28. Ellie #2
Jinx holds my gaze for a long moment, pursing his full lips. Then he pushes off the counter and disappears into the hallway.
I hear his footsteps on the stairs, followed by a door opening and him scraping around in a drawer somewhere.
Cyrus's forehead rests on top of my head. "He's going to kill me for this."
"Who?"
"Kade. He's going to kill both of us for touching his things, and for showing you this, but maybe it's time for all the cards to be on the table."
Jinx reappears in the kitchen doorway with a piece of paper in his hand. It's pink stationery. I recognize it immediately from the set I got one year as a birthday gift from my grandmother. Even from across the room, I spot the looping handwriting on the page.
My handwriting.
"I'm surprised you found it so fast," Cyrus mutters. "Even I didn't know where he's been keeping it all these years."
"I know where everyone hides their dirty little secrets in this house." Jinx crosses the kitchen and holds the paper out to me, but doesn't let go when I reach for it. "El. Before you read this—"
"Give it to me."
His fingers release the paper.
The stationery is soft. Worn at the edges like it's been folded and unfolded a hundred times over. The creases are deep, the ink slightly faded in places.
To my boys.
I know you don't want to hear this, but you deserve to know the truth and it's clear you're not taking the hint.
I'm not coming back. Not now. Not ever. The trailer park was fun when we were kids, but I've outgrown it. I've outgrown all of you.
Kade, we both know the only place you're going to end up is a jail cell or six feet under.
Same with you, Cy. You think your brain is going to be enough to get you out of trouble forever, but you're just not as smart as you think you are or you would have learned to read between the lines a long fucking time ago.
Jinx, I think we both know we're not each other's…
I have to stop reading for a second because my eyes are too full of page to see the words clearly. But I know what the next is going to be, because he echoed it so recently. And now I know why. He was just repeating "my" words back to me, the lie he's believed all this time.
…type. You're someone I'd talk about boyfriends with, but that doesn't make you boyfriend material.
As for you, Tank… my sweet Tank. You've always been the gentlest of the group, but that doesn't make you less of a monster. It doesn't change what I know is under that mask. Princesses don't get happily-ever-afters with monsters in the end.
I'll always look back on the life we shared as special, but none of you fit in the life I have now. I'm supposed to trade it all for what? More nights in that shitty little RV pretending we weren't all just killing time until we could leave?
I finally got out, and I thought you'd be happy for me. If you can't do that, you at least need to let me go. No more letters, no more calling. It's getting pathetic, and some things are better left in the past. You're four of them.
Goodbye forever,
Ellie
At the bottom of the page, beneath the signature that's mine but not, there's a kiss mark in pink lipstick.
My favorite shade. The one I wore since I started wearing makeup, right up until I polished off the last of the stockpile I accumulated when they said they were going to stop making it.
I read the letter again. And again. I read it so many times the words blur and sharpen and my hands are shaking so hard the paper crinkles in my grasp.
"I didn't write this."
There it is again, that confused look passing between them.
"I didn't write this." I look up at Jinx and Cyrus. "This isn't… I would never…"
But it's my handwriting. My favorite pink lipstick. And that is my fucking name signed with that stupid little flourish I've used since I was fourteen years old and got really into calligraphy for six months.
No wonder. No wonder Kade hates me, no wonder I never heard from any of them.
They tried.
The entire time I thought they were furious with me, that they'd forgotten me, they were writing letters and trying and they thought I…
"Hey." Jinx is in front of me suddenly, his hands cupping my face, tilting it up until I have to look at him. I only realize there are tears spilling down my cheeks when he wipes them away with his thumbs. "El, it's okay."
"It's not okay." My voice is shaking now as badly as my hands are. "I didn't write that fucking letter, Jinx." I grip his wrists in desperation, needing him to believe me. "I swear on my life, I didn't. Please, believe me. You have to believe me."
Jinx's eyes widen as they stare back into mine.
He wants to believe me. I see it in his face.
He's the one I told all my secrets to first, and he told me his.
All but the one I knew from the beginning anyway.
But that letter is damning evidence written in my fucking handwriting, and sealed with a kiss in my fucking lipstick.
I don't understand it myself. Hell, there's part of me that thinks maybe I've lost my mind and just don't remember writing it. Even if I hadn't started with the pills yet when it was written, even I don't trust myself. How could they?
"It's your handwriting," Cyrus says quietly. It's the most vulnerable I've ever heard him sound, and when I look up into his eyes, they're full of the same cautious hope in Jinx's. "How can that be if you're not the one who wrote that letter?"
"I don't…" My voice breaks again on the words. "I don't know. Maybe Todd hired someone to forge my handwriting? Maybe he used the letters I sent."
Cyrus's eyes go dark. "They weren't with the ones we found, but he could have just hidden them somewhere else. Or destroyed them to hide the evidence."
The pain in Jinx's eyes is what really undoes me. So much time lost. Four years spent thinking I meant nothing to them, and the other way around.
The gravity of that is making it hard for me to breathe.
I wonder if they feel the same.
Then I see the way Cyrus looks at me, and I know. Calm, collected Cyrus looks like he wants to burn the fucking world down and Jinx is right there beside him, ready to light the match.
"But you believe me?" It comes out like the plea it is. "Please believe me."
I need them to believe me so much it hurts.
Cyrus's gaze softens. Before he can say anything, Jinx's arms wind around me and his cologne fills my nostrils, clean and soothing. "We believe you, Ellie. Of course we believe you."
I sink into his arms, still in Cyrus's lap.
The two of them are the only things grounding me right now, keeping me tethered to this new reality where nothing is what I thought.
In some ways, it's better because I know now they didn't just hate me because I left.
And they didn't just forget me. They wrote to me.
They fought for me, for everything we had, until they thought I told them not to.
But when I think about everything we lost, about how it didn't have to be this way…
Jinx's face burrows into my neck and I feel the moisture from his tears on my skin. Cyrus's arms close around us both and the grief ebbs with the realization that I'm not alone. I'm not the only one feeling this black, empty pit where all those years could have been.
"We lost you once," Jinx says, his voice raw and shaky as he breathes into the space between my neck and shoulder. "But he's not taking you from us again. Not for a single minute."
I hug him back tighter, my fingers digging into his long hair. Cyrus's arms tighten around us both.
"Never," he agrees, pressing a kiss to my temple.
"But Kade and Tank still don't know," I say, pulling away to wipe my eyes. "And Kade won't believe me."
"Then we'll make him," Cyrus says firmly. "One way or another."