Elsie
Chapter Forty-Six
Ava was going to do one of two things:
Bite my head off for daring to intrude on her solitude.
Tell me to get lost, but leave my head otherwise intact.
I didn’t really see a scenario where she’d be glad to see me walking down the stairs toward her, but I saw her face when she left the kitchen. She wasn’t pissed. She was broken.
And I just couldn’t leave her alone like that.
Not when I’d been in that spot so many times, wishing there was someone to come check on me, and knowing the feeling when no one who ever did.
But instead of the fire-breathing dragon I’d expected to encounter as I walked down the stairs to the basement, I found only Ava, looking utterly human as she laid on her back, blonde hair splayed against the carpet and an old Bop It game in her manicured hands.
“I used to love that game.” I pointed to it.
“I always hated it,” she said, tossing it aside. “It used to stress me out until I cried.”
I couldn’t help but laugh because of how characteristically Ava that was.
“It can be a little overstimulating,” I agreed. “But that’s part of what made it fun.”
“I don’t like games that you can’t win.” She frowned, sitting up so her back was resting against the couch. “What’s the point of them if it just goes on forever? Now, the Rubik’s Cube. That was the one I liked.”
“I can see that.” I came to sit cross-legged on the floor in front of her. “Now, me? I never had the patience to even try to solve one of those.”
Ava sighed, looking at me with a weary expression.
“I guess I embarrassed myself pretty bad up there, huh?”
“What?” I focused my gaze on a pattern on the carpet. “No.”
She raised her brows, and I peeked up bashfully.
“Well, I think you made them a little concerned. They seem worried about you.”
She huffed, wiping at tears that were still escaping from the corners of her eyes.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” Her voice was soft and vulnerable.
“I don’t mean to be like that. I don’t. It’s just, when I start to get into that headspace, I feel like if I can just reorient myself.
Just clean a mess or finish a task; it’ll take some of the weight off me.
But it never does. There’s always something my brain tells me I have to do next.
And it builds and builds until I…” She looked down. “Well, you saw what happened.”
“I can’t help but notice,” I started. “And please, tell me if I’m being an absolute ego-maniac here, but I feel like there’s a correlation between when I’m around and you’re…you know.”
“Melting down?” She huffed a laugh. “You can say it. And you’re not wrong.”
“But why?” I asked. “Did I do something to make you hate me?”
She stared at me intently, opening her mouth and shutting it, as if the words were hard to say.
“I told you before that I was jealous of you. I meant it.”
“But why?”
Because the truth was, I was jealous of her. Her put togetherness, her stability, the life she lived without questioning the entire world around her.
She said she had noise in her head, and I didn’t doubt it, but so did I. Like a marching band, blaring at full volume, warning me that I better get my life together fast or else I’d miss the mark.
But Ava’s worries were different. She wasn’t scared of not ‘finding’ whatever it was I spent my life looking for. She was scared of losing what she already had.
“Because those people up there? They’ve been my family for as long as I can remember. After Matthew died, they still let me come around. Or maybe I just refused to leave. But I can’t help thinking…now that you’re with Will…”
“Now that I’m with Will…?” I pressed, trying to figure out her line of reasoning.
“Well, what do they need me for anymore? They’ll have you, and there won’t be any reason left to keep me around.”
I stared at her, mouth slightly agape as her words settled over me.
She couldn’t be serious, could she? Couldn’t think her place in their life was so precariously fragile that another woman coming around would somehow erase her spot in their family?
“Ava,” I said slowly and intentionally. “You’re not going anywhere.”
She snorted.
“You’re in every other picture up there!” I exclaimed, urging her to understand. “You were in every single story. You’re a Hughes, through and through. And that’s not just because of Matthew.”
“Will has spent the last five years hating my guts.” She laughed bitterly. “Why would they keep me around if their own son can’t stand me?”
“Will can’t really hate you,” I said. “You’re family. You grew up like brother and sister, didn’t you?”
She was silent, but it spoke more than her words could’ve.
I felt an anxiety settle in my chest at the secret fear I’d been harboring seemingly coming to the surface.
“Ava, can I ask you something? It might not be my place at all, so you can tell me to shut up and I’ll drop it forever, but…”
She stared at me, and before I could lose my courage, I forced the words from my lips.
“Before you married Matthew,” I said slowly, working my way up to the question that had the potential to devastate me. “Was Will in love with you?”
It would explain why everything was so weird between them. If he’d been scorned and rejected and forced to watch the woman he loved marry his brother, I could see how the potential fallout of that could lead them to where they were now.
But if that were the case, wouldn’t Will have told me? If it was so long ago in the past, why would it matter anymore? Why would he have held onto his anger this long if he were really, truly over her?
Ava stared at me, brown eyes exhausted as she said, “No. He never was.”
Relief washed over me so completely that my shoulders nearly sagged with it.
Whatever happened, surely it couldn’t be as bad as anything I’d imagined.
Until her next words twisted my heart in a different direction.
“I was in love with him,” she said, eyes pressing shut before whispering, “I was always in love with him.”