Chapter 10 #2
I’d buy Culture Jar breakfasts for a year if he’d admit that he’s tied to this situation.
I’d give him my country club membership if he helped me out of it.
And as much as it kills me (poor choice of words, given my present state), I need to go back to his loft and find a new way to get him on board.
I’ll need a far more compelling argument—a stronger negotiation tactic.
Nothing’s coming to me right now, but it can’t be too hard. I have years of knowledge on the man … who is currently sprawled across his bed like a fallen angel.
The thought comes from nowhere.
I douse it immediately.
His body is a weapon—like his dimple—and I should be prepared for him to wield it. Anytime. At all times. It’s another tactic meant to—
The front door opens. I drop to all fours in fright and hide behind my sofa, like I’m the one who shouldn’t be in my own apartment. Blood pressure spiking, I tune in.
“I made it.” Cristina’s muffled voice makes me slump in relief.
“Cristina!” I jolt to my feet and rush to her, feeling better than I’ve felt all morning. “I’m here,” I say, waving.
Phone tucked between her shoulder and ear, Cristina closes the door and sets her bucket of cleaning supplies to one side as she changes out of her sneakers into her cleaning Crocs.
Her dark hair, sprinkled with grays and whites, is secured in her usual tight bun, and she’s wearing faded scrubs. I want to hug her.
“Cristina.” I step in front of her. “Please, see me.”
She picks up her cleaning supplies and walks past me, talking into the phone, “No, not the candy house.” Cristina laughs, a warm, familiar sound that makes me ache.
“Da. The pretty lady’s house.” The fondness in her voice means she’s talking to one of her three granddaughters.
It’s usually the youngest who calls, the one who’s seven and named for her grandmother.
Their relationship makes me long for things I never had.
“No, puiu,” she says, setting out her cleaning supplies. “She isn’t home yet.” Cristina’s tone changes, softening. Her face turns sad, and now I know she’s talking about me.
When she first started working for me, Cristina brought homemade treats.
The way we make them back home, she said.
I was reluctant to try the Romanian cornule?e—candied jelly wrapped in dough and powdered sugar.
She watched me the way a bird watches her hatchlings feed.
I didn’t dare tell her I was training for a marathon.
So I ate the dessert … and had another and another.
I must have passed some unspoken test, because Cristina started showing up with treats every week.
With stories about her homeland and family. With an easy disposition and smiles.
It didn’t take long for me to look forward to the days our paths crossed, to consider her more than someone who makes a part of my life easier.
I never told her that.
Now the need to tell her scratches at the back of my throat.
I scramble to the other side of the counter. “I’m home. I’m here,” I say, my voice desperate. Cristina doesn’t respond. “I’m right here!” I shout, waving wildly.
She chatters as she walks.
I amble after her, across the kitchen and living room, down the hall, toward the linen closet.
“It is in God’s hands.” She switches to Romanian … and passes me without a glance.
I don’t follow.
Instead, I slide to the ground and pull my knees to my chest, feeling more helpless than I’ve felt in the last decade. And that’s saying a lot.
Stevie Popovici knew how to survive, because if Margot—my mother—taught me anything, it was this: how to figure things out with Annie. Our mother was too busy chasing attention to give it to her daughters, so prone to spending any income on herself that we became survivors.
Annie was only two years older than me, but she was my sister, my mom, my best friend. She was a wild spirit who had big dreams and an even bigger heart. With her around, nothing felt impossible or scary. Whatever our mother didn’t provide, Annie found a way for us to get.
By the time I was six, Annie had taught me how to heat up canned spaghetti on the stove without burning myself.
By my eighth birthday, we’d figured out which utility companies gave the longest grace periods before shutting off the lights.
By the time I turned ten, we had a rotation of excuses for why I was always late getting to school, because most of the time we’d walk the entire way.
And by fourteen, I was standing alone, planning Annie’s funeral.
We had no clue that she was diabetic at first. It started with dizzy spells, rapid weight loss, blurry vision—things Margot waved off, calling them “growing pains” or “attention grabs.” It didn’t help that she didn’t trust doctors.
One of her loser boyfriends had once said hospitals were for people too weak to fight, and Margot made it gospel.
She said modern medicine was a scam, that pills were poison.
So Annie didn’t get the right treatment, but she didn’t push Margot.
And when it got worse, I begged, and we finally got insulin …
because Great-Aunt Julia stepped in, offered to pay and care for Annie.
For a while, it worked. Until Margot found other uses for the money.
She also liked the sympathy, the way people asked about her sick kid.
She liked being seen and doted on. And when it mattered most, when Annie didn’t get her insulin in time, her blood sugar dropped and she collapsed in our living room.
Margot wasn’t there. But the damage was.
By the time Annie made it to the hospital, it was already too late. The machines kept her going for a while, but she never woke up. Margot only showed up to sign paperwork. And at the funeral? Margot didn’t cry. She sat rigidly beside me, offering no comfort.
I already hated her by then.
I cried for a week straight. Hating the four walls of the trailer home closing in on me. Hating the patch of daisies outside the door and how they reminded me of Annie. Hating the universe for taking her and leaving me behind because I wasn’t half as good.
But I survived.
It took me two years to save up enough money to leave.
Great-Aunt Julia’s 1990 Honda Accord brought me to Chicago, where at sixteen, I worked odd jobs and put myself through school.
I faked parents when I needed to. I gave out burner numbers when teachers asked for emergency contacts.
I learned how to talk like I had a home to go to, a family who cared.
So I lived out of the Honda until I could pay the rent for a basement room, where I lived through the first years of college, alternating between working and studying.
Seeking internships and scholarships and any ship that could help me pay the bills and move forward.
Not once looking left or right or behind because forward was the only direction that meant survival. A way out.
And finally, when I’d scraped and clawed my way out of the darkness, I emerged as Evie Pope and kept doing what I’d always done. Run.
Straight into the afterlife.
You’re not dead, I can almost hear Rafael’s voice reminding me.
Releasing a shaky breath, I press the heels of my palms into my eye sockets. I haven’t allowed myself to feel so Stevie in a long time.
A sharp pain radiates from my chest—from the place where something new grew after Annie died.
Grief lodged itself between my ribs that day, an unshakable, throbbing, broken thing.
An imagined appendage I never asked for.
It’s been aching quietly ever since. Thinking of Annie makes it sharper.
Thinking that all that running led me right back to nothing makes it unbearable.
A deep, familiar voice makes my breath catch.