56. Chapter 56
Chapter 56
DECLAN
I t’s well after midnight when I get back home, and I am exhausted. That’s becoming my new normal, just feeling exhausted all the time, but still going. My brothers and I have been working nearly round the clock between the properties and the restaurants and putting everything into place that we need for Lexington.
I need to hold Vivian. Holding her reminds me why I am doing all of this, why I am doing all this shit that keeps me away from her and burning both ends. I nearly cracked when she wasn’t in bed last night, and I deserved it. The beating she gave me too—I deserved that a hundred times more. I am no good for her, and I know it. I am going to push her too far. I just hope I get everything done before I hit her breaking point.
So tonight when I get in, I head straight to the bedroom, and again she isn’t there. So I wheel around quickly to the living room, but I don’t find here there either. I start to throw lights on and move through my entire place, calling for her. But she is nowhere to be found.
When I get to the kitchen, I see the mail all piled up. I am about to do another search when I see the folded paper on top of the stack, with my name on it, in Vivian’s handwriting.
Panic’s too tame a word for what I feel as I pick up the note. Once I’ve read it, complete and utter devastation just barely covers the new feelings I have.
She is gone.
I am too late.
I hit her breaking point.
I take the letter and go into the living room, reading and rereading it until it is memorized. Until I know every line and curve of each of the letters to each of the words she has written. She is leaving, it says, and she doesn’t want to be found. She hadn’t said where she is going, so I can’t find her. Do I even have a right to anyway?
I sit on the couch with the letter for hours. Eventually I get up and walk over to the TV, lifting all sixty inches of it up and throwing it into the wall. After that, everything is fair game. Anything that I am able to lift meets the same fate. I destroy my apartment and then sit in the middle of it and drink every bottle I can from my liquor cabinet before I pass out.
Slade finds me there at some point the next day.
“Dec!” he shouts when he enters the space, finding me on the floor. “Oh God, Dec. Vivian! Did they—”
“She left me,” I croak out to him and then curl into a ball, among the remains of the life we had built in such a short time.
Slade doesn’t know what to do. “Dec, let’s get you cleaned up—”
“No!” I shout at him. “Fuck you! Leave me the fuck alone!” I hear Slade exhale and then I hear him on his phone, talking with someone, probably Axel.
“No, man, I don’t know what to do… He’s not up for anything… I know, but we can’t move forward without him and God only knows, maybe we have to let the plan die, let this whole thing go… yeah, me either, Axel, but Declan is the brains for this whole thing. We can’t do it without him.”
It is at those words that I realize I can’t let them down too. I had let Vivian down. I wasn’t good enough for her, and I couldn’t give her what she needed, not yet, not how I was. But I’m not going to lie down like a battered fucking dog and fail Slade and Axel too.
And now I realize that he had done it, that motherfucker. Lexington had taken what meant the most to me. He had taken me to a dark place, where I had obsessed about him, and in my tunnel vision I had ignored what really mattered and driven Vivian away.
Now I am more than ready to do the same thing to him. I am going to take the one thing he loves and is more devoted to than anything and watch him suffer, and I know it will make me feel alive, and it will make everything right. Something has to, because I’ve decided that I am not going to lie down and die. I am going to make myself something more.
So I move to stand, and it isn’t without an effort. And when I do, I meet Slade’s eyes and he freezes. He looks afraid for me, or maybe he is afraid of me. My own brother.
“I’ll be ready in five minutes,” I say, and start down the hall to the bathroom. This ends now.