Mad Girl (The Mad Girl Saga #1)

Letter One

Just picture it, Casey: a world where you and I had never met.

I picture it sometimes. Actually, now that I have nothing better to do, I picture it a lot.

I picture where I might be right now if you’d never befriended Michael.

Or become so close to my dad.

Or ended up living in my house.

I often wonder how the last three years might’ve unfolded if you’d never walked through my front door. Never cracked the carefully laid foundation of my life.

You once told me people get life wrong sometimes—that no one ever gets it exactly perfect—and you know what? In this alternate world, where we’d never met, my track record wouldn’t have been anything close to perfect, but at least I wouldn’t be writing to anyone from jail.

If it hadn’t been for you.

I can tell you think so, too. You think you’re responsible for where I am now, for what I’ve done. It’s eating you up inside—the guilt. It’s there on your face, etched so deeply you can’t hide it, every time you visit me in here.

The first time you visited—the first time our eyes met across that awful, fluorescent-lit room—all the color drained from your face.

You looked close to losing your lunch down the front of your sweater.

I guess knowing someone’s going to jail and seeing the reality of it are two very different things.

But facing your guilt isn’t the worst part of every Tuesday.

It’s the way we sit there—for the better part of an hour—staring at each other over a grimy steel table.

It’s the way your voice catches when you beg me to talk to you, to say something, anything.

It’s the way you look at me. Like you’re trying to figure out where it all went wrong.

And I could tell you.

The condensed version of my story goes something like this:

Crazy rich girl had to be kept on a leash, so crazy rich girl’s father kept her leashed to you. But crazy little motherless rich girl wasn’t leashed securely enough, and that bitch broke loose. Again.

For most people, it’s no surprise that I ended up here. After all, I’m the girl who stabbed a boy at her eighth birthday party, and a person doesn’t do a horrible thing like that unless they’re seriously unhinged. A problem. Too dangerous to be free.

So to say I wouldn’t have ended up here if it hadn’t been for you isn’t exactly true, now is it? The reality is, I’ve committed a crime or two that probably should’ve landed me in handcuffs well before the one that finally did.

But if I know you—and I definitely do—you think you’re entirely responsible for what I did that night.

If only you’d stayed home like I asked…

If only you hadn’t left with Hal…

If only you hadn’t struck me with those venomous words…

I’d be heading to college in the fall after taking that waste of a gap year. Not sitting behind bars.

The irony, though? The irony’s the real bitch of this story, because the irony behind the truth and me following you that night is the same.

My dad did everything within his power to keep me from turning out like this girl—you know, the cautionary-tale kind, the regretting kind, the if-only-I’d-chased-my-dreams-instead-of-a-guy cliché. After what happened with my mom, Nic had hoped to do better by me.

My dad and I, we had a plan: I’d graduate summa cum laude from his alma mater, I’d go to business school and intern for the biggest real estate development firm in Boston, and when he decided I was ready, I’d work alongside him at that firm—at our family’s firm—Bancroft Property Group.

He’d teach me everything he knew, and when he retired, I’d take his place.

Nic had hoped for this outcome from the very beginning, from the moment I slipped from my mother’s womb a girl instead of a boy.

I may not have been what the sonographer said I’d be, but Nic didn’t let a case of mistaken gender kill his dreams. He’d still named me Elliot James Bancroft—after my great-grandfather—and having a girl was better, my dad said.

Having a girl was great. Not only was I the first girl born to a Bancroft in more than a hundred years, I’d be the first female president of the firm, too.

But you know what they say about the best-laid plans—or maybe just the ones people make for me. They implode, don’t they, Casey?

I have a knack for ruining everything.

The morning I left for jail, you asked what I’d tried to tell you the night of that stupid party, and I told you it didn’t matter.

Because I wanted to hold on to what little of you I had left, right before I lost everything, your voice cracking on the question and the weight of it hanging in the air between us.

“What else were you trying to tell me, Elliot?”

You, guilty and unshaven as you searched my face.

Me, arms crossed over that cropped sweatshirt of my mom’s, barely able to meet your gaze.

You, so beautiful and distraught it pierced my heart to tell such a hideous lie. “It doesn’t matter.”

But it did matter, Casey. It does.

The truth—the confession I tried to make that night—was supposed to fix everything.

And now I know why you stopped me from saying it: you didn’t have the full story. You only had the pieces I’d been brave enough to give you.

The condensed version of our story goes something like this:

Crazy rich girl decided it wasn’t so bad being leashed to strange foreign guy. He brightened her dark corner of the world so much she finally stopped fighting him. And in quiet, ordinary moments, they fell.

Into a routine.

Into each other.

Into something they could never undo.

But there’s a bigger story, hidden within that one—like secret photos stashed between the pages of a book—and it’s bigger than you ever could’ve imagined.

This isn’t all about me, Casey. It’s your story, too.

For the last four weeks, I’ve tried blurting it out. Tried laying everything bare on that steel table between us. No preamble. No excuses. Just the full, ugly truth.

But is an hour enough? In sixty minutes, can I convince you to stay and listen? Make you understand?

I look at you, and you’re gazing back, that little groove of concern deepening between your eyebrows, and I’m transported to all the other times—the truths I gave you willingly, the few you demanded, that one you took.

You saw some truths I never wanted you to see, but you didn’t judge.

You only tried to understand, because that’s the kind of person you are.

But this truth is a bomb, held in the palm of my hand, too complex and powerful to drop. Too cataclysmic.

I don’t know how you’ll react to it. All I know for sure is I have to tell you everything. Despite what it might cost me.

And to do that, I have to go back to the very beginning.

I’m writing our story down so you’ll always have it. So there’s never any doubt.

This, Casey, is your proof.

That it was always you.

Something beautiful happened in that dark house, and it changed my life, and nothing in this world—not even a whirlwind like me—could make it any less true.

In the meantime, I hope you tire of wasting your Tuesdays here, begging me to talk.

Because seeing you is like picking at an open wound, and while I deserve that pain, I still wish you’d relieve me of it.

And while you’re out there, acting like the son Nic never had, I’ll be here, writing these letters.

Filling however many pages it takes until there are no lies or secrets left.

So here it is.

All those missing pieces you wanted? The darkest ones? What’s broken and still true?

Here they are, Casey. They’re yours to keep.

But don’t ever say I didn’t warn you.