Chapter 7 #2
For a moment, I just sit there with my hands on the wheel.
The house glows in front of me. My house.
Our house. The front windows are warm and golden, the kind of light that used to make me feel safe when I came home late from rehearsals or charity dinners or one of Janine’s meals where every compliment had a blade tucked underneath it.
Sebastian stands on the steps. Katrina is a pale shape behind him. There's no version of this picture that does not destroy me.
I start the car. Sebastian takes one step forward, then stops himself. The last thing I see as I pull away is his hand lifting like he can reach me across all that distance. He can’t.
I don’t remember the whole drive back to Jessica’s.
I remember the turn out of the neighborhood, because I take it too fast and the tires hiss on wet pavement.
I remember a red light where I sit with both hands clamped around the steering wheel, staring at the glow until it blurs.
I remember my phone lighting up once in the cup holder.
Sebastian. I don’t answer. It lights up again before the first call even feels finished.
I pull into a gas station parking lot two miles from Jessica’s house and block his number with my thumb moving almost independently from the rest of me. Then, after one long second, I turn the phone off entirely.
The silence that follows is so complete it presses against my ears.
“Okay,” I whisper. No one answers.
I drive the rest of the way with the heater on too high and my coat still buttoned wrong.
Jessica’s porch light is on when I get there. So is the kitchen light.
My sister's never believed in leaving people to find their way through the dark if she can help it.
Even when we were kids, she used to sleep with her door open after a bad day, pretending it was because her room got stuffy.
I knew better. She wanted me to see the stripe of light and know I could come in.
The front door opens before I reach it. Jessica stands there in flannel pajama pants and an old sweatshirt from a bakery supply company, her hair twisted on top of her head. She takes one look at me and says nothing.
That's how I know she understands. If she thought there was room for anger, she'd have already filled the doorway with it.
She'd be threatening Sebastian, Katrina, Janine, and any unlucky shrub on Austen property. Jessica’s rage is active.
It likes a list and sharp objects. But she looks at me, and all the fight leaves her face.
“Oh, Chloe.”
I make it one more step. Then I crumple.
Jessica catches me with a sound that breaks in the middle.
Her arms close around me, solid and familiar, and the smell of vanilla sugar clings to her sweatshirt.
It is such a Jessica smell that it undoes me more completely than anything else could have.
Bakery air. Warm laundry. The sister who used to sit on the bathroom floor with me in high school when I cried over boys whose names I can barely remember now.
This one I'll remember. This one has my whole life built around him.
“I can’t,” I say into her shoulder.
“I know.”
“I can’t, Jess.”
“I know, baby.”
She gets me inside somehow. I don’t remember walking to the couch, but then I'm on it, folded into the corner with a blanket around my shoulders and Jessica kneeling in front of me, pushing my hair back from my wet face.
“Did he hurt you?” she asks.
I shake my head.
“What happened?”
I look down at my hands. They are empty. No ring. No keys now, because Jessica must have taken them. My finger looks pale where the band used to sit, the skin slightly indented, as if my body still believes something belongs there.
“She was there.”
Jessica goes very still. “Katrina?”
“In the house.” My voice sounds scraped out. “In our sitting room.”
Jessica’s eyes close for one second. When she opens them again, they are bright with a fury she is holding back only because I am in pieces on her couch.
"It was like she’d been there before. Like she knew where to stand.”
“Chloe.”
And then I tell her everything. I tell her about what he said. About the look of triumph on Katrina's face. About how he followed me out of the house, begging me to understand, and how I couldn't. How I didn't know if I'd ever be able to understand.
“I feel like I’ve been shattered into a thousand pieces,” I say.
Her face crumples then. She pulls me back against her, and this time she rocks me a little.
“I know.”
“I don’t know how to be a person after this.”
“You don’t have to know tonight.”
“I don’t know how to be his wife.”
“You don’t have to know that tonight either.”
“I don’t even know how to be me.”
Jessica is quiet for a moment. Then she says, “I know you don’t. But I know something you don’t know right now.”
I close my eyes.
“You can piece yourself back together,” she says. “It may not be pretty. It may take glue and spite and a lot of coffee. There may be weird edges. But you can do it.”
“I don’t want weird edges.”
“I know.” Her hand smooths over my hair. “But weird edges are still edges. They still hold.”
I cry then. Not the sharp, shocked crying from before. This is worse. Slower. It comes from somewhere deep, somewhere tired, and once it starts, I can’t stop it. Jessica doesn’t tell me to breathe. She doesn’t tell me I’m okay. She just holds me and lets me be exactly as not okay as I am.