Chapter Twenty-Five - Charlotte #2
That’s the part Cole’s pain and Jack’s poison almost let me hide behind: underneath the public scandal, there is a small private thing I did that is bad enough on its own, and it isn’t the scheme.
It’s the broken promise, and the four months of lying on top of it.
Cole’s wound and Indie’s aren’t even the same wound.
Cole thinks he was pitied, that he wasn’t enough to be wanted without a charity drive, and that’s Jack’s poison, and it isn’t true.
Indie’s is true. And it’s mine. And it’s simpler: I gave her my word, and then I lied to her face until a man she’d never met handed her the truth at a dance.
I love Indie more than I love almost anyone alive, and when she asked me for the one thing, I decided I knew better, and called the control care, and the bill came due in a green dress in front of three hundred people.
My mother used to do this. She called it helping.
She arranged people, their schools, their marriages, their opinions, their afternoons — with the serene total confidence of a woman who has never once doubted she knows best. She did it from behind a curtain.
She did it, she always said, for them. And everyone she ever helped this way ended up smaller and managed and quietly furious, and I spent my whole childhood swearing I would never do it, and I did it to the one person on earth who loved me without managing me back.
I thought I’d run into my mother’s arms in the doorway with Ben, my mother would be proud, I thought, of the precision of the cruelty.
I was right, but I had the crime wrong. The cruelty in the doorway wasn’t the inheritance.
This was. The arranging. The deciding-for.
The curtain. I am my mother in the one place I never thought to check.
The place I was sure I was being kind.
***
Ben texts, the day after the formal. Once. I almost don’t read it.
I told Cole the whole truth, that it was real, that you protected her, that the scheme part was mine to confess.
He’s not listening to me right now. But if there’s anything I can do to get the truth to Indie, any way at all, tell me and it’s done.
You don’t have to answer this. I just need you to know I’d do it. —B
And I sit with that a long time, because it is the kindest possible thing, and it is from the person who lit the match, and both of those are true at once, and my whole life I have refused to let two opposite things be true at once, because two-things-at-once is what you can’t control.
I don’t answer it. Not because I’m angry.
I burned through the anger somewhere around dawn and found, underneath it, only the exhausted recognition that he and I did the identical thing in different dialects.
He was careless because careless was easy, and easy was safe.
I was controlling because control was safe.
We both reached for our oldest, safest, most automatic move at the exact moment the people we love needed us to do the hard new thing instead, and our two safe moves met in the middle and detonated.
We aren’t opposites. Indie told me that on the kitchen counter, and I didn’t hear it. We’re the same animal.
We just learned to be afraid in different houses.
I don’t answer him because I have nothing yet to say that isn’t either a move or a wound, and I am, for the first time, trying very hard not to make another move.
***
So I stop.
It is the hardest thing I have ever done, and it doesn’t look like anything.
It looks like a girl sitting on her kitchen floor, the floor where Indie fixed me once, the floor where I lied to her about Ben — doing nothing.
No plan. No optimized message. No coffee left as strategy.
No serve to hit, no court to narrow the world down to, no wheel to hold.
I sit in the unfixable thing and do not try to fix it, and it is unbearable, and I make myself bear it.
Because every single time in my life I’ve tried to fix a thing by taking control of it, I’ve made it worse, and the people I love have paid, and I am finally, finally out of evidence that my way works.
And in the silence, the real silence, not the engineered kind I built in my doorway, but the kind where you’ve put the tools down and have nothing left to do but look — a thought arrives. Small, and terrible, and entirely unwelcome.
The only thing that might give Indie back what I took from her isn’t a plan.
It’s the truth. The whole shape of it, out loud, in public, where I did the damage, with my own name attached and no curtain anywhere.
Not a managed reveal. Not a precise message that lands.
The actual opposite of everything I’m good at: standing up with no control over how it goes, no guarantee it works, no wheel, and handing Indie back the one thing I stole.
The right to know exactly what was done to her, and decide for herself what it means.
It would clear her in front of everyone who watched her be humiliated.
It would cost me the only thing I’ve ever truly kept, which is the appearance of always having known best. And I cannot do it alone, because half the truth isn’t mine to tell.
Half of it lives in a boy I gutted in a doorway.
A boy who just offered, with the match still warm in his hand, to do anything at all.
I look at his text again. Tell me and it’s done.
I am going to have to go to Ben. The one person I promised myself I’d never need, after I made so very sure he’d never come back.
I am going to have to walk back across all of it and ask the man I destroyed to help me undo the disaster we built together.
Not to win him back. Not as a move. Because it is the only way left to give Indie the truth, and the truth is the only thing I have left that isn’t a lie I’m telling to stay in control.
I don’t sleep. I sit on the floor until the light comes up gray in the window, and for once I don’t fill the dark with a plan.
I just let it be true: I hurt her. I can’t fix it the way I fix things.
And the only road back runs straight through the wreckage of the one bridge I was most careful to burn.
There’s a kind of terror in it I didn’t expect.
Every other low point of my life, I had the wheel, the cold house, the dress at nine, every loss since.
I survived them all the same way: seize the controls, steer hard into the skid, call the wreck I chose better than the wreck I feared.
This is the first time I have ever sat in the skid and not grabbed anything.
It feels like dying. It also feels, somewhere far underneath, like the first honest minute I’ve had in years, because for once I’m not performing the recovery.
Not managing the optics of my own grief.
Not three steps ahead, arranging how this will look.
I’m just a girl on a floor who hurt her best friend and doesn’t know how to fix it and is going to have to ask for help from someone she wronged.
It’s a strange feeling, putting down the wheel for the first time at twenty-one.
Your hands don’t know what to do. They just sit there. Open. Useless.
Free.