Chapter 25
Madeleine
At least a lecture helped me for a minute. Sitting at the top of my bed with my laptop balanced on my crossed legs, watching a virtual lecture for my course, I got to push all the heavy thoughts that stuck to me like a malaise off to the side, just for a bit, just for long enough to put the words together. Got about fifteen minutes in before the lecture was somehow miles over my head, as if I’d never done technical drawings in my life, but trying to keep up at least kept my mind busy.
And then once it ended, I had nothing. Ostensibly, I should have been getting to work on my assignment—I had a drawing to get in before the week ended—but even just watching the lecture felt like I’d had everything taken out of me, and I slumped back into myself, exhausted and heavy down to my core.
I needed… I don’t know. To take everything back and start over. To never fall in love again. To rewrite my entire being down to the core in hopes I could be better and not end up in this deep, black hole again.
Failing that, maybe coffee would work.
I set the laptop aside, feeling weak as I shut it and stood up, trudging out of the room, praying not to run into Britt in the kitchen, and I ran into Britt in the kitchen.
“Hey,” she said, looking up softly from her food, a design sketch on her tablet in front of her—I knew her well enough that I knew how she sketched. Normally she drew things in minimal lines, clean and swift strokes to suggest an outline. The chicken scratch she had right now said she was doing about as well as I was. “Coffee?” she said, and I walked past her, into the kitchen, where the French press was half full.
“Thanks, Britt,” I mumbled. “Doing okay?”
“Yeah, I’m… I’m all right. I’ll live. Are you feeling any better this morning?”
“Yeah, a little.” I laughed, mostly to myself, as I poured a cup. “Nah. I’m lying to myself. Worse, actually.”
“Okay, true though, I’m lying too. I’m not all right at all. I don’t know if I will live. God, I can’t even believe she’s just… gone.”
I shrugged, hunching my shoulders as I finished off the French press, dumping out the grounds and cleaning it at the sink. “She’s Haley… I get the temptation to fix her, but you can’t fix people.”
“Girl, I’m talking about the love of your life. I mean Sapphire. I hate Haley right now. Give me a few days to get through denial and anger and work my way to depression and then I’ll miss her, but Sapphire?” She shook her head. “I feel like there should have been more I could do.”
“Ah…” I set the press down on the drying rack, stared at it for a while, and I meant to pick up my coffee and go back to the bedroom, but I ended up at the table instead, sitting next to Britt with the coffee cupped close to my face. “You seemed to have a lot you were raring for us to do last night,” I said, and she hunched her shoulders.
“Ellen listened to me wail at her for the longest time,” she muttered. “Ranted at her for like two straight hours about what we’d do to keep your girlfriend safe from all the creeps who think they own her, and she patiently listened and nodded as I talked myself into every corner that ever existed, letting me realize for myself why none of it would actually help anything. Just—dammit. Why do her parents suck?”
I closed my eyes, letting out a long, slow sigh. I felt the table shift with the way Britt slumped.
“Sorry. I should quit referring to her like that. Probably just rubbing salt in the wound.”
“You always were right about her,” I said. “Knew right away she was a perfect fit for us all. Knew right away… that she and I would be good together.”
“You know, I’d understand if you resented me right now.”
“You’re my best friend. I’d lose my mind if you weren’t around right now… even if sometimes you being around makes me lose my mind.”
“Maybe—her parents will move on once she’s gone for long enough,” she said, folding her hands together on the tabletop. “Maybe once she’s been away for a while, they’ll get it into their heads that they can’t just muscle their way into whatever they want, and she can come back, and—”
“Britt.”
Just that silenced the room. She winced, and everything hung in painful silence before I sighed, quietly, shaking my head.
“She’s getting everything she was after. A new start with everything in the right place. A good job, too. And a home without her parents’ fingerprints all over it. She’ll be better off this way… it’s just going to suck for all of us in the short run.”
“And in the long run, you really think you’re going to be happy?”
