Chapter 24
Sapphire
Andrew had a nice place. I never really thought about the logistics… Andrew having a home of his own. He was always just kind of there, like a stable background element that you never had to consciously think about—he stayed in the family house plenty of nights, in a room more sequestered from the others, but I’d never really thought about the logistics of the nights he didn’t stay at the house.
Guess there were a lot of details I never thought about. Turned out even with all the help possible, I still couldn’t figure out how the world worked.
I’d kind of expected something fancier—anything connected to my family, it felt like there should have been big houses with glittering foyers that had massive chandeliers in them—but he took me to a small townhouse a bit outside the metropolitan center, a small, manicured garden bed out front and a relatively clean, unadorned style on the inside. Everything in its place.
We barely spoke the whole time—guess he knew I wasn’t up to forming words—until we’d started the dinner he set out, a simple baked vegetable dish, with a glass of red wine for each of us. Normally I was pretty okay with wine. Couldn’t have said much about this one beyond that it was probably made with grapes.
“Chelsea’s excited to see you,” he said, and it stirred me out of the hazy reverie, looking up across the little table at him, underneath a window with the blinds drawn—anything to hide me from view right now. Because feeling like contraband material was exactly what I needed.
“Oh…” I said, finally, a second later than I should have. “You’ve been talking to her?”
“After I met you at your apartment, yes. She’s happy to see you… spreading your wings a bit.”
I looked away, shelves of books the only touches of personality in the place. Nothing too surprising—self-improvement books, Stoic philosophy, a couple of cookbooks, books on historical politics and economics. “Spreading my wings… I guess we can call it that.”
He looked down, focusing on the quiet movements of fork and knife on the plate, before he said, “I’m sorry it’s come to this, Sapphire.”
“It’s not your fault.” My voice was a small, thin thing, and I tried again, not much better. “It’s not your fault. I don’t know what would have happened if you’d been… you know, working directly with them, I guess. Doing what they were asking you to. I’m… I’m grateful you took my side. I know it’s probably cost you a lot.”
“They’re the ones who lost these relationships. I don’t think I really took sides. Just did what I needed to.”
I set down my silverware with a clink that echoed through the lonely, quiet house. Andrew was the type who didn’t put music on… my parents were the same. Kind of thought that was just how everyone was, but Britt and Madeleine usually had something playing. Haley, Ellen, Zach, the others. Not always, but often enough I knew everyone’s music tastes just from being around them. Andrew? Over two decades and I’d never really known anything about his personality.
That was my family for you, I guess. Strip away all the personality, all the character—just pretty little mannequins. No wonder they’d been furious with me. Probably wouldn’t have cared about me being a lesbian if I didn’t make a scene out of it… if I’d just seen women in secret while putting on a fake face like everyone else, suffering slowly in silence.
“What are you going to do now?” I said quietly. “Lining up another butlership? I’m sure you have plenty of contacts who could use a good household manager… although.” I frowned. “Are my parents going to ruin your reputation, trying to get back at you or something?”
He shook his head. “And admit they lost their daughter and their affairs manager by being homophobic? I doubt it. They’ll tell everybody I decided to pursue other opportunities so they can save face. I… well, I’m not sure what I’ll do next, but I have some time to figure it out. You don’t need to worry about me, though.”
I took my wine glass, swirling it steadily, watching the wine dance along the perimeter. “I remember Chelsea being… nice. What’s she like?”
“Exacting. But she’s kind. She’ll make a great stylist out of you. I saw you’d been putting together something of a portfolio for makeup art.”
I frowned. “What didn’t you look up?”
He didn’t bat an eye. “It’s what I do. And I wanted to make sure you’d be all right. I’m not exactly a makeup artist myself, so I’m not a good judge, but I thought your work seemed professional, so—that was why I’d contacted Chelsea specifically.”
Dammit. Why he’d been so… good to me, I didn’t know. I’d cost him his job, turned him against his employers of twenty years, and he’d been there making sure I had a home, checking in with my career to make sure I was doing all right, considered it when he thought about ways to help.
I didn’t realize I was crying until he said, “If you’d prefer a different career—”
“Why?” I said, my voice scratchy. “Just… why do I always need everyone’s help? With everything?”
He sighed. “Because you have more people… more powerful people… actively working against you than most people. There’s no shame in needing help, Sapphire. People help because they can and you need help… it’s human nature. It’s hardwired into all of us. Even if there are some people who actively train it out of themselves in pursuit of more money, power…”
I buried my face in my hands. “I… I just… I just want a normal life. Is that too much to ask?”
