The water is a cold slap, but refreshing at the same time. With the methadone I’m slightly sleepy all the time, so it feels good to be woken up by the cold seawater. I float on my back impressed with the way my bump rises out of the water, when Jase yells.
I put my feet down quickly, scanning the beach as I wipe salt water from my eyes. “What?”
He’s holding something in his hand. “I found something in the sand!”
I will my heart to stop beating so fast. Nobody is after us. We’ve not about to get ripped apart by bullets. No, he found something in the sand.
I swim over to Jase and stand, waist-deep in the water. He’s on his knees, still searching the water, and he holds something up to me.
It’s a ring. It looks like an antique, diamonds pressed into the thin band and a monster square diamond in the middle, surrounded by smaller ones.
I hold it up to the light. “Wow. Somebody must be missing this.”
Jase nods. “I think there’s something written inside, can you see?”
I turn the band around, feeling awful that someone’s probably looking for this gorgeous piece of jewelry. I squint to read the tiny writing inside.
J & J and a love heart on either side of the initials.
I gasp, almost dropping the freakin’ thing in the water. Jase laughs as I look down at him, where he’s kneeling on one knee.
“Is this—”
He nods. “It is.”
“But how did you—”
“I had some help.”
I take a shaky breath. “This is for me?”
Jase smiles, taking the ring back and pushing it onto my ring finger. It sparkles in the sunlight, dazzling me.
“It belonged to my grandmother,” he adds. “My mom’s mom. If you say no she’ll haunt you for the rest of your life.”
I shove him in the shoulder playfully, my chest swirling with dueling emotions. After everything we’ve been through, could things really be this easy, this wonderfully good?
“Juliette,” Jase says, moving his sunglasses onto his head so I can see his eyes, “will you marry me?”
Is he joking? Of course I’ll marry him. I’d die for this man.
“Hell yes,” I say, swallowing back the lump in my throat. I lean down to kiss him, a salty wet kiss that tastes of the ocean.
I have never felt happiness like this. It’s wonderful. It’s…terrifying.
This is the life I’ve always dreamed of. The life I assumed was reserved for other people. Not for dead, broken girls like me. But here, now?
I’ve never felt so alive.
I am loved. And nothing has ever felt so good.
Everything is going so well. So well. We’re getting married, and we’re having a baby. Two things I never thought I would be able to say. Two things that I’d never seen in my future, and that I probably don’t deserve.
My demise is pathetic, really.
I’m holding the bottle of methadone in one hand, my little measuring cup in the other, when the door to the bathroom bursts open. I jump ten feet in the air, reflexively dropping the bottle into the sink. “Fuck!” I curse, horrified.
“Crap, sorry,” Jase says, closing the door again as I watch the last of the precious fluid glug down the drain.
I swipe up the bottle in my hand, but I’m too late. Everything but a few drops is gone, gone, fucking gone.
I stare into the basin, hearing a glug and a gurgle, and I freak the fuck out.
Every last drop, gone.
I try to call Luis on the burner phone Elliot left me. No answer. I even get so desperate as to cut the plastic methadone bottle in half with a pair of scissors and lick every last bit of sticky fluid from the inside of the bottle.
It doesn’t do anything. Not even a mild buzz. Nothing.
After pacing in the small bathroom for a few minutes, I begin to shake. I’m panicking, freaking the fuck out. I have nothing left. Not even some fucking codeine for when shit gets really bad. Which it will. Really fucking soon.
It’s better this way, I finally reason with myself. Get clean, detox—hell, I’m already halfway through, with the way I’ve been dropping my dose steadily each week, and all in plenty of time before the baby’s born. By the time they need to stick an IV in me during labor—because I’ve decided I’m definitely having as many drugs as they’ll let me have—the track marks in my elbow will be gone entirely, and this day will be nothing but a murky memory, a lesson in the fragility of things.
Jase knocks on the door again about fifteen minutes later. “You okay in there?”
“Yeah,” I call out. “Just morning sickness.”
I’m almost five months along. My morning sickness dried up weeks ago, but he doesn’t know that.