Chapter 26 UNRAVELING A LIFE
Chapter 26
U NRAVELING A L IFE
It’s later in the afternoon after Noah returns from work. The lovemaking is mechanical. Charli’s not quite motionless, but she’s having a hard time getting into it. Not that Noah’s performing poorly. Not that he’s not everything. It’s just that she’s being eaten alive by shame and doubt and an overall self-loathing that never strays far enough away. How could she possibly love someone else when she feels this way about herself?
What is she doing here anyway? She’s certainly not going to disprove Miles’s guilt— if in fact he’s not guilty. Even if she does, what’s really going to happen? Her dad is suddenly going to spring to life? Her mom is going to escape the clutches of her own imprisonment? Will these truths somehow absolve her mother of all the terrible things she’s done, the way she treated Charli and William? Is it going to erase the responsibility that Georgina has never owned up to anyway? And is Charli suddenly going to be floating around with the glee of Mary Poppins?
No. Not a chance.
She’s on top of him, straddling him. His clothes are on the floor.
He stops, right in the middle of things. One moment he was moaning and then nothing. He waits for her to look at him. When she does, he asks, “What’s going on?”
Looking at him is a chore, the hardest thing she’s ever done. Their eyes meet, and she pulls them away as quickly. He tugs her down to his side and wraps his arm around her. She usually feels safe, but she now feels like his betrayer.
She’s still not ready to confess, though. The pit in her stomach is killing her, but she knows it will be even worse once she tells him. Please, please, give me a little while longer before I tear it all apart, she begs to whoever is listening. Because it’s going to hurt—she knows that. She knows that now more than ever. These feelings seem more real than any she’s ever had before. Noah allows her to be herself, even when she’s not her best self. Of course, he still hasn’t seen her at her worst, which is the part she knows will eventually tear them apart.
Noah maneuvers so that he’s on his side and facing her. She sits up and wraps her arms around her legs. Her eyes squirm left and right. She’s never felt such push and pull in her life, the need to grab hold of him like he’s a lifeline while also wanting to run, run, run out of there like she’s trying to break an Olympic record.
“Someone in there?” he asks.
Charli turns away from him. She’s ten years old, and her mother is shaking her finger at her, demanding to know who spilled the orange juice without cleaning it up. Charli can’t bring herself to turn back to her mom, to face her.
“Tell me what’s going on with you,” Noah whispers.
Even now , as he’s showing her that he’s there for her, she can’t seem to be the person she wants to be.
“Hey, hey,” Noah says, sitting up and petting her. “I can’t help if you don’t let me in. Is this about us?”
She can’t answer. Tears well in her eyes, and she attempts to blink them back.
He’s so patient with her. “Charli, you gotta let me in.”
She can’t turn back to him, like she couldn’t face her mom. “I can’t,” she mutters.
“Why not, dammit? I am trying to be patient, but you make it hard sometimes.”
“Oh, don’t I know.” She’s heard that before a thousand times.
“Tell me what the hell is going on.”
Charli finally turns halfway toward him. “I told you. I ruin things.”
He sits cross-legged, facing her. “Why would you say that? You’re in control. There’s no one else steering you. Make this one different.” He’s getting angry with her, and she welcomes it. This is more like it, giving her what she deserves.
She looks away again. He can’t understand. Even if she comes clean now, and even if one day he forgave her, she’d screw it up again and again and again.
“I love you, Charli.”
Those three words smash into her chest. She can barely reply. “Don’t say that.”
“Oh, I’ll say it a thousand times. I’ve never felt like this before, and I never will again.”
“I’m not who you think I am.”
“Stop,” he says. “And look at me.”
She won’t. She can’t.
“Charli,” he whispers. And then he waits.
When she finally twists back to him, he says, “What is all this negative talk? Why do you let yourself believe this stuff? What happened to you that you can’t let yourself love anyone? What happened to you that you don’t believe you deserve this?”
She tries hard to hold his gaze this time. Where to even begin?
“I want a chance with you. I think I’m falling in love with you.”
The word love catches her like a sharp blade in the side. “No, you’re falling in love with the part of me that I’ve shown you,” she says, squeezing her legs tighter. “Not the rest of me. Trust me, you do not love the little girl inside of me that’s still so fucking damaged by her childhood. The little girl whose mother told her she should have thrown her away. Whose father was so focused on work that he barely noticed.”
