Chapter 3. Ophelia #2
My life at the moment is an endless string of not sures.
I’m not sure who my mother was, not sure if my father knew about her cheating, either.
I’m not sure why Alex left without a word, not sure if he’ll come back.
I’m not even sure if I’m angry with him, or if I’m just heartbroken for a boy who has let his life become the bridge that others walk on.
And I’m really, really not sure why I didn’t tell him about my plan to out his father, or that my intentions at the beginning of our relationship were not genuine. I replay them now, all the opportunities I had to come clean, all the opportunities I had to delete the document.
I guess I just didn’t want to let my parents down, to give up on getting some sort of justice for them, to feel like I was trading them in for Alex.
Now I have none of them.
Colette snorts beside me, taupe fingernails tapping at her phone screen. “Vincenzo is so funny,” she sighs, grinning at the string of blue and gray texts. I smile back but don’t reply. Vincenzo doesn’t speak to me anymore. I’m embarrassed to admit I miss him, too.
We wind our way out of the labyrinth of tunnels in the eastern wing of the castle, a poorly lit archway spitting us out into the valley outside.
It’s not long past midday, but Sorrowsong is laden with thick, heavy clouds that make it look like it’s early evening.
The damp air is rich with the smell of rain, but the storm looks like it might finally be easing off.
A few white wisps of sunlight trickle through the patches where the cloud cover thins.
Colette slides her phone into the pocket of her fluffy white coat, giving me a serious look.
“My love, if I read and believed everything that’s said about me by people who hardly know me, I’d never get out of bed.
I get it: It’s new and novel to you. It’s unthinkable.
Abhorrent. But it’s just the way it works. We ignore it.”
“Do you think I’m bland?”
“I think you’re wonderful.”
“But am I wonderful in a bland way? Like salted crisps, or white bread?”
Her grin widens as we trudge up the path to the large, ornate Victorian glasshouse that encloses the pool. “I think you’re wonderful like roses. Beautiful and prickly.”
Christ. “Is this about my unshaven legs?”
Her laugh is bright, too cheery for a place like this. “Mine are prickly, too. I miss my wax lady.”
Even if you melted down the entire contents of Madame Tussauds, it wouldn’t be enough wax to fix the state of my legs.
“Hey,” she says, changing the subject. “Still no more anonymous texts?”
That sours my mood further. I still don’t know who sent that message to me in the airport.
The person with the most motive is Cain, but would he really waste his time with me?
I have zero power and influence. Vin and Belladonna?
They aren’t my biggest fans these days, especially Belladonna.
But somehow, I can’t believe it of them.
Shawn’s friends? I’m sure they don’t love me, either.
I run away from Carmichael at every opportunity, but he probably has my face on a dartboard.
And there are always a few students up to something in the woods at night. Anyone could’ve stumbled upon us.
My friends and I have been trying to figure out my anonymous texter for weeks. Last Monday, they all sat in the high turret windows while I walked round the courtyard for an hour like a fly that can’t find the door. We were hoping they’d catch someone taking a photo of me, but no luck.
And when we caught Lettice Hartwick following me down to the tarn a few days ago, we thought we had it figured out, but no, it wasn’t her. Which I was quite pleased about, because being stalked is bad enough, but being stalked by someone called Lettice would be a new low, even for me.
I’d have gone straight to the police, if the image attached wasn’t a picture of Alex and me burying a body.
We killed a man together. Buried him together. And now I’m trying to deal with the consequences of that alone. Maybe killing someone doesn’t seem so significant in Alex’s world of wealth and power, but in my world of multipack crisps and laddered tights, it’s enough to keep me up at night.
I hug my knees to my chest on the bathroom floor in the early hours of each morning and try as hard as I can to justify a man’s death, scrub my fingers raw like they’re still caked in damp earth from the forest, and beg the universe to erase the things I saw that night from my memories.
He killed my parents because of his unhealthy obsession with my mother, because she wouldn’t run away with him. He had Cain make them disappear as payment for upholding his family man image.
A video of Cain sleeping with Carmichael’s secretary. That was the price of my parents’ existence. And so, the helicopter crash became the price for Bancroft’s existence.
