit and a tie, looking so… different. And so much the same.
This girl could have traveled the world a hundred times over, changed her name a million times, gone to the ends of this earth and back, and I’d still know her eyes.
