Chapter 51 #2
“Don’t finish that statement,” I cut in.
“It’s wildly ironic. You shot her, remember?
I’ve got a lot of nerve? Nah, you dumbass…
I just love her.” Something he clearly couldn’t wrap his head around because narcissists don’t understand what it means to love someone.
Lauren’s father sat back, his look of skepticism holding firm until he’d stared me down long enough to realize I wasn’t bullshitting.
What was skepticism in his eyes before turned into caution, unsureness in what was coming next.
I released a sigh. “And so here’s what you’re gonna do… ”
***
December 16th, 2017
(Present Day)
Every week, I got a bill from Dr. Eloise’s office for two weekly therapy sessions.
However, I only saw Dr. Eloise once a week. Every Monday at noon.
The other session was for Lauren. Mondays at four. About a year and a half ago, after a hostile conversation with Joshua Caplan at a shabby Overtown diner, I took on the cost to ensure that Lauren, even in my absence, was not being neglected.
In trying to understand Joshua Caplan, I would always ask myself, ‘What would Silas do?’ and then I’d have my answer. Would Silas, having as much money as he did, ever think to send any one of my sisters to a professional if that’s what they needed?
Absolutely not.
So, naturally, it was safe to assume Caplan would be the same way. They were more alike than they were different—my father and Lauren’s. It helped a lot in terms of making me aware of who I was dealing with.
Despite the fact that I always knew where Lauren would be at four o'clock every Monday, I never waited around in the parking lot, or anything, to get a glimpse of her. I was always out of the building and home long before Lauren would even get there.
Paying for the therapy wasn’t a control thing for me.
I paid for it because I knew she wouldn’t have anyone to talk to about all of this. I knew Lauren better than most, if not better than everyone, and I knew no one in her world of upper middle class exceptionalism was ever going to understand what she’d been through. Not even her best friend.
Footing the bill for the appointments didn’t grant me some special insight into what went on in Lauren’s sessions either. No matter who paid for the appointments, Dr. Eloise adhered by a strict set of laws that forbade her from even mentioning that she knew Lauren.
But of course Dr. Eloise was aware that I knew Lauren was one of her clients.
The bills were in my name after all.
Always the professional, though, Dr. Eloise didn’t say anything about it to me.
We carried on in our sessions as if Lauren wouldn’t be sitting in the same exact seat three hours after I left.
I didn’t even ask. I simply relied on the faith that whatever was happening in Dr. Eloise’s sessions with Lauren, was helping her heal.
Seeing Lauren’s emotional state from last night made me lose a little confidence in the effectiveness of her therapy, though.
Lauren went to just as many appointments as I did, and while I felt the sessions with Dr. Eloise served me well, the Lauren I saw last night seemed more broken than I could’ve ever imagined.
Maybe it was na?ve of me to think that just because she needed her parents, it would mean they would actually be there for her. The girl that I saw last night was very clearly deteriorating slowly.
It was something that haunted me throughout the entire day, making me wonder if I needed to rethink my approach. Did she need me? Or did I just really want to believe she did?
I was sitting in the living room of my apartment when a call came through on my cell phone. It was Eden’s manager, likely calling to confirm the purchase of photos I’d put in early this morning before I went to bed.
“Did you get all of them?” was the greeting I chose to answer the phone call with. Eden’s manager was a no-nonsense older woman who was very good at her job, so I wasn’t surprised when she made a sound of confirmation. “I appreciate it, Lily.”
The photos I’d bought, using Eden’s manager as my middleperson, went to market at six-thirty this morning, being shopped to gossip magazines and large scale blogs.
That’s why I stayed up so late; I wanted to be awake to make the first bid.
The pictures of me carrying Lauren to Marlon’s car the night before were never going public now.
Lily might’ve thought I was buying the pictures to avoid being accused of cheating on Eden, but that wasn’t the case at all.
After all, Eden and I were friends at best.
It also wasn’t like me to buy paparazzi shots in order to keep stories from going public. I never cared that much. The pictures I bought, that was for Lauren’s sake.
Setting my phone down on the coffee table in front of me, I picked up another.
I’d fallen asleep this morning around eight, and when I woke up at around noon, the rose gold iPhone Lauren had left at Seven the night before (along with the rest of her stuff) was lighting up once every five minutes with text messages.
It had been ringing off the hook before I’d fallen asleep as well.
I tried to mind my own business.
Lauren’s text messages weren’t for me to snoop through. Most of the messages she’d received today were, from what I could see from her lock screen, birthday wishes. However, it was one name that kept popping up, seemingly desperate to get a hold of her.
He had already called her thirty-eight times and it wasn’t even six o'clock yet.
Lauren had said his name the night before, identifying him as the man she’d shown up at Seven with.
The one who wouldn’t take her home because entry to the party had been too expensive.
It would be a lie if I said I didn’t have questions, if there wasn’t some part of me that wanted to know who she’d replaced me with.
I’d been telling myself that for me to even try to guess her passcode and snoop around in her personal life would be some bitch made behavior.
But the curiosity was mounting, every time another one of his text messages or calls went through, I found my finger lingering on the keypad, talking myself out of trying to get in.
When Lauren was mine, I knew that the passcode to her phone was her birthday, December 16th, 1996. It was so easy, I could just press it in and…
1-2-1-6-9-6
The phone in my hand vibrated with an error, meaning that was no longer her passcode. That should’ve been my cue to set the phone down and quit while I was ahead, but now it wasn’t so much as a desire to see what was in the phone, but a desire to see if I still knew her well enough to guess.
6-9-6-1-2-1
Her birthday backwards wasn’t the code either.
I went on to try six different possibilities, from her address to even my own birthday; all wrong.
Just as I was beginning to think the code must’ve tied into something new about her that I didn’t know, an idea crossed my mind.
A leap was what it was, but it was the last six-number code that I could think to try.
I keyed in the numbers expecting yet another error vibration.
0-3-0-4-1-6
The error message never came. With the input of the last number, Lauren’s phone unlocked, and my chest tightened with the revelation. No, her passcode wasn’t her birthday. It wasn’t my birthday. It wasn’t her address. It wasn’t her name numerically. None of that.
Lauren’s passcode, after all this time, was the day that we first met.