Happy? What did happy matter, anyway? I looked away. “Sapphire will be happy. Me… I’ll get back to my center eventually. And I’m sure I’ll find something else to focus on… I was itching to be single while I was with Tristan. I guess now I can be.”
“Yeah, but—”
A sharp knock at the door interrupted the scene, and I looked at the door and back to Britt, raising an eyebrow. “You ordered something else weird online?”
Britt didn’t get to protest before there was another sharp rap on the door, and a voice I neither expected or needed right now—Britt even less so, tensing up at the sound of Haley’s voice from the other side. “Madeleine?” she said. “Hey—I know you’re in there. I heard you talking. Don’t pretend nobody’s home.”
Britt paled, half-standing. I gestured her back to the chair, standing up with a heavy sigh spilling out in the process—everything was so much more exhausting than it needed to be right now. “Britt’s not here,” I said, leaning against the door.
“I’m not here for Britt, dumbass, I’m here for you. ”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Can we wait until I’ve been single for longer before you try hitting on me now?”
“I’m going to flex my Hulk strength and knock this door off its hinges. It’s about Sapph, you clod. Open up, I don’t want to have to shout through a door.”
Britt looked uncomfortably between me and the door, and I shook my head, turning back to the door. “She’s leaving. I know. I don’t really want to talk about this—”
“Are you opening the door or not?”
“I’m not wearing pants.”
She called my bluff. “I literally could not care less, I don’t want to shout this in the hall.”
“ I care. Tell me what you want and give me some space to be… I don’t know. Sad.”
I heard her groan from the other side of the door, and she leaned against it, the door shifting at the touch. “I heard the butler had kidnapped her—”
“The butler’s the one keeping her safe right now—”
“Yeah, I found that out when I went to his house and found her.”
Britt, the idiot, blew her cover, furrowing her brow. “What the fuck?”
“What the—what the fuck is right,” Haley said, stepping away from the door. “You are there—Jesus Christ, Mads, you broke up with Sapphire two minutes ago and you’re taking your pants off with Britt?”
“No, I’m—” I groaned, raking my fingers back through my hair, and I unlatched the door, throwing it open. “I’m wearing pants. I was trying to make you go away so that you would give Britt some space, but she’s pathologically incapable of keeping her mouth shut.”
Britt couldn’t stay away from a problem, so she pushed in between me and Haley. “How the hell did you even track her down?”
Haley rolled her eyes, folding her arms. “I checked the whois information for the butler’s personal website and tracked it back to an address and went to hide in the bushes and see which room aside from the bedroom had lights on last, and I waited until all the lights were off for a while before I tapped Sapphire’s window with a stick.”
Britt put her hands up. “Since when were you a private eye? Or just a professional creep?”
Haley huffed. “Just because you decided to stop seeing me doesn’t make me the villain all of a sudden. I heard about what happened from Meg, and apparently she’d heard it from Sam who’d heard it from someone else, so it got messed up along the way. I thought the butler had grabbed her and was hauling her away, so I was trying to help.”
Britt scowled. I didn’t need this right now. Hadn’t even realized Britt had been the one to call it off with Haley, but that was a topic for another time. I put a hand on Britt’s shoulder, pulling her back. “Britt,” I said. “Can we not have a fistfight in the apartment doorway?”
With an exasperated groan, Britt turned back, hands up, and she dropped onto the couch, looking pointedly out the window. Haley stepped inside, but not by far, hovering by the door bubbling with anxious energy as I shut the door, and she said, “Mads, you can’t just let her go.”
I couldn’t deal with this, was what I couldn’t do. I let out a long, slow breath, holding myself together as much as I could, and I said, “If you have any ideas what I should do about the situation, I’m listening. Chasing down the butler doesn’t seem to help the situation.”
Haley folded her arms. “Don’t get mad at me. I’m not the one who took her away.”