“You deserve a normal, happy life as much as anyone.”
I pushed my plate away, crumpling up on the table—I didn’t care if he saw me crying, didn’t care about anything. I didn’t want to go to Baltimore, didn’t want to be a stylist, didn’t want to work for Chelsea, didn’t want anything. I just wanted to disappear. Just wanted to stop trying.
“I want,” I rasped, my voice heavy, thick, muffled against my arm. “I just want to stay here with Madeleine and the others…”
He sighed, heavy, frustrated—not at me, I could tell. “I know. I… I wish I could give you that.”
“It’s not… your fault,” I murmured, shaking my head against my arms. “You’ve been a better parent for me than my parents. I wish… I could have brought Madeleine around, too. You’d really like her… she’s so intelligent, insightful, just amazing.”
The room was painfully quiet. Poor Andrew couldn’t have known what to say, how to deal with this—wasn’t exactly part of his training. Not like anyone had ever gone to him for anything like this before. He’d been the one I’d go crying to when I was little and something went wrong in the way they did for little kids, but when I’d found out the way my mother went white with mortification seeing me like that, I learned to put it away quickly enough. Never really did it as an adult… not even as a teenager.
And now I was here catching up on the years of crying. And Andrew—always with a mind for the practical, I guess—finally said, “I’m sorry I couldn’t do more, Sapphire. I… I’m sure you’ll find…”
“I don’t want to find anything. I don’t want to go. Not just when things were starting to work… I don’t want to start over.”
“It won’t be starting over. You’ll have a solid job, a place to stay—”
“It is starting over. It was…” I trailed off, not even sure how to say it—that finding Madeleine was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, a miracle I could never afford to give up. That out of everyone in Chicago, my path crossed with hers—the woman who brought out all the things I wanted to be, the woman who made me feel rare and precious and valuable, the woman I loved, and by some miracle she wanted me too? And everyone around her—her community, the people who made sure I was a part too, who did everything to keep me safe, to make me feel at home?
I was supposed to throw it all away? When all of that had fallen into my hands?
“Sorry,” I said quietly, wiping my eyes, pushing myself back up. “Sorry, I’m… I’ll be all right. With time.”
He lowered his head. “It’s okay to cry, to… feel everything. I’d be worried if you didn’t right now.”
I shook my head, squeezing my eyes shut. I’d finally gotten to be a girl, growing up, having feelings—a wild head-over-heels love story with a girl who had me blushing like an awkward schoolgirl, learning how to fit in with a friend group, getting my first job, learning about my own dreams, and then learning about heartbreak, about making hard choices, about how sometimes people hurt people just because they could. Learned about losing everything and having to make sacrifices.
I’d finally gotten my chance to grow up. I’d just had to do it in record time. And now it was time to be an adult. And adults didn’t spend their time sitting around crying about their feelings.
Adults got to work. I wasn’t a little girl anymore.
But I couldn’t say that to him, so I just drew a long breath, put on a smile, and I said, “Yeah. But… it’s all right. One foot in front of the other. I just need time.”
∞∞∞
Time wasn’t healing anything. Finished dinner and Andrew led me to where a home office had been set up as a temporary bedroom with an air mattress across from a small window blocked from road view by dense tree branches, and he showed me where everything was. He’d gone ahead and moved my bags up here, packed full of as much of my stuff as I’d been able to fit in a hurry to get out of my apartment, and once he said goodnight with that look in his eyes like he was forcing himself to keep it together just like I was and shut the door behind him, I sat down on the floor surrounded by my bags, everything I owned stuffed into a backpack and a duffel bag, and I stared up at the ceiling, wondering what life was supposed to be like.
I couldn’t get it out of my head, everything Madeleine had said about life—the world—about the kinds of things she’d hear from Tristan. People were busy—people were in their own bubbles, doing their own things—people didn’t have time for each other. To play around and be silly. And I’d known on some level that I was wrong when I told Madeleine we could just be different from that, but I guess it had been nice to let myself believe in those kinds of fun, silly little things, like how a little kid might believe in Santa Claus, even though it would break their heart once they found out.
Ugh. Did that make me the equivalent of believing in Santa until I was twenty-three? How embarrassing.
Falling asleep wasn’t easy that night, lying there going over everything I’d ever done wrong, all the things I shouldn’t have said and all the things I should have, and spiraling wondering what the rest of my days were going to look like now—if this was all there was, and if I’d spend the rest of my life missing Madeleine—and I was deep in the darkest depths of the spiral when a tap at the window just about gave me a heart attack.
