Chapter 42 1964
Calliope gropes for my hand. Footsteps sound behind us.
Bob Ashenhurst.
He smiles at Flitter. “The part is yours. I’ll tell Matty I’ve overridden his decision.”
“The part?” Calliope repeats.
“Jane Eyre, the orphan girl,” Bob says, smiling at her now.
Then at me.
It isn’t the breeze that whispers; it isn’t the palm trees either.
It’s the castle itself, letting out a memory the same way you find a piece of the puzzle hiding beneath the rug on the floor.
The memory is Flitter saying to Calliope long ago: So long as it doesn’t turn you into a pill bottle like Marian Monti or a bitch like Lacey Magee.
And of something Bob said to me that same night: I will never forgive you.
For seven years he’s been thinking: Why hurt the orphan when she’s small and low? There’s so much more to hurt when you’re happy.
He’s been waiting to cut the points off Calliope’s star too. Waiting until we both had farther to fall.
All this time, Flitter and I were afraid Calliope would be the one to turn. But Flitter—what have the past seven years turned her into?
And me—what did it turn me into?
A woman who’s holding her friend’s hand while she watches her lover and her sister betray her in two different ways.
“Y-you…” Calliope stutters at Flitter, trying to piece it together.
“She found out somehow that Win’s a liar,” I say dully. “Then she told Bob. In exchange for what she’s always wanted. Power. And—”
“The part,” Calliope finishes, both of us staring, not at Bob who we thought was the worst thing at the Marmont, but at Flitter. Who’ll most likely become the new Calliope. After her will come another girl, then another, right up until the world ends.
Once upon a time, Calliope tarnished Flitter’s dream. Bob tarnished Calliope’s and the world tarnished mine, but really it was ambition that tarnished everything.
Flitter’s ambition was always for herself. Calliope’s is to hold everyone’s hearts in her hands. Bob’s is to keep getting away with the game he plays. Mine was for a place of my own.
None of us wanted consequence.
But something always comes after.
I take a step away from Flitter. Away from Bob, who probably, as a boy, caught birds in nets just so he could watch the glitter of life die in their eyes when he slit their throats.
Away from Theo, whose father watched the glitter of life die in his son’s eyes one morning over breakfast and who then became a man who drank and sang and married his way through life—a man I was supposed to marry today but who, at the very least, is a colossal liar.
I told him how much I hated secrets and lies.
But there is no renovation. No construction workers.
There’s just a woman he’s embracing the way you hold someone you care deeply for.
On the table behind them are needles, glistening like the diamonds in the wedding tiara I will never wear.
Finally, I run. Down the path, toward the pool. I’m almost there when I hear Win’s voice roaring, “Aria?”
“What the fuck did you do?” he spits at someone: Flitter, Calliope, Bob—I don’t know. Know only that I need to get away from here with the suitcase I packed because part of me always knew that marriage shouldn’t be the dream of a poor orphan girl if she ever wanted to rise up out of her story.
Aria’s friends look in her room, in the turret, in Calliope’s suite, because those are the places where Aria can always be found. Not tonight. The Chateau Marmont is the only one who knows where she is and of course it won’t tell.
When Jupiter, the only other person who knows about the tunnel, approaches the entrance to search for Aria, the handbrake on one of the Lamborghinis releases and it rolls forward, hitting a Corvette.
Jupiter hurries to rein in the Lambo and forgets all about the tunnel until much later, when it’s empty.
The Marmont waits for two hours before it pushes the young woman in the short pink dress out onto the Strip.
She’s carrying the blue suitcase that will give her purple bruises on her shins before the night is over.
Just as she did seven years ago when she stood in the very same spot, she looks at the edifice of the Chateau Marmont. This time she doesn’t glare.
The fire inside her has been blown out.
But the Chateau Marmont crosses its curtains and hopes that something in her future will rekindle it, because this—this is the path the castle wanted her to take all along.