Chapter 26. Ophelia
OPHELIA
The ache in my knee wakes me up, like it has each morning for the past seven days.
And just like every other day this week, a snoring Josie is wedged between Alex and me in bed.
I fly home late tonight.
I’m trying not to think about it.
I fly home. I keep saying that, but I don’t even know where home is, anymore. When I say the word in my head, no picture or place accompanies it. Really, I’m just flying back to Scotland before I get expelled.
I miss Colette, Magda, and Divya, too. I’m craving a movie night with them, so we can unpack the events of the last few weeks with popcorn and beers. They spam my phone all day, constantly checking on me in the group chat.
Alex is asleep beside me—someone so in love with me that he bought the car we spent our first night together in.
It feels like I have six little sisters now. Elise is like a third parent in my life, dishing out the best advice. Cain Green is in hospital, likely his last stop before heading to a maximum-security prison to live out the rest of his days. He’ll never shred another family apart again.
It’s surreal. It’s ridiculous.
Peace is all Alex and I have ever longed for, and I’m beginning to feel it.
It’s here in this room. It’s in the way the line between his brows is relaxed as he sleeps.
It’s in the way that Cain is finally out of their lives.
It’s in first couple of cardboard boxes Alex has packed up, preparing to move anywhere that isn’t here.
He shifts slightly, opening an eye. The bruise on his eyebrow is fading, and though it’s only been a week, the events that transpired in his office are fading, too.
Cain Green has been shackled to me for years. I’ve been dragging him around like a heavy weight, turning even the most level of days into an uphill climb. But when Fleur shot him, I finally let go.
Cain may die soon, or in thirty years. But seeing him on the floor, begging for whatever scraps of his life remained, I realized that watching his family move on, losing his children, losing his wife—it’s punishment enough for me.
“What’s on that mind of yours?”
“Guess.”
He smiles. “Knowing you, it’s either the pointlessness of life and the decay of modern society, or croissants.”
I laugh softly. “I feel quite … positive.”
He frowns, looking so genuinely alarmed as he checks the temperature of my forehead that my laughter gets loud enough to wake Josie.
Alex prods his sister and cocks his head toward me. “Ophelia’s in a good mood, Jo.”
She frowns, spinning to face me. “Weird.” Two small arms wrap around me, clad in bright blue Spider-Man pajamas. “I don’t want you to go.”
“I know. I’m so sorry. But Alex has been very kind and paid for a clever doctor to help me talk about my fear of flying.”
“So you can visit?”
“Exactly.”
She squishes her face into me. Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry.
I love having a big family.
Alex stands, tugging a T-shirt over his head. He points at Josie. “Jelly and butter?”
She whoops with joy at the knowledge that our toast-in- bed party is making its appearance for the fourth consecutive morning.
I watch Alex head out into the hallway, my eyes lingering on the way his muscular shoulders taper down to a narrow waist, on the way his thighs fit into those gray sweatpants.
I do love Josie as my own personal hot-water bottle in bed, but I need to catch him alone today. Maybe in the shower.
The door creeps open, and then Charlotte is beside us. “Are you really leaving today?”
“I have to go. But I’ll be back.”
“Pinky swear?”
“Pinky swear.”
“Double pinky swear?” comes a voice from the hallway. Elise leans against the doorframe, a fragile smile on her face. “I’m going to miss you sorely, Ophelia.”
“I’ll miss you more,” I reply, struck by just how true that is. I’ve been here for weeks. I haven’t stayed anywhere other than Sorrowsong or the house near Inverness for this long in my life.
The mornings are hectic here, the evenings packed full of dance recitals, tennis games, movie nights, arguments, tears, family dinners, and exasperating bedtime routines.
In a month, Sorrowsong will close for the summer, and I’ll head back to my parents’ house.
And though I’ve enjoyed my time here, I just know it’s going to make the silence bite harder.
But I’ll tread water, just like I tell Alex to do, because this distance is temporary. We’ll get our time, and it’ll be even sweeter when it comes.
I pat the space on the other side of Josie and Charlotte, inviting Elise to sit.
Her whole face brightens, and my hand steadies her as she lowers herself onto the mattress.
Other than one particularly bad day earlier this week, her moods have been more stable.
The highs aren’t so high, the lows aren’t so low.
But years of eating disorders, drug use, surgeries, stress, and health trials are catching up with her.
She looks so fragile.
Her hand slips into mine. “If you’re in that house alone, call us every night. We’ll put the phone at the dinner table if we have to.”