It’s that way of thinking, like all of this is just a set of equations to be balanced, that scares me. It feels like Sorrowsong is rubbing off on me, lacing those first few threads of corruption through my conscience.
Everyone has a limit at which they abandon their own morality, Ophelia Winters, even you.
It was one of the first things Carmichael ever said to me, the two of us beneath Achlys’s haunting stare on my first day here. I guess I reached that limit sooner than I thought.
“No, no more texts,” I finally breathe out, realizing Colette has stopped walking in favor of watching me with great concern.
My new stalker had asked me to hand myself over, but if it’s Cain, I have no idea where he is, and if it’s not, I have no idea who this person is.
So, I decided to remain silent, surrounded by friends.
Weeks later, it seems to be paying off. I haven’t heard from that number again.
If Cain wants to find me, he’ll have to walk onto a busy university campus.
With Belladonna in it.
At the rusting entrance, I swap my fading leather boots for sliders and head to the pool, where the aforementioned Mafia heiress is gliding through the water at a pace that makes it clear why she’s the captain.
One toned, tattooed arm hits the tiled edge and she surfaces, pulling off her cap and goggles and glaring at us.
Even if I did manage to grow a backbone—even if I managed to grow nineteen backbones—I’d still be scared of her.
“Go and warm up,” she barks, more at Colette than me.
She’s made it clear that she believes that what happened to Alex was my doing and wants nothing to do with me, either.
For the most part, I can handle the online abuse, the stares and the venomous looks, and the snickers whenever I ask a question in a lecture, but when they come from someone I’d hoped might be my friend one day, it feels a whole lot worse.
SWIM PRACTICE IS grueling. I stay long after the others leave.
Length after length with Belladonna shouting at me.
Too slow, too sloppy, too tense, too relaxed.
Steve, the actual swim coach, can’t get a word in edgewise.
He’s a short, wiry man who wears a navy tracksuit that tells me he’s clinging onto his youth as hard as he is to the remaining strands of hair dotting the back of his head.
He might be the only person more scared of Belladonna than I am.
My final one hundred is fueled only by frustration and spite. A determined chant of don’t cry don’t cry don’t cry rattles around my brain.
Miraculously, it’s my fastest time of the day.
I haul myself out of the pool, thighs landing on the edge with a wet slap as my mantra of don’t cry turns to don’t vomit.
“Good job, Ophelia,” Steve says, like it has just occurred to him that he is a coach.
Belladonna crosses her arms. “Keep swimming like that, and there’s a slim chance you might not lose everything this season.”
From her, it’s high praise, and I take it as a win.
She’s the only one in the poorly lit changing room when I emerge from the showers, tugging a hoodie over my head. Industrial iron lockers line one wall, oak benches along the other. The stained plaster is peeling to reveal gray brick beneath. It looks postapocalyptic in here, like a war bunker.
Belladonna doesn’t glance in my direction, focusing instead on stuffing a folded towel into her bag. The atmosphere is awkward as I pull my duffel from my rusty locker, half expecting a knife to land in my back.
“How is he?”
It takes me a minute to realize it’s my mouth those words have slipped out of. Those words I’ve held on to so tightly, swallowed down at every opportunity, creeping out without my permission.
She looks like she can’t believe I’ve just said that. I can’t believe I’ve just said that.
“How do you think he is?” she snaps, picking up her bag with far more force than is required.
I don’t know why it makes my stomach sink; it’s not like it’s a surprise that Alex is suffering.
I know how sick his mom is, how lost his sisters are, how heavy his father’s disappearance must weigh on him, how busy Green must keep him.
I’ve seen videos on social media of Fleur lashing out in clothing stores, smoking outside bars she’s far too young to be at, arguing on the street with her new boyfriend.
Deliberately or not, I did that to them.
“He left, Belladonna,” I say, not convincing enough for either of us. “He left without a word.”
What happened between Alex and me was a mess, a complete injustice to what I felt for him, to what I’d dreamed of for our future.
I let my desperation for revenge take the reins on my life for four years.
I let the grief I felt over my parents prevent me from doing the one thing they always wanted me to do: live.
But he believed them. The papers, the media. The lies and the deceit. I made a space for him in my heart, and he walked away.