Charli jabs a finger at her own temple. “I still hear my mother’s voice every day. I see her smashing my dolls because I wasn’t ...” Charli loses her breath. “Because I was such a sorry excuse for a child. Trust me, you don’t love that, and you don’t even want to try. You don’t want to bring me into your life, let alone your family’s.”
Noah raises a hand. “Stop. Dammit, stop.” He pauses to make sure Charli’s listening. “That is not your call to make. I’m sorry to hear about your parents—”
“It wasn’t my father. I didn’t mean to say that. It’s ... my mother ...” She wipes a tear. “She had this extraordinary ability to make me feel small. She did the same to my dad, too, tearing into us. I was always one slipup away from her launching into me. The things she said ... they were bad. The kind of bad that I can’t get past.”
Noah scooches back and leans against the headboard to give her space.
“I know you see this pretty girl who knows how to have fun. Make conversation. Maybe even make you laugh some. But trust me, that’s me trying. That’s me doing my best not to let you see the other me.”
“Geez, Charli.” He starts and stops. “Don’t you see that I don’t need you to be perfect? I’m certainly not. There’s nothing that you’re hiding from me that I’m not ready for. You had a hard life. Mine wasn’t always easy either. I don’t know that anyone’s life is gravy. So we move on and find people that we love and that love us, and we do our best to be our best. But we’re not always going to be. Love is about being there for someone at their worst. It’s easy to be there when things are good.”
She wants to rip her heart out and throw it into the garbage. He has no idea of her worst. “I’m different.”
“You’re not.”
“Noah, I’ve been down this road before. Maybe not this exact one. And to tell you the truth, I do care about you. A lot. That’s what makes this worse. I know I’m going to ruin us, and you don’t deserve it.”
She’s caving, her heart and soul. He’s looking at her and through her, and he must see that she’s dying inside. “You don’t know that you will ruin us. You’re afraid to try.”
“Do you want me to prove it?” she asks.
“Prove it? What kind of childishness is that?”
“It’s facts, Noah. I am saving us, saving you.” She can’t take it anymore. “I’m not who you think I am.”
His head falls back, accidentally hitting the headboard. “If that isn’t a cliché.”
“I’m serious.” She gathers her thoughts, hating herself for what she’s done. “A couple of months ago, I connected with this woman named Frances ...”
Charli tries to tell the story as best as she can, taking him to Costa Rica with her. “I’m not one to believe in such stuff, really. I’m not the person who believes in miracles or happy endings ... or even true love.” She feels how that hurts Noah but plows on. “But this constellation shifted something inside of me. You know those moments where you think you have it all figured out. For a second there, I did. Somehow, some way, Frances helped me figure out that someone in my family a long time ago did something bad, and maybe that had trickled down to me. All that guilt I’d been feeling, the self-hatred, the way I felt cursed, she claimed that it was because someone in my family committed a crime.”
Noah is silent and showing a thousand shades of perplexity on his face.
“Turns out they did. Someone in my family did. That’s why I came here, to find out the truth. That’s why I’m researching my family.”
His brows curl in curiosity. “What?”
“The only thing I’ve ever done right is raise a dog with the love that I never knew. That’s it. I’ve hurt almost everyone I know. I’ve failed at everything I’ve tried. And I didn’t know it when we first met, I swear, and I don’t know how it is that we were brought together. It scares the shit out of me, honestly. But it was my grandfather ... well, my third great ...”
She blows out a blast of air that slaps the corner of the sheet. “His name was Miles Pemberton, the man accused of killing your great-aunt several times back, Lillian Turner. You know the picture I showed you of my grandfather and the other girl? The one where we came close to finding where it was taken? That was them.”
“Wait, let me get this right. That photo ... you’re saying the girl was my relative?”
She nods. “With my relative, who was accused of killing her.”
“What in the . . . ?”
“Yeah, I know. The reason I’m here is because I was trying to figure out what happened. I thought that making sense of it would help me feel better. Of course, it’s only destroyed things.”
She could not be more disappointed in herself. “I should have told you the moment I knew, but I didn’t. Because I tell lies, Noah. I’m bad. Just a bad person, like the man who murdered Lillian. I think it was Miles’s father who killed her, not Miles, but that’s a whole other thing. And like my mother and probably everyone else in my family ...”
