Chapter 2 #2
“I see you trying, Gwenna,” she says. “I see you trying really, really hard. I see you wanting to—as you put it—get to the bottom of this. But I just don’t…
” She gives her head a little shake. “I’m not saying you’re not in pain, Gwenna.
I’m not saying that at all. I think you are genuinely unhappy and I think you genuinely don’t want to be.
But…psychotic?” She shakes her head. “I can’t agree with that. ”
“So how do you explain it, then?” I spit out. “I was there, flames went up, church went down. How”—I make my words long, venomous, slow—“do you explain that?”
I suck in a breath so deep it almost hurts. Then I sink in on myself, falling back between the cushions of the couch like they could swallow me up.
“I don’t,” Jessie says simply.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t explain it.”
Now it’s my turn to give my head a little shake. “What?”
“Empirically? It doesn’t add up. From what I know, anyway.” She bites her lip. “But I don’t know everything. You don’t know everything.
“So, what, it was like…magic?”
I say the words before I even fully consider them.
To her credit, Jessie doesn’t laugh. Or press the panic button and have me dragged off to Protective Care—PC, as the regulars call it.
She just…shrugs. “‘There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’”
“Hamlet,” I say.
Jessie gives a small smile that’s almost guilty.
“I was an English lit major in undergrad.” She exhales, spreading her palms over her notepad.
“My point is, I don’t have all the evidence there, and even if I did, I’m really not…
qualified to weigh in on what happened and why.
What I’m qualified to weigh in on is you.
And do you know what I do see when I look at you, Gwenna? ”
I shake my head.
“I see someone very smart, very sad, and very…” She pauses.
A long pause.
“…lonely,” she concludes.
I don’t know what to say to that. Can’t meet her eyes. Just watch as she flicks through her notes.
“You haven’t had a visitor in...over a month.”
I shift in my seat. “My mom’s a partner in her firm. She’s slammed.”
That’s the truth. But that’s always been the truth. My mom doesn’t visit because she doesn’t want to visit. She’s seeing someone now, I think—Max, a name I glimpsed on her contacts list.
“Any friends?”
How do I even answer that? “School,” I reply, a one-word explanation that actually explains nothing. “This is kind of out of the way.”
“Mm.” Jessie closes her notes, and the silence between us turns into the kind of evaluative silence I can’t stand.
“So that’s your diagnosis?” I ask. “Smart, sad, and lonely?”
“It’s not a diagnosis,” Jessie says. “Except by elimination. It’s more of a…therapeutic observation. Make of it what you will. But that’s my opinion as a professional based on what you’ve told me and what I’ve seen.” She pauses. “I’m not saying you don’t belong here. You can stay here as long as—”
“—the check clears?” I mutter.
“—as you need,” Jessie finishes. Again, she rolls her red lips together. “Sometimes a retreat from…everything is good. To get clarity. To be alone with your thoughts.”
“Like an anchoress,” I say without thinking.
Jessie quirks an eyebrow. I rub the back of my neck.
“It’s…they were women in the Middle Ages,” I explain, stupidly. “Who’d give up their worldly goods and go live a life of contemplation in a…cell, basically.”
Julian of Norwich’s words echo in my head. All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.
Will they, though?
“I see,” Jessie says. “So…right. It can be helpful, to a point. But for you, Gwenna…” She stops herself. “Unless there’s anything you haven’t told me—”
No.
I try not to visibly stiffen.
Even now, I can’t tell anyone the secret I know.
That Kai told me. That they all kept from me.
It’s all real. Magic. Miracles. The holy spirit. Whatever the fuck you want to call it.
I’m not stupid. I know that nattering on to my Renfrew therapist about the Holy Grail is a one-way ticket to PC.
So I shake my head at Jessie.
“No.”
She nods. “Then I don’t think you need to be here any longer than you want to be.” She gets up and opens the door, releasing me to the hallway. “Take some time to think it over, okay?”
“Sure.”
I walk very, very slowly down the hall.
I’m not just lying by omission by not telling Jessie. I’m lying to myself about why.
Because If I really admit it to myself, I’m not that afraid of coming off as crazy. I’m here because I’m crazy, after all. This is quite literally a mental hospital—an upscale, classed-up, ferociously expensive mental hospital, but still: it’s no wellness retreat, as Jessie said.
