Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
Cleo
A sound lifts from the house. It freezes me and probably everything around me, including the air.
It’s familiar, the way a backstage laugh used to cut through after a show. It crosses the gorge and lands at my feet: a guitar, just fingers finding a shape that doesn’t hurt. It’s not even a song yet. Three notes, then five, then a mistake, and then the mistake again because it liked how it felt.
I can’t help but smile in ways I haven’t done in what feels like forever.
That’s what Barret’s music does to me. It wakes me in ways no other melody can.
His music is skin-close, tracing the small histories between us—the late-night jokes, the quiet when a lyric landed, the time his hand found mine when no one was watching.
It knows how my breath stutters and my laugh folds back into me, and somehow, when he plays those seams stitch up for a minute.
Barret plays carelessly for himself and reverently for everyone else. With Eddie and me, he plays like no one else has in the history of the world. His music comes close, as if he’s tracing the shape of the space between my ribs; it’s intimate and ridiculous, and it knows the places I keep secret.
Right now, the notes float like little rafts I’m both grateful for and embarrassed to climb aboard.
He doesn’t know I’m out here trying to shrink into nothing for their sake—trying to become a ghost so they don’t have to worry.
They haven’t come looking. They give me space, and some minutes that feels like love.
In other minutes, it feels like a test I have already failed.
I sit back, listen to whatever he’s trying to play, and try to decide what to do next.
The sea keeps being itself. A long time ago, my grandmother told me the ocean doesn’t owe us anything.
It’s not a mirror, a cure, or a clean thing.
It eats and forgets. I thought she was being poetic then, but I know better now.
I lay my palm flat on the rock and try to list the things that belong to me.
Fingers. I didn’t pay for the sweater, but I wore it anyway.
The word that ends visits. The right to say no to tea now and yes later.
The way my breath fogs when I laugh, which I haven’t done in a long time.
The sound a string makes when Barret misses on purpose just to make me smirk.
I look over the edge. The sea doesn’t care if I’m brave or a coward. It would take me the same as driftwood and gulls. I whisper please and I don’t know if I’m speaking to myself, the ocean, or the two men I’ve been trying to avoid since I woke up three days ago.
This is the bit in dramas where a man appears with an umbrella and says something simple that rearranges the weather. No one appears.
Good. I wanted that.
Yet, I hate that I wanted that.
I lean back and let my spine find the cold behind me.
The sky is the color of old nails. Fog thins near the cliffs, and the light tries to happen and mostly fails.
My teeth chatter. It’s not cute. I tuck my hands under my thighs so I don’t do anything stupid, like stand without knowing which way I’m pointed.
I think about all the girls who smiled when told to, who lowered their eyes so the camera would love them.
I think about the ones who learned to be rooms for other people’s appetites and survived on steam.
People say survivor like it’s a ribbon, not a name you get when the worst thing doesn’t finish you.
I am not brave enough to live, but that is not quite true. I am not courageous enough to live like this, which is truer.
The guitar stops. The gulls argue and forget the reason. I press my nails into my palms and think: if I go back now, it doesn’t make any of this less true.
If I return now, I am still the girl who walked to the edge because she believed it would save everyone. I am also the girl who didn’t jump. Both can be true, and that makes me want to retch. It makes me want to sleep for a year.
I push to my knees. The rock complains. My legs don’t love me, but they cooperate. I take a step back from the line, then another. It feels like leaving a friend to do a job I promised. I apologize to no one and everyone. The words stay inside me.
The path looks longer toward the big house.
I use my sleeves to wipe my face and taste salt that didn’t come from the sea.
The fir needles are shedding in a hush that makes me think of theaters between shows.
I walk until my walk becomes a stagger, and then something that would look almost normal if anyone were here to grade it.
I stop once, hand on a trunk. Softly as I can manage, I tell the tree, “I don’t belong there, but I want to learn how to stay.”
The tree does not offer suggestions or notes. I want someone to argue. No one argues.
I breathe.
Again.
Again.
Again.
The numbers catch this time because my lungs don’t have better ideas.
From where I stand, I can see the house—glass and timber, impossibly gorgeous in a way that screams Eddie. He’s made a “cabin” into a work of art. I stand in the fire like a stranger who heard there’s a room to rent and might not pass the interview.
The guitar starts again as I walk toward the house.
This time, the sound is calm, as if Barret is breathing life back into everything instead of trying to stop the end of the world.
Maybe Kit was right—musicians carry a sound that isn’t just notes.
It’s the way they let their souls speak without words, the way tiny, stubborn phrases become maps back to a place you thought you’d lost.
The front door is open. Eddie stands there with what looks like a big, fluffy towel, waiting as if holding his breath for me to show. When I reach him, I say, “I went out.”
“Yeah,” he answers softly.
“And I came back,” I add.
“Yeah.” He steps forward with the towel. “May I wrap you in this? You look cold.”
I nod.
He moves with a care that makes me want to cry—his hands are gentle as if he’s worshipping, but his eyes are scanning my face at the same time, trying to confirm this is really me. The towel is warm and smells faintly of soap and cedar.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” I say, words small.
“Your socks are soaking. Let me carry you to the room. Maybe I can help you with a bath?” His voice is soft in a way that isn’t Eddie-first-command. It’s a tenderness I don’t get to hear often.
The Eddie I used to know would be barking orders, hauling me to the tub, and telling Barret to throw the bath and find some salts and bubbles.
That version wouldn’t ask. I admit I liked him bossy.
His bossiness was fun, and I wanted to challenge him.
He didn’t command to belittle or to abuse—he never did.
“Don’t do that,” I mumble.
“Carrying you?” he clarifies.
“Change for me,” I say. “I’ll take the bath, though. I think I’ve turned into a popsicle.”
Barret’s voice cuts in from the hall. “Don’t ask him not to change. This isn’t for you, if that’s what you’re afraid of. He’s changing for himself. He’s changing because if he doesn’t, he’ll be left alone in one of his castles while the people who love him disappear.”
I’m unsure what he means, but Eddie lifts me anyway, ensuring the towel is snug around my shoulders before he carries me across the foyer.
“B,” Eddie says, one-worded.
“On it.” Barret heads toward the stairs. He takes the steps three at a time, like he’s trying to meet us halfway.
Again, I say, “I don’t know if I can do this, Eddie.”
He smiles at me like I’m the ridiculous woman who always manages to surprise him. “You’re already doing it.”
“I don’t know if I can do us,” I say, the pronoun catching. My mouth trembles. “Not when you two are in love and I’m just—” I can’t finish it. “You should have found someone else to save.”
When we reach the bathroom, Barret kneels at the tub and cups his hands in the water, jaw working like he’s swallowing something big and impossible. He looks at me and manages, “We didn’t save you. You saved yourself, Cleo. The rest is . . . we’ll figure it out. Together.”
“You want me to help you undress,” Eddie states.
I don’t know how to respond because maybe there are bruises I don’t want them to see—bruises that shame me because I didn’t know when to leave. And maybe the moment I met Dorian, it was already too late.
“We’re just trying to help,” Eddie says, voice even.
“Cleo, this man is trying his fucking best,” Barret adds, half-joking, half-pleading. “The restraint is killing him. Throw him a lifeline and let him pamper you before he spontaneously combusts.”
I laugh, a short, surprised sound. “That bad, huh?”
“He’s not bossing around or fixing anyone,” Barret continues as if Eddie has become infuriating in the best possible way. “This is a favor to him as much as to you.”
“Okay,” I say, small and a little afraid of what they’ll find—afraid and also relieved in a way I haven’t let myself name.
Everything is fine until Barret gasps.