Noah shakes his head in bewilderment. “You’re telling me that you’re here because ... I don’t understand.”
“Because I wanted to find the truth ... and fix it if I could.” She fumbles around the story for a while, attempting to make sense of something that she herself has lost faith in. Her self-disgust comes with a dose of relief. Finally, she doesn’t have to pretend anymore.
Noah’s disappointment in her looks a lot like Patrick’s had, and a line of exes before them. “And you’ve stayed with me why?” he asks.
A bout of sadness catches in her throat. She doesn’t want to lose him. It’s a passing thought, and it’s too late now. “Anything I say is going to make me sound unhinged.”
“Might as well get it all out ...”
Noah’s right. What else is there to lose now? “I found the spot in the woods, Noah. It was in the Winnall Moors Nature Preserve. Like the exact spot, and I found a carving that they’d made with their initials in it. When I touched it, I felt their love. And I knew then that he didn’t kill her.”
He’s trying to be patient with her. “You walked into the woods and felt their love from more than a century ago? And then what? Decided to take advantage of me? What in the hell are you doing here?”
Charli can’t bring herself to look at him. But she finally does. “According to the constellation work, I needed to find out who did this bad thing in my family. I know it sounds crazy, but I had this hope that maybe I could remove some of what was going on with us. Mostly my dad. I was out of options, and there was a woman telling me that finding the truth could restore the balance in our constellation. So that’s what I was doing. And I had another idea that maybe I needed to fix what had happened, like repay your family for my family’s crime.”
Noah holds her gaze for a moment, then climbs off the bed. “This is all too much, Charli. I don’t even know where to—”
She wishes he could understand, but he’s long gone. Another one bites the dust. “I know, I know. That’s why I didn’t tell you.”
He makes a face like he’s tasted sour milk. “You know what? It’s not even that you were keeping the truth from me. Or that you do sound a bit batshit. It’s this push and pull between us. I’m exhausted. Your omitting the truth is just the breaking point.”
Charli seeks some warmth in his eyes, but he looks utterly exasperated by even her appearance. She can’t stand to look at herself, either, so she gets it.
As he gets dressed, he says, “I’m going to leave now. I think it’s clear that whatever we had is tied up in a lot of baggage.”
She can’t bear to lift her head.
He goes to the bedroom door.
“I warned you, Noah,” she whispers. “You said it yourself. I’m a fucking yo-yo.”
“You warned me? That’s what you have to say? I need to go.” He turns and goes down the hall.
Charli falls back against the bed and mashes her eyes shut, trying her best to run away from this awful world.
His scent is almost too much to take as she goes around to collect her things. She wishes she’d never kissed him, never slept with him, certainly never ever ever let him tell her he loved her. She wipes her eyes in the bathroom as she crams all her belongings—including the clothes she bought—into her backpack and heads toward the door.
There’s a pen and a pad of paper on the kitchen counter. She walks over and scrawls: I’m sorry. I was just trying to do something right for once.
The ink isn’t even dry when she crumples it up and drops it into the trash can. Worried he’ll discover it, she digs it back out, folds it, and jams it into her pocket.
She tries again. I’m sorry. You deserve better.
She gets rid of that one. Tries five more times.
Accepting that she can’t write her feelings, she leaves the apartment without leaving a letter at all. The abandoned letters weigh heavy in her pocket.
The wind has picked up even more and blows her hair in her face as she hikes up High Street, headed toward the train station. She has no idea when one leaves and doesn’t care. She wants out of this town. And if there’s a strike, she’ll take a taxi back to London. If there are no taxis, she will take a bus. If there are no buses, she’ll walk.
She buys a ticket for the eight-o’clock train, then buys a caprese sandwich and finds a place to wait. Though a tiny part of her feels like she hasn’t done what she came to do, she doesn’t care anymore. It all feels like a joke. She , who can ruin anything. She , who thought she might be able to make right what Miles did wrong.
But she only made it worse. She can feel Noah’s pain right now, as she knows that he loves her.
Or did love her.
He never loved you, you dumb shit. What’s it been, a few days? You’re stupid, Charli.
“Stop it,” she says, but her voice lacks any fight at all. And in this moment, she knows exactly what being unlovable means.