So no, I’m not keeping their secret out of self-protection. I can’t go on telling myself that I am.
I’m keeping it because…
Because despite everything they did to me, personally, despite the deception and the secrecy and the betrayal and the two kisses that made me—
I clench a fist, warding off the memories.
Despite all of that. I’m not telling.
Because if they’re right, and if it’s real, then I want them to succeed.
And I certainly don’t want to be the reason they fail.
The Renfrew library is a joke. A single, thousand-pound carved wooden bookcase in the dayroom that looks like it’s from someone’s grandmother’s Sears-catalog set, filled with paperbacks in three categories: religious treacle, “young adult” novels old enough to have teenage children of their own, and airport bestsellers of yesteryear.
Still, after my session with Jessie, when I’m cut loose until dinner, that’s where I go, giving it a perfunctory skim to make sure there wasn’t a surprise shipment of sexy romantasy or grisly true crime or anything actually worth reading.
No such luck. I select my current read—a battered hardcover of The Michelangelo Matrix, which I’m reading mostly to laugh at the bad scholarship—and settle into my usual reading corner.
What if the world’s most genius artist had hidden the truth about the legendary Garden of Eden in his paintings? asks the peeling dust jacket.
What if, indeed, I wonder.
There’s a handful of other girls lounging around, some gossiping in a knot of armchairs, one or two curled up to themselves, all of us wearing the pale blue Renfrew sweats.
I give the barest nod of greeting, but focus very intently on the book, as if I’m desperate to get back to the world of “elite mythographer”—not a word—“Dr. Patton Montgomery” and his “beguiling research assistant, Fabienne de la Croix.”
“Called me a cow and told me no one wants to marry a girl with cankles.” One of the gossiping girls—Sophia, with thin, dark hair and moon-pale skin—says, and shrugs. “I was six.” She looks at the girl next to her, eyebrows lifted in a challenge. “And?”
Amanda, with her heart-shaped face and sunken eyes, nervously twists the end of her long, straw-colored hair.
“Mine’s not so bad.”
“Bitch, please.” Miri, whose eyeliner is somehow impeccably sharp despite the non-contraband makeup permitted inside Renfrew being as waxy as dollar-store crayons, snorts. “No one carves themselves up like a Thanksgiving turkey because they love their mommy too much. She must have done something.”
Maybe it’s my imagination, but the thin scar-tissue cross on my chest gives a single throb.
“Fine, I’ll go.” Miri rolls her eyes, then purses her lips in a triumphant little smile. “Found her new boyfriend in my bedroom and called me a whore for trying to steal him.”
Amanda gasps.
“I mean, to be fair, I was,” Miri says. “That’s just the borderline in me. Crazy bitch is as crazy bitch does.” She sticks out her tongue. Then notices me. Staring.
I quickly look back down at my book, but it’s too late.
“Got something you wanna add, Gwenna?” Miri says, not unkindly. “We’re just swapping maternal trauma. Worst thing your mom’s ever said to you—go.”
I lower the book.
Honestly? In that department, I’m spoiled for choice. Especially in the past seven weeks.
I’m not paying to get you help, Gwenna. I’m paying because I can’t live like this anymore.
Everyone’s silent.
“Damn,” Miri says. “That’s fucked up.”
Before I can respond—like I have anything to say—there’s a buzz.
“Vale. You have a visitor.”
I jerk my head up. “What?”
“And he’s hot,” Sophia says.
Miri scoffs. “God, you’re such a ho.”
“You’re a ho, ho.”
“Yeah, well, you sound like fuckin’ Santa Claus.”
“He is cute,” rhapsodizes Amanda.
My heart jumps to my throat, clogging my breathing as my skin rushes with pinpricks.
Kingston.
It can’t be. Here? How would he…
He’d find something out. Somehow. Surely he could.
Slowly, almost automatically, I get to my feet, walk the few steps across to where the glass windowed wall separates the dayroom and reception room, the knot of girls parting for me to pass.
I see him.
Tall. Black wool coat, leather gloves. Flushed cheeks.
Handsome.
Familiar.
Not Kingston.
“Hello, Gwenna.” Alexei Moroslav bows in greeting, ducking his head of dark curls. “I believe I owe you an apology.”