I sat bolt upright, breath suddenly ragged, staring at the window, every thought suddenly gone from my head. I sat there in the bed for a long time wondering—if it had been my imagination, nothing stirring at the window, or if maybe it was just a bird or something—when something tapped at the window again, sending a jolt of panic down into my gut. It was dark enough it was hard to tell, but there was a silhouette of something—something reaching up, touching at the base of the window, tapping on the glass.
I stood, slowly, shakily, desperate to make as little noise as possible—I didn’t know what time it was, how long I’d been lying there, and if there was any decent chance Andrew was still awake, but if my parents had sent someone to come here looking for me and come in through the second-floor window, I think that warranted waking up—
With another movement from the window, I stopped, frowning. From my vantage point standing at the door now, I could see a little better, the silhouette poking up from the base of the window, of a… stick. Just a really big stick, wobbling around to the point where it looked like it was being held from a long distance, like someone just standing in the dirt outside tapping my window with a… stick?
My family didn’t seem like they’d use methods like that. The image of my sister, serious faces and pert frowns, standing there in the dirt with a big stick in the air, was so absurd it almost made me burst out laughing. Nervously, I crept closer, sticking to the wall out of view, and I peeked the tiniest bit through the window to where I saw a flash of pink.
I wouldn’t have landed on that if I had a thousand guesses. I shifted into view, looking directly out the window, at where Haley—Madeleine’s coworker Haley, Britt’s newly minted ex-girlfriend Haley—was waving a stick, bundled up in a puffy down jacket, pink hair shoved into a hat. And when I looked through the window, she lit up, dropping the stick and waving, desperately, gesturing for me to open the window.
Was she looking to forge an alliance of the people who’d broken Madeleine’s and Britt’s hearts? I opened the window, mostly out of dumbfounded disbelief.
“Haley?” I whisper-hissed down to her, leaning out the window. “Oh my god, what are you doing here?”
“Shh!” She put a finger to her lips. “I waited until the lights went out on the other room, but I don’t know if the creepy butler is asleep yet. I’m here to rescue you.”
“Rescue—creepy—” I shook my head. “Oh my god, Haley, no, you have it all wrong,” I said, leaning on the windowsill. “Andrew’s helping me. I have to leave Chicago to get away from my parents, he’s… he’s helping me get out safely.”
“What?” She dropped her arms by her sides. “That’s not what Meg heard. She just said you and Madeleine had broken up and you were at the creepy butler’s house.”
“How did you even know where he lives? I didn’t know where he lives.”
“He has a website.”
He… had a website. How about that? “With his address on it?”
“Just a little domain registration tracking and I pinned it down pretty quickly. I got here and saw a small room and a big room with the lights on and I figured you were probably being kept in the small room and… look, we’ve gotta get you out of here! The butler’s not taking you anywhere!”
I hung my head, squeezing my hands on the windowsill. “Oh my god… I don’t know what you heard exactly, but I can’t stay here. It’s… my parents, they’ve been going all in on tracking me down and they’re going to keep getting me fired from jobs, going to start getting Madeleine in trouble, and—probably all of you, too. I can’t stick around.”
She shoved her hands in her jacket pockets. “So… if the butler isn’t that creepy, can I come inside? It’s so windy, my nose is going to freeze and fall off.”
“Haley, it’s so late. And you’re going to draw attention here and get yourself in trouble too.”
“I don’t care. I’m not letting you leave. You’re our friend, dammit.”
Ugh… I hated this so much. Hated having even more reminders to make leaving harder, hated having people coming around telling me to stay when all I wanted was to stay anyway. When I was already doing everything in my power to remind myself why I couldn’t stay.
But I let her inside. I called, “Go to the back door and I’ll let you in,” and I shut the window, walking quietly through the house, flashbacks to creeping through an echoing house trying not to wake up my parents. Clung to the banister creeping down the stairs and into the kitchen, where Haley was… climbing over the fence into the garden. I slid the glass door open carefully just as she dropped down onto the grass on the inside, catching herself clumsily and fumbling towards the low stone step up to the door.
“Couldn’t have just use the front?” she said, a little out of breath.
“Oh my god, Haley, there’s a gate. It’s not locked.”
“Oh. Damn.” She looked back at the gate, shrugged, and pushed into the house, dropping into the armchair next to where the blinds were still all closed. “You can’t leave,” she whispered, and I looked away, sinking slowly into the sofa.
