Chapter Twenty Portland, OR 2009
Chapter Twenty
Portland, OR
The first thing Scarlett bought with the money from her grandmother’s life insurance policy was a pair of first-class plane tickets to Paris.
The second thing she bought was a pregnancy test.
“Omigod, Scarlett. Please tell me you didn’t actually spend five thousand dollars of your inheritance on a senior trip for us to France.
” Chrissie’s voice, caught somewhere between a scold and a squeal, reached the bathroom from the living room with a soft echo.
Every conversation inside the apartment these days sounded like that, thanks in large part to the growing pile of boxes that contained the entirety of Scarlett’s childhood.
Bit by bit, Chrissie was packing up the pieces of Grandma that remained. Bit by bit, she was forcing Scarlett to move on with her life.
Scarlett hastily shoved the pregnancy test underneath a pile of towels on the back of the toilet. The requisite three minutes hadn’t passed, but there was no way she was risking Chrissie popping her head inside and catching Scarlett in the act.
“They’re nonrefundable, so you have no choice but to go with me,” Scarlett said brightly as she stepped into the living room.
She tried not to wince at the sight of the cardboard stacks or at how bare and empty the apartment looked without her grandmother’s knickknacks on every available surface, but she couldn’t seem to help herself.
She knew the lease was up at the end of the month and she had no other choice but to find a new place to live. She knew all her grandmother’s belongings were waiting for her inside those boxes, ready to decorate wherever she ended up next.
But that didn’t make her resent them any less. Or to resent Chrissie less, either. How could her friend keep putting one foot in front of the other? Why was she so capable of carrying on when all Scarlett wanted to do was curl up in a ball and stay here forever?
“I know.” Chrissie’s arms were around her within seconds. “It’s awful in here while everything is in flux. I’m sorry. I’ll go to Paris with you to make up for it, and I won’t complain a single time. I might even try escargots.”
“And wine,” Scarlett sniffled, wishing that instead of helping her every step of the way, Chrissie would be less amazing of a friend.
She needed that so much more than she was willing to admit.
“And frog legs. And you have to have a scandalous love affair with at least two Frenchmen, but if you wear a beret even once, so help me…”
Chrissie laughed and let her go, which had been Scarlett’s objective from the start.
“I don’t think Grimshaw would appreciate me having two love affairs. I can probably get him down to one, but that’s as far as I’m willing to push it.”
A wave of nausea came over Scarlett, so strong it was impossible to chalk up to the mild bouts of sickness she’d been having on and off the past few weeks.
Chrissie had never used the L-word with regards to Grimshaw before, even as a joke.
Whatever that stupid pregnancy test in the bathroom ended up saying, she couldn’t carry on like this.
“Chrissie, I—”
A knock sounded before she could make the confession that would ruin them both. Scarlett reared back, but Chrissie’s pleased look indicated that she’d been expecting someone—had even, possibly, planned yet another surprise to try and lift Scarlett’s spirits.
“That’ll be Mitchell,” she said as she went to answer the door. “I hope you don’t mind, but I convinced him to borrow his dad’s truck to help us haul some of this stuff to the storage facility.”
“Oh. Mitchell. Goody.”
Chrissie turned and pulled a face at Scarlett. “Be nice, Scarlett. He only wants to help. It’s not his fault he’s head over heels in love with you. If you want guys to stop doing that, you should try being less gorgeous.”
That made Scarlett snort. “I hate to break it to you, Chrissie, but it’s not my looks boys are after. Not when they have you for that.”
Chrissie shot her a puzzled look, but there was no time to explain herself before the door opened and Mitchell bounded in. Which was probably for the best because what could she say to make Chrissie understand?
You’re the gorgeous one, both inside and out. I’m the walking disaster. The good time. The bad mistake.
“My dad says we have until five o’clock, and then he needs to pick up my sister from band practice.” Mitchell strode into the apartment with his long-legged gait, his brow puckering as he took in the empty shelves and even emptier walls. “Oh, wow. You guys made a lot of progress in here.”
“Chrissie made a lot of progress in here,” Scarlett corrected him. “All I’ve been doing is playing Doodle Jump and eating two-month-old pie.”
“Two-month-old pie?” Mitchell’s face showed his horror. “Is that…safe?”
“Have some and see for yourself. There’s peach and strawberry rhubarb. Or, if you’re feeling really brave, coconut cream.”
Chrissie rolled her eyes as she grabbed the dolly Mitchell had brought with him and dragged it through the apartment. “Don’t listen to her. They’ve been in the freezer since the funeral. I don’t know why, but everyone seemed to think pie was the one thing that would make all of this bearable.”
“Since the funeral, huh?” Mitchell eyed Scarlett askance. She wished Chrissie could see that look. Far from showing the lovelorn signs of a boy infatuated with her, he looked like a judgmental little prick.
“Yes, since the funeral.” Scarlett swung open the refrigerator door and started slamming pies onto the counter. “Is that a problem, Mitchell? Is there anything you’d like to add?”
“I’ll take a slice of the strawberry rhubarb, thanks.”
This was said with such a calm, good-natured air that Scarlett immediately started to deflate.
She didn’t know what was wrong with her.
Two incredibly generous people were standing in her apartment, helping her to pack up her old life so she could start a new one.
There was more money in her bank account than she’d ever seen in one place before, and her best friend had just agreed to accompany her on the trip to Paris that she’d been planning since the day they’d met.
She was living the life she wanted. She was living the life her grandmother had given her.
Tears sprang to her eyes before she could stop them. They fell in fat, heavy splotches all over the freezer-burned pie.
