CHAPTER FIFTEEN
"Undecided: Between Life and Past Tense"
For the first time in Monica's life, she felt lonely. Around her was chatter and soft music playing like background noise. She was surrounded by people who wanted to be near her, and she had never felt more completely alone.
She was at a dinner organised by some brand she had recently signed with, a room full of exactly the kind of people who had previously been unavailable to her, and she was working her way through it as effortlessly as she could manage.
Smiling. Nodding. Saying the right things.
Touching the right arms. It all felt fake.
"Monica, what do you think?" someone called out, shoving a brightly lit phone in her face.
"Looks great," she smiled, her eyes burning.
"I'm going to use the bathroom," Monica whispered, extricating herself from the group and walking toward the back of the restaurant.
She locked the bathroom door behind her. Her feet carried her to the sink and a tiny sob broke through before she could stop it, it was small, ugly and completely involuntary.
She looked at herself in the mirror. Her fingers shook as she tried to wipe away the mascara that had begun tracking down her cheeks.
In the mirror was a girl she could barely remember choosing to be.
The girl who had wanted so desperately to be Tao that she had eventually decided the only solution was to remove Tao from the equation entirely.
The girl who had thought that once Tao was gone the hunger would stop.
It had not stopped. It had simply changed its shape.
She opened the photos on her phone and looked at a photo they had taken in Budapest. Both of them in the marble atrium, laughing at something off-camera.
Both candidly happy. Monica had looked at this picture so many times since that night in Hyattsville that she no longer needed the phone to see it. It was bled into her mind.
She dialled Taron.
"Monica?" His voice was warm.
"Can I see you?" she said. Her voice was smaller than she liked. "I know it's late and I know it's a lot to ask. I just— I can't think straight and I need someone who actually knows me."
"Where are you?" he said.
"That small restaurant on Bellmore Street."
"Stay there. I'm leaving now."
She sat on the bathroom floor with her back against the cool tile wall and felt, for the first time in months, something that resembled genuine relief. It alarmed her slightly, but right now, she couldn’t allow herself to focus on that.
?
He took her to the beach.
The drive was quiet and she held his hand for most of it, looking out the window at the passing lights, just letting herself exist in the car. He drove without asking her questions, which was exactly what she needed, and when they arrived at the beach he parked and they walked down to the sand.
The beach was quiet. The ocean was loud and indifferent and enormous, the kind of enormous that made everything else feel proportionate.
They sat in the sand and Monica pulled her knees up to her chest, watching the water.
"Tao would have loved this," Taron said.
The words landed differently on Monica. No contempt, no hate, just her quiet acknowledgment.
"She would have," Monica said. "She loved the ocean. I never understood it. She was so controlled about everything but the ocean is the opposite of controllable."
"I think that was the point," Taron said quietly.
They sat with that for a while.
"I lost Tao," Taron said. "I can't lose you too. When you called tonight sounding like that— I was concerned, Monica. The whole drive, I couldn’t stop thinking about how you must be feeling with everything that has happened."
Priya had been right, it wasn’t a complicated plan. Taron only had to say things close to the truth.
Monica was quiet for a second, this was the most he had ever expressed himself to her.
She looked at him. His profile against the dark water and the low moon. He looked like his sister in moments like this.
She should have felt triumphant. He was in exactly the position that was useful to her. She had the room. She had the emotional leverage. The ball was in her court.
Instead she felt the specific, wretched misery of being cared about by someone who didn't know what they were caring about. The warmth of it was real. That was what made it unbearable.
"Come to mine," she said. "Nothing funny, I just don't want to be alone tonight."
He helped her up from the sand. She leaned on him on the walk back to the car and he let her, his arm around her shoulders, and Monica closed her eyes for a few steps and allowed herself to feel him. The warmth. The simple human reaction to someone choosing to stay beside you.
In the car, she watched him type something quickly into his phone, screen angled away from her. She chose not to ask. Some things were better not examined too closely. She was beginning to understand that this applied to her own feelings as much as anyone else's.
Taron typed two words to Priya I'm in.