Chapter I
I
The words echo through the room.
And for a moment, no one moves.
At some point Ezra shifted to the window, where he stands, his back to the night, while Lottie is still sitting on the edge of the bed, arms wrapped around her ribs, and Alice is on the floor between a sofa and a marble coffee table, gripping the stone edge until her fingers hurt as a scream tries to claw its way up her throat.
Because the thing is, there are good ways to die.
Old age is up there, of course, but there’s also sacrifice, saving someone else, for instance, a loved one, or a stranger.
There are deaths that have value, have meaning, or at least have purpose.
There are tragic accidents and suicides, there are acts of violence and revenge, and if you trace them back along the timeline of events, there is a reason, a cause to the effect.
But Alice is sitting there, trying to process the fact that her death wasn’t part of some big picture, some elaborate design.
It wasn’t even an act of careless hunger on Lottie’s part.
It wasn’t about need, or even want, and the question that’s been beating like a drum in Alice’s head— Why me?
Why me? Why me?— doesn’t have an answer, other than Why not?
Because it wasn’t about her at all.
It was a shot fired by a jealous ex. She was just collateral in someone else’s war, and Sabine killed her because she was there, because Lottie couldn’t keep her hands to herself, she did it to prove a point, to play a game, and that means it was meaningless, her death was meaningless, and she doesn’t realize how hard she’s been gripping the marble surface of the table until finally it breaks.
A vicious crack, a fissure running through the stone and back, echoing through her with a pain she barely even feels.
“Alice,” says Ezra gently, as if she’s a skittish pet, as if the soft cadence of his voice is going to make it any better, will smooth the shattered ruins of her life.
“I died for nothing,” she whispers, because she’s afraid that if she starts shouting, she’ll never stop, and then she thinks, Fuck that, and raises her voice and says, “I died for NOTHING. ”
“Alice, I’m—” starts Lottie, but Alice is already on her feet, already shoving Lottie so hard she stumbles back into the wall.
“Don’t you dare say you’re fucking sorry.”
“I did everything I could.”
“Obviously not,” says Alice. “You could have stayed the hell away from me.”
She pushes again, but this time Lottie catches her wrists and pulls her in, arms folding around Alice’s back, and Alice is sobbing now, her vision red, and Lottie says, “It’s all right, it will be all right,” as if the words are a spell, as if they can fix any part of this, but there’s no fixing it, because there’s no going back.
Alice wrenches free, stumbling away.
(And it turns out you can in fact have a panic attack without a beating heart, or a working pair of lungs, because the room is spinning and Ezra has her by the shoulders, eyes locked on hers as he tells her to breathe, or at least she thinks that’s what his mouth is saying, but she can’t hear the word, not over the white noise climbing in her head.)
Alice tries to inhale but the air isn’t going in this time, her lungs won’t inflate because they’re dead ( she’s dead) and she just wants to go back, back to the weekend and the party and the wall, wants to unravel her life moment by moment and stitch it together differently but she can’t, and it’s not fair (it’s not fair, it’s not fair, it’s not fair) and Alice thinks that maybe she can’t breathe in because she’s screaming, and then Ezra is there again, bringing a cup to her lips, and his mouth is saying Drink this, and it smells different, tainted, wrong, but Alice doesn’t care, not anymore (she is so tired and so angry and somehow even through the fog of panic the hunger is still there, the only sharp thing in the blurring room), so Alice drinks and knows the moment the blood hits her tongue that she was right, and it is wrong, but she doesn’t care, if it will make the pain stop.
So she drinks, and by the time the glass is empty her head is spinning, or the room is spinning, and then it’s like someone snipped the strings holding her up, because her legs go out, and Ezra catches her, eases her down to the floor, and she curls up there, the way she wanted to back in the little cemetery by the church.
Only this time she doesn’t fight her way up again—
She lets the ground reach up, and pull her down—
Down—
Down—
Into the dark.