18. Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Eighteen
Demetrius
It turns out a man can walk and talk and breathe and still be dead inside.
I'm the proof.
The clock on the mantel says it's morning, and the light at the edge of the curtains agrees with it, so I'll take their word for it.
Nothing else in this room is volunteering an opinion.
I'm at the desk, where I have been since yesterday night, but I'm not doing any work.
My laptop screen has long gone black and I'm still staring at it.
There's a tray by the door that Mrs. Fairweather brought up at some point. Eggs and toast, gone cold and unappealing. Beside my hand is a glass of something amber I poured and never drank, which is its own small joke. A man reaches for the cliché and can't even commit to it.
I haven't slept. I didn't even try. All I did was stare into the void until my eyes burned and my brain felt fuzzy.
The only thing I know for certain is that I lost Maddie.
There's a knock at the door and it swings open before I get a chance to tell whoever it is to go take a long hike off a cliffside.
Not that it would be a good idea, since Agatha appears on the other side, leaning heavily on her new cane.
She is dressed for travel in her elegant grey cashmere coat.
Her gaze travels the room as she stands in the doorway.
First on the tray, then my wrinkled shirt, then my intact bourbon glass.
Finally, her eyes land on the paperwork, still strewn across the room.
"You look terrible," she says as she sets her dark gaze back on me.
"Good morning to you too, Grandmother."
"It wouldn't be a good morning even if it were morning." There's no trace of mercy in her voice. Not that I'm expecting any. She's a Thornwood, after all. "It's almost two in the afternoon, my boy, and I'm about to leave for Cliffwood Rehabilitation Center."
It takes a moment for my brain to process those bits of information. When I do, I straighten in my chair and frown at the elderly minotaur.
"You hate the idea of a rehabilitation center," I say, flat.
"I require quiet to finish mending," she retorts with a pinch of her lips. "And I find I would prefer that quiet to be somewhere I am not obliged to watch you rot in real time."
She settles a fraction more of her weight onto the cane and glares at me like I'm holding a red flag and wiggling my butt.
"I'll be gone about two weeks. I want you out of this house before I return. Boston. Long Beach. The far side of the moon. I do not especially mind which. But not here."
I don't argue. I'm a defeated man, something I swore to myself I would never be. I nod to Agatha anyway.
She doesn't move toward the door. She studies me instead, and when she speaks again the heat has gone out of her voice, which is always how I know she means it most.
"You're a fool," she says.
"I'm aware."
"You had that girl. You had her twice, which is more chances than most men manage once, and on both occasions you found a way to make the same mistake all over again." She shakes her head and her jewelry dangles from her horns. "All these years, Demetrius, and you have learned nothing."
I don't have a rebuttal. That's the part that's been eating through me since the door closed behind Maddie. I always have a rebuttal. I have constructed an entire life out of being right where other people were wrong, and I cannot find a single angle from which I come out right on this one.
"I was trying to give her everything," I say, and I hate the way I sound. Small and defeated.
Agatha looks at me for a long moment, her lips pinched and her eyes hard.
"You have everything," she says. "The money. The company. You have all of it." A pause. "And you are going to spend whatever years you have left discovering that not one piece of it adds up to enough."
Then she's gone, the cane tapping away down the hall, and somewhere below a door opens and the car takes her away.
There it is. My grandmother is right. I have everything and I have nothing at all at the same time.
I have spent my life confident that any deficit could be answered if you found the right input. More capital. Better timing. The correct person in the correct chair. There is no input for this. This is not a problem that I can solve with numbers and sheer force of will.
I don't get up after that. I'm good at not moving, as it turns out. Another talent I didn't know I had.
But I do reach for that glass. And when that glass is empty, I reach for the bottle and pour myself another one.
I don't see why not.
The bottle gets lighter. The light at the curtains slides from white to a thin, slanted gold, the kind that means the afternoon has stopped pretending to be early. I pour another. Maybe one after that.
I don't know how much time passes and I don't care.
Then a car horn goes off in the drive. One long flat note, and then it keeps going, annoying and stubborn.
The shouting starts a beat later. The words don't reach me up here, only the shape of them, and the shape is unmistakably Jasmine Seaglass. Incredible, really, that Maddie and she are still best friends after all these years.
Less so from where I'm standing right now.
Below, Mrs. Fairweather's voice comes up through the floor. Whatever she is saying, it isn't taking. The other voice climbs straight over it, and somewhere in there is a word I'm fairly sure is my name, and it's accompanied with a foul curse that would make a kraken sailor blush.