“Oh god. I’m such a mess. You can’t possibly eat this now.”
The plate was lifted from her hands before she could add her dripping snot to the rest. Mitchell’s hand fell to her shoulder and forced her onto a stool while Chrissie poured her a glass of water and slid it across the counter.
“I’m sorry,” Chrissie said. “We don’t have to do this today if you aren’t feeling up to it. Or you and Mitchell can go to a movie or something, while I—”
“Stop.”
Instead of stopping, Chrissie started to rub slow, comforting circles on Scarlett’s back.
“Don’t, Chrissie.” Scarlett shrugged her off with a twitch. “It’s fine. I’m fine.”
She could hear rather than see Mitchell and Chrissie share a concerned look over her head. She sprang to her feet, ignoring her sudden whirl of dizziness, and turned on them. “Omigod, you guys. Enough.”
They both moved toward her at the same time but she flung up her hands, holding them back like an exorcist keeping the demons at bay. Only…that wasn’t right. She was the demon in this scenario, not them.
“Scarlett, what’s going on?” Chrissie’s voice started to take on a concerned vibrato. “What’s gotten into you?”
She would forever regret the way she responded to that question—not with the gratitude she should have shown her best friend of eleven years, and not with the calm, self-assured grace of a woman facing an inevitable dead end, but with a laugh.
Granted, it was a laugh that went on for a few seconds too long, as unhinged at the jaw as she felt all over, but that didn’t make it any more appropriate. Nor did it explain the words that next left her lips.
“Your perfect college boyfriend, Chrissie. That’s what got into me.”
When her confession was met with a shocked stare from one side—Chrissie’s—and a pain that seemed to extend into eternity—Mitchell’s—she dropped her head to the counter with another one of those eerie laughs.
“It was Grimshaw Pemberly. At the funeral. With the statue of Mary Magdalene looking on.” Each sentence was recited like a game of Clue. “There. I confessed. Are you happy now? Can I cry into the rest of this pie in peace now?”
She had no idea how she made it to the couch or how an actual cup of chamomile tea—the last of her grandmother’s stash—was placed in her hand.
Or why there was suddenly a blanket over her shoulders, which were shaking, shaking, shaking in a way that looked like crying but felt like worse.
If she had to guess, she’d have said that Chrissie had clicked into full-on martyr mode.
Her saccharine soul had been prepping for this moment for years—for her whole life, in fact.
She was wrong.
“Drink that, Scarlett.” Mitchell spoke softly but gruffly, his voice belonging to a man twice his age. “It has an obscene amount of sugar in it, but you look like you’re about to pass out. In fact, I think you did pass out for a second there.”
“Where’s Chrissie?”
Scarlett used the lengthy pause that ensued to sip the tea, which was hot enough to burn her tongue. Instead of spitting it out, she let the burning water swirl around her mouth, scalding everything until it felt almost as numb as the rest of her.
“She, uh, went outside,” Mitchell said. He jerked his head toward the double doors on the far end of the apartment, which opened up onto a minuscule balcony overlooking the parking lot.
From her position on the couch, Scarlett could make out a flash of Chrissie’s hair but little else. “She said she needed some air.”
“That’s right. A little oxygen, a moment to reflect, and she’ll be back to her usual self.” Scarlett was unable to hide the bitterness in her tone, but that might have been because of the first-degree mouth burns. “I can’t wait to see how she blames herself for this.”
“Scarlett, that’s not fair.”
She knew it wasn’t. That was the whole point. None of this was fair.
“Do you think maybe we should post someone below to catch her in case she jumps?” Scarlett asked.
“I don’t think I have the emotional capacity to attend another funeral so soon after the last one.
I bet Grimshaw wouldn’t mind, though. He keeps texting me, wanting to know when we can hook up like that again. ”
Mitchell gave her a disgusted look before snatching the tea away from her, hissing sharply as the hot water scalded the backs of his hands. “Look at her shoulders, Scarlett. She’s out there sobbing. Sobbing.”
She didn’t want to look. She didn’t want to know.
But there was such an aura of command around Mitchell—annoying little Mitchell—that she had no choice but to do as he said.
And the moment she saw the way Chrissie’s whole body heaved, as if every breath came at a cost, she wished she hadn’t given in.
She’d never seen Chrissie cry like that before. Not one tear had she shed for her dead brother. Not a single streak of mascara had darkened her eyes after Grandma had been laid to rest. When calamity struck, there was a stoicism to Chrissie that seemed to strengthen her from within.
But Scarlett had done the unthinkable. Scarlett had done the one thing that broke her.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” Scarlett whispered. Her own eyes started to fill again. “Mitchell, I don’t know how to fix this.”
“I don’t think you can fix it,” he said, his voice as cold as the blood running through Scarlett’s veins. “What the hell is wrong with you, Scarlett? It’s bad enough that you left the funeral with my stupid cousin. Why did you have to go and tell Chrissie about it? And in such a way?”
That, at least, she had an answer for. She got to her feet, surprised to find that her legs held her weight without a single tremor.
“Don’t go out there,” Mitchell warned. “Give the poor girl a minute to herself.”
“I wasn’t planning on it.” She strode to the bathroom and pulled the pregnancy test out from under the towel.
She was tempted to squeeze her eyes shut or shove the plastic under a cascade of running water to render the results null and void, but she didn’t.
She needed to see those two pink lines for herself—to realize the full enormity of what she’d done.
Her legs continued not shaking as she reentered the living room and placed the evidence on the coffee table next to the still-steaming tea. It was her voice that did that instead.
“I’m pregnant,” she said. “And as I’m sure you can guess, the baby is Grimshaw’s.”