Inferno(54)

We talked about the garden and the new wooden trellis she had erected against the back wall. We talked about me going back to school soon. We didn’t talk about the mortgage letter again, or all the half-finished projects. We didn’t talk about Jack, or about my father. Lately, it felt like our conversations were defined more by what we avoided than what we discussed. That’s the trouble with trauma – you wear it like a cloak, but to acknowledge it only makes it worse.

I ate what I could manage, tasting nothing but ash in my mouth. The coffee was too bitter; the juice was too red. My mother was picking at her plate, dissecting her eggs as I cleared my plate and excused myself.

It was overcast outside, but the humidity was unbearable. Even indoors, I felt stifled by it. It frizzed the ends of my hairs, sticking them to my neck. My T-shirt was warm; it clung too tightly around my arms.

Millie came by in the afternoon.

‘Soph!’ Her face broke, and she surged into me, wrapping her arms around my neck and knocking me backwards into the hallway. ‘I can’t believe they actually did it, I can’t believe they went through with it.’

‘I know.’ The thing is, though, I could.

She looked utterly deflated. I had done this to her. I had pulled her down with me, into a murky, unforgiving world. Now we were like zombie versions of ourselves, trying to climb back out. But it’s hard to forget the things you’ve seen once you’ve seen them, it’s hard not to wonder about the people you’re trying to leave behind, once you’ve gotten to know them. If the blood war had begun, with deaths on both sides already, then who knew who would be next? It’s hard to ignore it, even if they’re liars. Even if they’re assassins.

I ushered Millie into the sitting room, where we sank into the couch. She brought her legs up and curled her feet underneath her. ‘I can’t stop thinking about it. We should have done more.’

‘I shouldn’t have believed Nic. He’d already betrayed me by showing up at Eden in the first place.’

‘It’s not your fault,’ she said, her voice quiet. ‘I believed him too.’

‘I shouldn’t have let him take that red card from me.’ And that was the awful reality – they wouldn’t have come if I hadn’t slipped up that night in the parking lot.

‘Nic took it from you,’ said Millie.

‘And I let him.’ I thought of our kiss, the dark passion, the cloying sense of wrongness in it. ‘I’ve been an idiot. I feel like I’ve been waiting my whole life for something to happen to me, something to shock me into living. I couldn’t wait to fall for someone, to feel loved. But this is not what I expected. This is not what I wanted. Everything is so messed up.’

Millie was silent for a while, chewing over her words. She leant forward and knitted her hands together. ‘People rarely end up with their first love. It’s, like, this stupid fairy-tale myth that they peddle to you in Disney movies. Did you know Snow White is, like, fourteen? If I ended up marrying my fourteen-year-old crush, I’d be stuck with Tom Peterson and his stupid bobble head. You’re allowed to make mistakes.’

‘I got involved with an assassin. And I guess I never realized how messed up he was until he made me that promise and then killed Sara anyway. She was his cousin, Mil. I can’t get my head around it. How could I have been so blind?’

Millie shrugged, her eyes trained on a spot on the floor. ‘I went out with Dom. The warning signs were there for me too. But I don’t regret it, Soph. I learnt from it.’

I raised my eyebrows. ‘What did you learn?’

She huffed a sigh. ‘That I’m painfully shallow.’

Her candidness roused a small smile, a spark of amusement inside the darkness that surrounded us. ‘I wish I could tease you about that, kettle.’

‘Sorry, pot,’ she said, her smile as small as mine.

I flopped back into the couch and looked up at the flecked paint on the ceiling as I voiced the realization that had been unravelling in the pit of my stomach. ‘I don’t think I ever really knew Nic at all,’ I said quietly. ‘If I really understood him, I would never have walked out of that house and left Sara behind. I romanticized him,’ I admitted, the painful truth almost choking the words out of me. ‘And it killed her.’

Millie tugged my arm so that I looked at her. ‘They killed her. If we had tried to do more, there might have been three bodies in that lake and not one, and that’s the hard truth, Soph.’

‘Maybe.’

Millie’s tone turned low and dark. ‘And there’s something else, too.’