“I’ll try to visit you guys before the end of the year.”
She winks at me like she knows something I don’t. “We’ll see.”
Charlotte sits up, her hair sticking up at every possible angle. “Maybe we can visit Ophelia, too!”
Elise drops a kiss to her forehead. “Maybe we can, mon chou.”
“Is Dad coming back?” Josie asks, for the four hundredth time this week.
“No, my love.”
“But—”
“Your dad wasn’t very kind to Alex, Fleur, and me. And he especially wasn’t very kind to Ophelia. That’s why he can’t come back.”
“We didn’t even finish playing Animal Crossing at Christmas.”
I don’t know how Elise does it. No frustration, no impatience, no anger, no sadness. Just a kind warmth in her eyes as she promises them that she’ll learn to play it with them.
Alex comes in, balancing three plates of toast. I know one was supposed to be for him, because it has peanut butter on it, but he smiles at Charlotte and gives it to her instead, handing the buttered one to me and the strawberry jam to Josie.
The ravens inked into his skin flutter as he stretches those thick arms above his head, exposing a thin strip of muscle at his waist.
If I don’t get an hour alone with him today, I’ll just cancel my flight.
Oh god. The flight. I drag my palms down my cheeks. Alex is at my side in a second, shaking his head. “We’re not worrying about the trip home until ten p.m., remember?”
“Okay,” I rasp, wiping my sweaty palms on my thighs.
A tiny voice in my head tells me to stay. To worry about my education later, to catch up with my friends on the phone.
But the girls go back to school tomorrow and Alex back to work. This cocoon we’ve been in, the calm after the storm, will burst.
I owe it to my younger self to fly home.
I COULDN’T brING myself to get on the first flight.
But a serious pep talk from Alex and a threatening text from Belladonna about missing the swim meet next week had me on the next flight an hour later, promising to pay Alex back for both tickets—or all four, if you count the ones he bought to accompany me to the plane steps.
The flight back felt a lot shorter than the one to New York, so short that when I watch the wheels touch down with my nose pressed against the acrylic window, I can still feel the dried tears on my cheeks and the ghost of Alex’s lips on mine.
“I might lose a finger in a minute,” the seventy-something-year-old lady beside me says, as people stand to grab their bags before they’re even allowed to. I glance down, and, sure enough, no blood is flowing to her hand. I release it quickly, cheeks turning red.
Mabel is my new best friend. She held my hand the whole way, let me trade my weird salad pot for her bread roll.
When I convinced myself that the wing looked a bit worse for wear, she reminded me I have no fucking idea what I’m talking about.
I told her about my fear of flying, and then we talked shit about her ex-husband for six hours.
“Safe travels up to the Highlands,” she says with a warm smile.
“Thank you,” I say, chewing my lip as I look at the train prices. It’s not the fourteen-hour journey time that bothers me—I’ve managed my fair share of horrendous travel days since I lost my parents—but the price.
There is no reason for a train to cost that much.
Mabel scowls at my phone, too. “Robbing bastards, aren’t they?”
I hang my duffel over my shoulder, following her off this horrific flying tin can. “Couldn’t have put it better myself.”
My feet hit the tarmac, and I have half a mind to kiss it. I feel like the star of one of those videos you see of astronauts returning to Earth from space. I will never take solid ground for granted ever again.
“I did it!” I exclaim, suddenly overcome with emotion. Then Mabel and I are bouncing around like two footballers who’ve just scored the winning penalty.
“I can’t jump anymore, I’ll piss myself,” she says, stopping abruptly. “Never have kids.”
I pick up her bag, too, and head inside the terminal at a busy London Heathrow. She scowls as we join the short queue at passport control. “I hate these new machines. Whatever was wrong with the people in the booths?”
I watch a woman put her passport in upside down. “Same.”
“And everything is becoming an app now.”
“Oh my god, thank you!” I say, hands dragging down my cheeks. “No one else understands. Why do I need an app to claim a free croissant? Why can’t they just give me one anyway?”
“World’s gone to shit,” she grumbles, as a short man in uniform directs her to a passport machine. I scan mine, turning to see where Mabel is. She makes eye contact with me, mimicking shooting herself in the head as the man asks her to step back from the machine and head to a booth instead.
I don’t want to leave her without saying goodbye, so I pull my phone from my pocket and switch it from airplane mode. Heart rate not yet below one fifty, I type out a text to Alex while I sit and wait for Mabel to stop flirting with the older gentleman checking her passport.
Ophelia
Made it!! And I only cried twice.