“I have to… it’s not like I want to.”
“You’d just been getting your momentum. You were building a portfolio and everything.”
“I got fired. And I have a good job waiting for me in Baltimore, and a place to live that’s well out of reach of my parents. And even a contact there.” I tented my hands in my lap, sitting rigidly. “It’s what I was looking for—everything I’d been after. A chance to leave my parents fully, well out of their reach. To get somewhere with a better foundation set up behind me—a job and a home and someone I know. Leaving properly this time. It’s what I wanted.”
Haley frowned, folding her arms, and she studied me for a long time before she said, “It’s what you wanted. Not what you want. ”
I hung my head. “Haley… I can’t get everyone else in trouble with me.”
“There’s not a single one of us who wants you to leave. Even if it’s to spare us that. We’re all grownups! We can handle someone being mad at us!”
“And put Madeleine’s education at risk?”
“She should be the one to decide that—”
“ No. Not when I’d have to go around after knowing that she lost it all for me and… going on knowing that I was the reason she couldn’t follow her dreams.”
She pursed her lips. I gave her a sidelong look.
“Relationships end. I, um… not to go for a low blow or something here, but I think you’d know that.”
“Putting a disclaimer on a low blow doesn’t make it not a low blow.” She slumped, looking at the floor. “Britt and I were just having fun. Screwing around a little. It was never love or anything. But you and Madeleine—”
“Britt sure got hurt like it was love.”
Haley shrugged, a distant look in her eyes. “I wasn’t trying to. I thought I made it clear it was just casual.”
“The point is, even in the best situations… people get hurt sometimes. That’s just life… you’ve gotta grow up, move on, get past it.”
“ You’ve gotta. Says who? Is there an authority who tells us how to live life?”
“An authority, no, just… just that’s how it works. If you don’t accept that, then you end up living in the past. What if everyone you were ever with refused to ever move on? If they all kept trying to be with you?”
She stood up, pacing with irritation, tugging her hat from her hair and marching one way and the other. “That’s different,” she said. “You and Madeleine both want each other. It’s just someone else hung up on the past who wants to get in the way. And—and—why do you have to suffer for it?”
I squeezed my eyes shut, giving her a shrug, my best attempt at casual. The hollow sound in my voice told me I didn’t quite make it. “Because… because life’s not fair, I guess.”
“But—”
“Haley. Please. I’m… I’m really grateful,” I said, quietly, looking down. “Even when you’ve just had a breakup and you’re probably not feeling all too… connected to the group, you’re doing everything you can to make sure I am. Even… finding my family’s butler’s website’s domain registration’s linked address to come tap on my window with a big stick. It means a lot, even if it’s a little, um, weird.”
She sighed hard, dropping back down in the chair but slumping back this time, looking as tired as I felt. “It sucks. You shouldn’t have to leave because of this. You’re our friend, dammit. You’re my friend. And the best makeup artist I’ve ever known.”
“How many have you known?”
“I could know all of them and it wouldn’t change, because you’re the only makeup artist who’s you, and we all really like the person you are. Are you even going to like Baltimore? Or are you going to spend forever just thinking that it’s not Chicago?”
“It’s not—”
“And letting Madeleine go on knowing she got in the way of your dream by being the target your parents went after that broke you?”
I felt like she’d reached into my chest and grabbed my heart, shook it around, left me aching inside and dizzy and short on breath, physically here but my mind somewhere far far away. “It’s not fair, saying something like that,” I murmured. “My dream was always just… to get out. And I’m doing that.”
“That was your dream then. And your dream now?”
My dream now was to make it work—to stay here, to be with Madeleine, to stay around her and Britt and Ellen and Haley, Zach and Meg and everyone—to be a makeup artist here with all the people who meant the most to me.
But I didn’t have that luxury. No amount of dreaming changed the waking world.
I shook my head, standing up. “My dream is to make it through what happens next,” I said quietly. “And I will. Haley… thank you. For this. But I think you should go now… we’re going to wake up Andrew.”
She narrowed her eyes, pursing her lips. “I’m going to walk to Baltimore and drag you back on foot if that’s what it takes.”
I smiled sadly, pushing out everything I had into a thin-lipped hazy smile. “We’ll see, I guess, won’t we? Who knows? Maybe I’ll really like Baltimore.”
But even so—even as I said it, the words were bitter metal in my mouth.
I wasn’t going to like it. Not when it was just like she’d said—when Baltimore was the place that took me away from Madeleine. Away from what my dreams really were.
But life was never so neat and pretty.