Laney shook her head. “God, if she lied … Luke, this is so fucked up. And Tess…”
Pain split my chest in two at the mention of her name. “I know.”
Jett’s brows were drawn. “What about the magazine? Do you think you can patch that up?”
“Not until I hear from them. I’ll try to reach out in a few days, but I can’t force them to give me another chance any more than I can Tess. Time and space. That’s all I’ve got to work with. And in the meantime, I’ll figure out exactly what’s going on with Wendy.”
“You’re gonna have to deal with Mom too,” Kash added.
Everyone sighed at that, even Marcus.
“You committed the cardinal sin,” Laney noted. “You slept with Wendy, and Mom will see that as a personal betrayal. She’s probably wondering what she did wrong when you were a baby that you’d sleep with Wendy after all she’s done to you.”
“I’ll talk to her tonight, after she burns an effigy and cries over my baby pictures.”
“And how are you planning on avoiding her and Tess?” Marcus asked.
“You act like avoiding things isn’t a special skill of mine.” A chuckle rolled through them, but I didn’t so much as smile. “I’ll stay here all day. I’ve got the installation to figure out, or at least break down. See if I can get another one put together with stuff we have in storage. That should take me all day. I don’t suspect anyone will bother me. The only one who wants to talk to me is the one person I don’t want to see.”
“Wendy. Goddamn her,” Laney said with a shake of her head. “How can we help?”
“Just keep the front running so I can salvage what I can, where I can.”
We broke the meeting with a plan—Kash and Jett would finish breaking down the installations. Laney would check on Mom. Marcus would get the rest of the store ready to open.
And I would escape to the back.
The second I could, I did, dragging myself to storage. I clicked on the lights to assess our stock, but when I looked around at the space—our space, mine and hers—I felt the last bit of my will crack and shatter. The pieces we’d worked on. The old rocking chair with the blanket slung over the back. The pile of hay.
I lowered myself to sit in the hay, dropping my head to my hands, closing the world out. The familiar scent of this place, like old wood and sweet hay and fragrant florals drifting in from the greenhouse. It wasn’t a realization of my mistakes, and it wasn’t a marker of loss.
Because I’d known what I had to lose from the start.
And despite how I’d tried to keep her, I might have lost Tess for good.
TESS
I bolted out the back door, blinded by the sun and drowning in the heat. The block I traveled home was navigated through a sheet of tears, my destination in my forethought and a thousand emotions bubbling beneath it.
Just get home. Get home. Get home. When you get home, then you can break.
The stairwell was cool and dark, my composure crumbling with every step. I unlocked the door. Stepped inside.
The one place in the world I needed was home, and the picture of this place was tangible in my mind.
A picture that no longer existed.
The walls were white but for the accent wall of Mom’s ugly, old wallpaper. The kitchen, white and pristine, Carrera marble countertops to replace the old pea-soup formica, backed by subway tile.
It was beautiful. But it wasn’t home, not anymore.
Everything had changed. And all because of Luke.
Before he’d come back, everything had been perfectly normal, perfectly predictable. But ever since he’d walked through the door of Longbourne again, it had been nothing but chaos. What had once been stable, secure, familiar, was turned upside down, inside out. The shop. My home.
My heart.
I couldn’t look at the room. I needed my place, my safe place, the one place I knew hadn’t changed.
“Tess?” Dad called from his study. “That you?”
It wasn’t me. I didn’t know who I even was anymore.
But I followed the sound of his voice to face what I could. When I passed the threshold, his face ran a gamut of emotions—concern, sadness, pain, anger.
“What happened?” he asked.
I drew a shaky breath. “The installation broke. We didn’t get the feature.”
“Oh, honey. I’m so sorry.”
A weak smile touched my lips, forced and aching with falsity. “I … I just need some time. Rest.”
He nodded. “All right. Go shower and sleep. I’m here. Okay, Pigeon?”
I nodded, my chin quivering. “Okay, Daddy.”
But when I stepped into the hallway, I didn’t head to the other side of the apartment for my room.
I turned for Dad’s room instead.
This room was the same as it had always been. The book she’d been reading when she died still sat on the nightstand. The bedding had faded and thinned, but it was the same navy-blue and white florals, the bed neatly made with care by Dad every day. But I didn’t linger. Instead, I opened the closet, dropping to sit in the small corner, closing the door behind me.
Light snuck in through the slats of the shutters, slashing lines of light on everything inside.
And I laid my head on my knees and cried for all I’d lost.
21
Empty Spaces
TESS
My exhaustion was complete.
I was a fire that had burned to ash, leaving only dust and dying embers. What had once been solid was now in pieces small enough to be carried away by nothing more than a gentle breeze. But somehow, I found a way to haul myself out of bed that morning. To dress and brush my teeth, bleary-eyed and numb. To exchange a few words of deflection with my father before ducking out the front door. And I went down to the flower shop, not ready to face what awaited me, but without any choice in the matter.
The shop needed me, and so did Mrs. Bennet.
I’d spent a long time in the safety of Mom’s closet, exhausting my tears long enough to shower and slide into bed. But as tired as I was, I barely slept, my mind too frantic, too busy fantasizing about all the unhappy endings that could come to pass, all the things I would lose in their wake. It was only between fits of crying and long, silent stretches spent staring at my ceiling that I fell into restless sleep, the kind that exploited exhaustion without relieving it.
Two hours I lasted before I peeled myself out of bed with one objective—distraction.
I cooked two meals from scratch. Watered the plants. Took some photos for Instagram. Played Mario Kart with Dad. Watched a couple of my favorite romcoms—The Princess Bride and Soapdish. Dove into a new book and stayed up until I couldn’t keep my eyes open. But the second I turned out the light and my distractions were gone, my brain woke up and chugged through everything that had come to pass, imagined what would come next.
The first item of business was to try to pin down exactly why I was so upset, and I boiled it down to a few points, which I held on to, repeating them on a loop like Arya Stark and her kill list.
At the surface was the skin-deep wound: we had lost our shot with the magazine, not only by looking like a pack of fools, but incompetent fools. I looked incompetent—which on its own hit a deep perfectionist trigger in me—and the responsibility felt like mine, regardless of my knowledge that it wasn’t.