I should leave Mrs. Fairweather to it. I am in no condition to manage anything more demanding than a glass of bourbon.
I get up anyway. This is my mess and I'll clean it up.
The room tilts a degree or two and then thinks better of it. Three bourbons, maybe four. Enough to make the floor feel like cotton balls under my hooves.
By the time I reach the bottom, Mrs. Fairweather is planted in the open doorway, spine very straight, one hand on the frame, and past her, on the step, is Jazz.
Her red car sits slung across the gravel at an angle that suggests she parked it the way a person abandons a getaway vehicle.
She holds a flattened cardboard box under one arm.
"It's all right, Mrs. Fairweather," I say. My voice comes out as gravel.
She gives me a look that says it is no such thing, and then steps aside, disappearing down the hallway and to the kitchen, her back straight and her motions jerky.
Jazz runs one long scan over me, top to bottom. The slept-in shirt. Whatever my face is doing. I'm pretty sure I also smell as good as I feel.
"God," she says. "You look like shit."
"Thanks, Jazz. Good to see you haven't changed."
"I'm not here for you." She cracks the box open against her hip in one motion, the cardboard popping into shape. "I'm here for Maddie's things."
It isn't a question, and she isn't waiting on me to answer it. She is already moving, past me and up the stairs, two at a time. I go up after her. I have nothing more pressing to do, and some part of me I am not proud of wants to be in the room while the last of Maddie leaves it.
She finds Maddie's bedroom like she has the blueprints.
She doesn't wait for permission. She crosses to the bed and lifts the grey sweater off the covers and folds it into the box with a violence uncalled for.
"You want to know what kills me?" she says, not looking at me.
"I actually hoped you'd changed. Maddie believed it.
She told me you were different now, older, and I looked her dead in the eye and said maybe.
Because she wanted it that badly." A paperback goes into the box.
A hair clip off the nightstand that I'm not sure is going to survive getting tossed with this level of animosity. "And then you proved both of us wrong."
"Jazz."
"I said don't talk to me." She finds a mug on the bookshelf, the chipped one Maddie brought from home, and she wraps it in the sweater like it's the one thing in this museum worth saving.
"You had a woman who didn't care about any of this.
" She sweeps a hand at the room, the view, the whole of it, with the flat contempt of someone who truly doesn't care.
"Not the money. Not the name. Not one square foot of it. She cared about you."
She straightens and finally turns to look at me.
"You're an idiot," she says. "A genuine, gold-plated, billion-dollar idiot."
I don't defend myself. There's nothing to defend. She isn't wrong. None of them are wrong. That is the entire character of this day.
"You want to know what you really are?" She tucks the box against her hip. "Under the suits and the cars and all the zeroes? You're a scared little boy. A coward."
Something goes through me then, cold and complete, because she has reached into a place I keep locked even from myself. I have been called a great many things by people intent to find the soft spot, and not one of them ever found this one. Jazz found it.
I say nothing. She does one last pass of the room with her eyes, hunting for anything of Maddie's she's missed.
"All you had to do," she says, quieter, which only makes it worse, "was have some balls. Stand in front of her. Tell her the truth. Ask the question. That was the whole assignment. You have all the money in the world, and you still couldn't afford it."
Then she's finished.
She's gotten every trace of Maddie into one cardboard box that doesn't even look full, and that is the detail that reaches in and twists. That Maddie's whole presence in this house fits in a carton a child could carry out under one arm.
That I could lose her that easily, like I never had her in the first place.
"For what it's worth," Jazz says from the doorway, not turning around, "she really does love you. That's the part I find the hardest. She loves you and you broke her heart."
And then she goes. Her footsteps echo down the hall. The front door swings shut with enough force to rattle the old stones of the Stronghold. Her red car coughs to life in the drive and pulls away with a screech of tires.
The house goes quiet again. I sit down on Maddie's bed.
I built my whole existence on a single conviction. That if you are clever enough, and patient enough, and you cover every angle, you can engineer any outcome you want. You can solve for the missing piece. You can make the numbers come out right in the end.
I covered every angle.
I solved for every variable.
Except for the one that mattered.
Some equations have no solution. Some wounds don't close. Some doors, once you've let them shut, stay shut, and all the money in the world just stands there in the dark beside you, useless as a coat in a house fire.
I sit on Maddie's bed, in the quiet. Even with all I have, I have never had less.