24. Taryn
TARYN
Jasper's couch is a foot too short for me and smells like motor oil and the cheap pine thing he hangs off the curtain rod, and I've been pretending to sleep on it for five nights now while my little brother pretends he can't hear me not sleeping.
"You want eggs?" he says the first morning, lanky and underdressed as always, a wrench tattoo on one forearm and a real wrench in his hand because he never fully clocks out. "I got eggs. I got, uh, eggs and hot sauce. That's the menu."
"I'm not hungry, Jas."
"Yeah, you said that yesterday, and the day before, so I'm gonna start ignoring it." He cracks four into a pan I'm fairly sure he also uses to bleed brakes. "You wanna tell me what happened with the rich guy, or you wanna keep doing the thing where you stare at your phone like it owes you money?"
"Nothing happened. I did my job, the job ended, I came home." I hear how thin it is even as I say it. "That's how the work goes. You get attached, you leave, you do the next one. I knew the rules going in."
Jasper sets a plate in front of me I don't ask for.
"You been doing that job ten years and you never once came back looking like this," he says, not unkind.
"So either he was cruel to you, in which case give me an address, or he wasn't, in which case I don't get why my sister's sleeping on a couch built for a ten-year-old.
" He points the spatula at me. "Eat the eggs.
I'm not asking again, I'm just gonna keep making them till you do. "
Brielle's less gentle, because Brielle has known me longer and earned the right.
She corners me at the bakery on day three, after close, when it's just us and the smell of the day's leftover sugar.
"So walk me through the strategy," she says, arms crossed, plum lipstick and zero patience.
"Because I'm the one who told you he'd pick the power.
I'm the one with the whole speech about men like him.
And here you are, gone before he so much as said a word, and I gotta tell you, Tary, that doesn't look like him choosing the power.
That looks like you choosing to leave before he could. "
"He hesitated, Bri. I told him the worst thing about me and he stood there and calculated."
"He hesitated." She says it flat, holding it up to the light, turning it over.
"A man finds out the woman he loves got blindsided in his own boardroom by his enemy, and he takes a beat before he knows what to say, and you read a whole verdict into the beat.
Baby. You've spent your entire life being shown the door so many times you started opening it yourself before anybody could reach for the handle.
That's not him rejecting you. That's you getting it over with.
" She softens, the way she always does after she swings.
"I'm not saying he's good enough for you.
I haven't decided. I'm saying you ran before you found out, and that's not the woman who sat on a billionaire's floor and refused to be scared of him. "
The news doesn't help.
I told myself I wouldn't look, and then of course I looked, and there it is on Jasper's cracked tablet — Whitlock Heir's Custody Fight Turns Ugly, a photo of Graham looking severe getting out of a car, and underneath it the cruelty dressed as journalism.
Questions raised about judgment. A caregiver with an undisclosed criminal record.
Sources close to the family. They don't even name me, which is almost worse; I'm "a caregiver," a liability with a job title, the smudge on his fitness to raise a child.
And there's a clip of some panel of strangers in good suits debating whether a man that busy, that scandal-touched, ought to be raising a little girl at all.
I did that. Not Vanessa, in the part of my brain that's been kicking me for five nights — me. I'm the crack they poured the poison through. Every word those strangers say tearing him down, I handed them, just by being someone he let close.
Chloe calls me on a Thursday from a number I don't know, and the second I hear the breathing on the other end I know it's her before she says a word.
"Coco?" My whole body goes cold. "Baby, is that you? Whose phone is this?"
"Helena's." It's barely there, that small rusty voice, and it's wet.
"I'm not s'posed to. She's in the other room.
Taryn, I ate breakfast today so will you come back.
I ate the whole thing. I'll eat lunch too.
I'll be good." Her breath hitches into the awful hiccupping I spent months teaching her out of.
"You said love doesn't pack in a bag. You said I keep it.
But I want you, not just the keeping part, I want the you part, please?—"
I’m on my brother’s awful couch with my hand clamped over my mouth hard enough to bruise, and I’m coming apart in pieces too fine to gather.
“Oh, my sweet pea. Listen to me. Eating isn’t a bargain you make.
You don’t owe goodness for love, you don’t earn a single inch of it, you are already the most loved girl in the world exactly as you are.
” Tears are running and I let them. “You didn’t do anything wrong.
The grown-ups did this. Not you. Never you?—”
The line goes muffled, Helena's voice somewhere behind it, gentle, oh, baby, give me the phone, and then Helena's in my ear, wrecked herself.
"I'm sorry, Taryn. I turned my back for two minutes.
She's — it's bad here. I won't pretend it isn't. That child wears your name like a wound.
" A pause. "He's not himself either, if it helps. Though I don't suppose it does."
It doesn't. Or it does. I can't tell anymore.
I sit on the fire escape after, the city doing its indifferent glitter, and I finally let myself look the thing dead in the eye the way Graham would.
I left because he hesitated. That's the story I've been telling.
But Chloe's voice cracked something open and underneath the story is the true thing, the one Brielle's been poking at: he didn't push me out.
I jumped. The second the worst of me was on a table, I did the math I've done my whole life — clean people don't keep the girl with the record — and I left before he could confirm it, because a leaving I choose doesn't gut me the way a leaving I'm handed does.
I've called that survival for fifteen years.
From out here on a rusted fire escape it just looks like a woman who never once believed she got to stay.
I didn't leave because he stopped wanting me. I left because I never let myself believe I was someone a man like that gets to keep.
And I'm still sitting there with that, raw and new and terrible, when Jasper sticks his head out the window with a look I can't read.
"Tary," he says, careful. "There's a guy downstairs.
Big coat, looks like money, looks like he hasn't slept since the nineties.
He's just — standing on the sidewalk looking up.
Says his name's Graham." He glances back down, then at me.
"You want me to tell him to get lost, or you want to put on shoes? "