“Yeah, no, I—” I groaned, loud and frustrated, marching back to my chair and dropping back into it, a hand to my face. “Sorry. I just… I can’t handle this. For once, I thought maybe it would just work out, that… that things could be nice and happy, that it could all just be that simple. I just… I love her. And I wish I could go get her back—I wish it were that simple—but nothing ever is. It was all just… stupid… in the first place,” I choked, burying my face in my hands, not even caring how it looked anymore—something broke inside me where I didn’t care, couldn’t care. If they all saw me broken down crying and thought I was a hopeless child, a pitiful nobody, then what was the harm? They wouldn’t be wrong. “Tristan was right… I was looking for something that doesn’t exist in the real world. Something that you can only have in stupid daydreams. And we had a nice daydream, and it hurts because she’s gone, but it also hurts because… I’d gotten my hopes up just for a second… just for one second,” I rasped, voice hazy, buried in my hands. “Just for one second. And just that was all it took to make a… fool out of me. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, when I—I’ve tried to be better—I’ve tried so hard. But I’m just… wrong. On some deep level, something wrong with me that I can never fix. And I didn’t want to be reminded of it. But… here we all are, I guess.”
Slowly, Haley and Britt exchanged a look, before Haley sat down next to me, a hand on my arm. “Hey,” she said. “Mads.”
“Don’t,” I mumbled, voice cracked like dry earth. “I get it. Forget it. I’ll be better in a… little while…”
“Mads,” she repeated, more insistent this time. “There’s nothing wrong with you.”
“If there’s not, then—then why do I keep fucking up?” My voice came out worse than I’d thought—blubbery, stupid, like a whiny little kid. Britt was the one to answer.
“Girl, you did not do one thing wrong with Sapphire. Falling for her wasn’t a stupid mistake. Believing you could be happy—calling something like that a mistake, what the fuck kind of life is that?”
“The fucking… real world,” I mumbled. “That’s how it goes in the end. One way or another—whether you like it or not—”
“Fuck the real world,” Haley said. “The real world is that we’re all just here trying to figure it out and then we all realize ten years too late that we were supposed to just make up our own rules along the way.” She squeezed my shoulder tighter. “What would you do?” she said, quieter now. “What’s the stupid thing you really want to do but think you’re not supposed to? Because when I talked to Sapph, I know she wanted to do something just like it.”
I was quiet for a long time, shaky, staring through the gaps in my fingers down at the floor. Finally, I said, in a haze, “What do you think? I’d try to go get her back.”
“So why don’t you?” she said, and I shrugged.
“Scared… of what her parents will do to her.”
She leaned into my field of view, a serious look in her eyes. “Only reason she was going along with this is because she’s scared of what her parents will do to you, you know.”
I swallowed, hard, feeling distant in my own body. Britt was the one who filled in the blanks—her and Haley completing each other’s sentences. Britt would hate that. “You know all of us have your backs. Both of you. For your own sakes and for each other’s, because apparently the only thing that motivates you two is each other.”
Haley gave me a dry look. “You’re going to be miserable forever if you just sit back while she leaves.”
I closed my eyes, resting my hands on my lap, and I squeezed, slowly but surely, into tight fists. “Yeah,” I said, eventually, a little shakily. “Yeah, maybe so.”
“So—” Haley started, and I sucked in a sharp breath, looking up at her.
“Hey—Haley,” I said, and she stopped, raising her eyebrows.
“Yeah?”
“Since you apparently have some stalking skills stored away in there somewhere… Sapphire’s parents. Where do they live?”
Haley and Britt exchanged a look, Britt rising slowly from her seat. “Are you—”
“They can’t track me down if I track them down first,” I said. Haley stood up with her.
“They’re practically public figures. I can find them in ten minutes.”
“I’m going with you,” Britt said, and I stopped, catching the automatic no, and I let out a slow breath before I nodded.
“Thanks. Both of you.”
What a stupid, harebrained idea. I was doing it, though.