Chapter 6 #2
A fundraising gala for New Ground, one of the two Patricia organized each year, filled a hotel ballroom with donors who wanted to feel good about how their money softened the edges of a broken system.
I stood near the bar with sparkling water because I was driving and because I had already given everything I had to three separate conversations about housing gaps and kids falling through the cracks, which everyone in the room preferred to call unfortunate rather than preventable.
Damien appeared beside me. Tall. Polished.
Certain of himself in that particular way men become when they have never once had to wonder whether the ground beneath them will hold.
He asked what I did. I told him. Then he asked a follow-up question.
He looked at me the entire time. Not at the room, but at me.
At twenty-three, after a lifetime of being the least compelling thing in every room I walked into, the force of someone’s attention felt like something I didn’t have the right word for.
Intoxicating is close. Disarming is closer.
He asked for my number.
I gave it.
I thought, standing in that ballroom with a professional smile and a glass of sparkling water, that this was what moving forward from Zane looked like.
I tap out of the photo, slide my phone into my pocket, and look around this soulless apartment.
Nothing in here is mine.
The furniture is his. So is the artwork that adorns the walls.
The coffee table came from his mother, still sitting at the same angle she placed it the one time she visited, and neither of us has moved it since.
The fake plants are his choice because he said real ones were too much maintenance, and I agreed.
I sat right there on the couch that is his and agreed, because apparently somewhere along the way I decided that being low maintenance was safer than admitting I wanted something alive in the room.
There is a cactus on our bedroom windowsill.
I bought it for four dollars at a farmer’s market on a Saturday morning eighteen months ago.
I carried it home and set it in the window because it needed light.
Damien said nothing about it. I took his silence as acceptance.
A fucking four-dollar cactus. That is the whole of what I have allowed myself to take up in two years of my life, and the worst part is that somewhere along the way I convinced myself it was enough.
I remember the girl I used to be. How that little girl always promised herself: When I grow up, nobody gets a say in my life but me. She whispered it like a secret she kept safe until she was old enough to use it.
I think about her now. That little girl. She bled for every inch of herself she kept. She refused to disappear, even when disappearing would have been so much easier, even when the world made it abundantly clear that nobody would notice either way.
And here I am at twenty-six. Still fucking invisible. Still crammed into the smaller side of a closet in a room.
I did this to myself, slowly, handing myself over piece by piece until almost nothing is left to find.
I did not survive all of that only to end up here.
The rage comes clean and fast, more honest than anger, something that feels dangerously close to grief.
For that ten-year-old girl sitting on the edge of a bed in a house that was never hers, bag still packed at her feet, swearing to herself that one day she would build a life no one could take from her.
She deserved so much better than what I have done with the life she fought so hard to build.
A match strikes near my ribs, and this time I let the fire burn instead of snuffing it out.
I walk to the bedroom and head into the walk-in closet.
I reach up for my dark green canvas duffel from the top shelf. The one I have owned since I was nineteen, which has followed me through every version of my life without complaint.
Then I stop.
No. Fuck that.
My eyes move to Damien’s leather weekend bag on the shelf.
The one he bought on a trip to Chicago and talked about for three weeks afterward, mentioning it twice in the same sentence on more than one occasion, because apparently a bag can be a personality if a man is devoted enough to the idea.
It’s expensive, and it’s coming with me.
It’s petty.
But you know what? I can live with that.
I start packing, and the speed of it catches me off guard.
With how little time it takes and how little there actually is.
But that’s the thing about growing up with nothing, about years of sleeping in rooms that were never really yours.
You stop accumulating. The clothes go in first. My shredded jeans, worn soft at the knees.
The oversized black sweater I’ve had for four years.
A handful of other things pulled from my shelf without folding, shoved into a bag, the ruthless efficiency of a girl who has packed and unpacked in too many rooms to be precious about it now.
Then I head over to the small glass tray on the dresser with my jewelry, rings, and a thin gold chain, and carefully put them into an inside pouch of the bag.
Then I take the novel from the nightstand I have been reading for a month and am only halfway through, still creased at the same page I keep falling asleep on.
I pack the cactus last.
I wrap it carefully in a hand towel, tucking the fabric around the tiny pot as if it were something precious. As if one wrong move might break it. Then I slide it into the side pocket of his leather bag.
A laugh escapes me before I can stop it.
Not because of our ridiculous photograph in the next room, pretending to be a happy couple.
Not because of the image Cassie sent me of that woman in the red dress, sitting across from Damien.
Or because of the past few years I spent folding myself smaller, softer, and quieter, trying to fit into a life that was never built for me.
What makes me laugh is the cactus.
A four-dollar cactus wrapped in a hand towel like crown jewels.
After all the pretty rooms, expensive wine, and empty promises dressed up as love, this stupid little plant is the only thing in this apartment that feels like mine.
The only thing I look at and think, I kept that alive.
The only thing from this relationship I cannot bring myself to leave behind.
I zip the bag, carry it to the bedroom door, and set it in the hall.
Then I go back for my green duffel because I am leaving with both. His for spite. Mine for history.
I stand in the living room and breathe.
I look around slowly, taking inventory, checking corners, shelves, and surfaces for anything of mine that might have drifted out here. There is nothing.
My eyes fall once again on our photograph. I walk toward it, pick it up, and look at us as a couple.
You absolute fool, Skylar.